Playing directly off of the Hard Drive

[Nocturnal]

I'll get right to the point, I want to build an HTPC. All I want from this HTPC is to hold and play my dvd collection from the hard drive and from a dvd disc if need be. Problem is I am still a little sketchy after reading DOOMs guide on how to do this. I get the whole ISO thing but it seems rather time consuming to have to mount a virtual drive and then play the movie everytime i want to watch something, and i was hoping there would be some type of archival software that could pull movies from an archive and some simple search functions (dreaming). The guide was written a little while ago and it was helpful but I'm wondering if there is a better way perhaps an easier way or a new way. All I want to do is achieve DVD quality, no more, on my 42 inch sony (HERE (http://www.amazon.com/Sony-KDFE42A10-Rear-Projection-Television/dp/B000A2K3XW/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_0_2/102-0515077-1689767?ie=UTF8)) but I'm not sure of what to do, if encoding in DivX after ripping to my hard drive is an option that will garner DVD quality and will be easier than the ISO method (maybe to time consuming). Any suggestions are welcome of course and I appreciate any help you guys can provide. Also should i use the standard monitor cable to hook it up to my tv (VGA?) The TV has an input for it or would getting a card with component out be a better option or perhaps use the empty HDMI (but that would require a card with HDMI and those are a bit pricey) Also file size isnt an issue im going to have tons of space.

On a side note this is a great site, LOTS of info, still trying to get through it all.

Oh and while im at it what would be the suggested operating system?

Again i thank you guys for any help.

[Nocturnal]

Well I found out that MCE will play VOB files directly from the folder so thats cool. My only concern, concerning video playback is VISTA, should i wait to get VISTA maybe VISTA doesn't allow this same functionality with the growing pressure from the movie industry. I guess I can wait to find out after some reviews.. maybe there will be atrial...who knows.

No one has any comments on my other concerns?

[DigitalDivide]

Well I can tell you what I've done. I am building an Unraid Server, http://lime-technology.com/. I'm using my existing HTPC case, just downloading their software.

I copy all my music in lossless format to my HDD. For movies I copy the dvd's to my hard drive in two formats depending on the movie. Some movies I rip via DVD Decrypter, then load it into DVDShrink and select movie only, AC3, No compression. This puts the vob files into a folder on my hard drive. On average a movie takes about 5GB. Some movies I encode to mkv(x264), I usually do all my encoded movies at an average bitrate of 2,500 using MeGui. Filesize averages somewhere between 2-2.5gb. There's practically no quality diff between the encode and the dvd. Right now I have approx 260 movies on my hdd and about 2,000 songs.

I use Theatertek for my dvd player. I personally believe it's simply the best. I connect to my rear projection tv from the htpc via vga to a transcoder which then makes the component connection to my tv. I have my desktop resolution at 856x480 then upscale my movies to 1440x960. Picture quality is awsome!

Hope that helps.

[int10h]

All I want to do is achieve DVD quality, no more, on my 42 inch sony (HERE (http://www.amazon.com/Sony-KDFE42A10-Rear-Projection-Television/dp/B000A2K3XW/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_0_2/102-0515077-1689767?ie=UTF8)) [...] Also should i use the standard monitor cable to hook it up to my tv (VGA?) The TV has an input for it or would getting a card with component out be a better option or perhaps use the empty HDMI (but that would require a card with HDMI and those are a bit pricey)

IMO, HDMI is the best choice if you aim quality, it will avoid D-A/A-D conversion. If you have no HDMI output and upgrading your graphic card is not an option, I would recommend VGA output.


@DigitalDivide : are you sure RAID is mandatory in your case ? After all, if one of the disk fails, all you'd have to do is re-rip your DVDs. You might consider installing the OS (it's a derivative from Slackware, but Debian will do as well) on HDD and setup a regular (non RAID) disk architecture. All you need is minimal system plus network tools, dhclient and samba.

[Nocturnal]

IMO, HDMI is the best choice if you aim quality, it will avoid D-A/A-D conversion. If you have no HDMI output and upgrading your graphic card is not an option, I would recommend VGA output...


Actually Im just aiming for good DVD quality.. not necessarily the best.. right now any way. but heres what i got planned

This MOBO (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131014) with THIS (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103741) processor and using the component out puts for now then when teh HDMI gfx cards become better or at least cheaper I'll get one of those and by then ill be getting one of the HD formats maybe both (who knows how long it will be before theres a clear cut winner) and at that time probably update to a better mobo.

I'll be running MCE05 or maybe vista we'll see what happens but mainly i dont want to go down in quality from my stand alone DVD player while playing form the HDD which shouldnt be hard considering its a crappy DVD player heh.

[int10h]

By the way, I don't know what graphic card you have, but in case it has a DVI output, you could buy a DVI-HDMI cable for a few bucks.

[DigitalDivide]

@DigitalDivide : are you sure RAID is mandatory in your case ? After all, if one of the disk fails, all you'd have to do is re-rip your DVDs. You might consider installing the OS (it's a derivative from Slackware, but Debian will do as well) on HDD and setup a regular (non RAID) disk architecture. All you need is minimal system plus network tools, dhclient and samba.


Actually, I would have to rerip my DVD's and reencode them to mkv(x264) which takes approx 20hrs per movie. I have approx 250 movies, so yes UnRaid is the way I most definitely want to go. If a drive fails, pop in a blank one, and let it rebuild overnight.

[Nocturnal]

Excuse me for my ignorance, but RAID as just starting to trickle down to consumers back when i built my computer so I skipped the whole RAID thing What is UnRAID or was that just your way of saying that you were not going to go the RAID route.

Im kinda scared because I liek to watch movies with subtitles a lot of the time so im not so sure how the text will look. Doe it look just fine as if i were playing a normal DVD? I'm looking for a system I'm not going to have to tweak to get it to look like normal DVD or good DVD I just don't have the time to tinker to much with stuff that may ultimately cost me hours of my life. So is getting a decent card (7900gt or something?) and using DVI to HDMI or straight DVI to DVI going ot be simple or am I going to have to dive into something like POWRSTRIP ( or what ever it is called ) for custom resolutions. Would the component out on that motherboard i have listed above automatically do that?

[Blue_MiSfit]

actually, a DVD converted into MPEG-4 or H.264 gives you the options of better subtitles! DVD stores subtitles as ugly pixelated bitmaps.

If you use SubRip, you can do OCR on these bitmaps and make text subtitles. Then you can use a good subtitle renderer like the one in Media Player Classic or vobsub to have very nice, anti-aliased, smooth white-on-black text overlaid on the top of your video.

Use VGA or DVI, HDMI is overrated and expensive. I would say that encoding to XviD at a very high bitrate, like doing a CQ3 encode with a high bitrate matrix will be a fast way to achieve transparency. It will also save space over the raw DVD files. I would also suggest setting your video card to output the native resolution of your TV, and using ffdshow on playback to lanczos resize up 2-3x. If you have a lot of horsepower on your HTPC, you can use a filter like SPresso to sharpen the image further and reduce the noise.

HTPCs are great. I have all my movies on my PC, averaging in at 1/4 DVD-R size (1.2 GB). I stream them to my crappy P3 connected to my TV with S-Video. It works surprisingly well!

[Nocturnal]

Whats a good program to set my graphics card to 1280X720.

[CWR03]

Whats a good program to set my graphics card to 1280X720.
It's dependent on the card and its drivers, not any external program. Right-click on the desktop (not on an icon) and select Properties, then click the Settings tab.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Right. For the best possible image, find out exactly what resolution your display uses natively. It's usually not 1280x720 for a 720p TV, a few pixels off on both generally. If you can, match the output resolution exactly and then set the refresh rate to an even multiple of whatever you are playing.

In other words, if you are watching interlaced stuff at 29.97, then switch the display over to 60hz. If you are watching 23.976 film stuff, then switch the display to 72.

This will make things look more fluid, though your LCD may only run at one refresh rate (generally 60hz).

~MiSfit

[Nocturnal]

I was just curious because i found this website.
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/powerstrip.html and thought it would be something that I needed to do. I'm not really sure what my TVs native is.

heres my tv http://www.amazon.com/Sony-KDFE42A10-Rear-Projection-Television/dp/B000A2K3XW/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_0_2/102-0515077-1689767?ie=UTF8#moreAboutThisProduct

This http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/Sony-Grand_WEGA_KDF-E42A10.htm says it's 1280x720

EDIT:
Carp i just noticed i had the wrong link in my first sentence there. Here's what it's supposed to be
http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/powerstrip.html

[Blue_MiSfit]

looks like it's a native 720p tv.

So set your display resolution (with the windows display control panel or powerstrip, whatever suits your fancy) to 1280x720 at 60 hz. Some cards have a "force 720p output" option.

That should do nicely. Lanczos to 2x the source on playback and you will be set :)

~MiSfit

[DigitalDivide]

Excuse me for my ignorance, but RAID as just starting to trickle down to consumers back when i built my computer so I skipped the whole RAID thing What is UnRAID or was that just your way of saying that you were not going to go the RAID route.

UnRaid is similiar to Raid, but it allows for mixing of IDE and SATA as well as different drive sizes. With Raid 5 you have to have all the drives the same size and of the same type. Unraid, you can add new drives to the array on the fly. If one drive fails, pop in a new one and the data is rebuilt. I just started with the free basic version of UnRaid for testing. I will be moving up the the UnRaid Pro which allows up to 12 drives.