consultant
7th January 2010, 20:24
I've already backed up DVDs and am streaming them to my PS3. I'm very disappointed at the lack of menu and chapter mark support in the DLNA protocol but that's for my other thread.
* I'm primarily setting this media library up to stream music videos during parties, and give my kids a good selection of classic movies and animated features that I know they like to watch over and over again. They've just destroyed our DVD collection and I'm not going to let that continue to happen, especially with Blu-Rays. I myself am not the time that is a movie junky that likes to watch movies over and over or just have bragging rights that I have 200 titles on my server.
I'm getting ready to start ripping Blu-Rays and am wondering what people's opinions are on a good method based on my needs/setup.
I've got powerline ethernet (only give me about actual 25mbit/s bandwidth), but will soon either put in Wireless-N or hard wire ethernet so lack bandwidth shouldn't cause a problem.
Storage is going to be a limiting factor as I don't really re-watch a lot of movies so I'm not going to spend the time and money to setup a 2TB RAID 5 array when I know in another couple years, I'll be able to stream most any movie I want in hi-def via Netflix or some other provider. I've got a 1TB and a 640MB drive. I'll use the 1TB drive for media storage and backup the important stuff (home movies, mp3 collection, photos) on part of the 640MB drive or use online storage. If my drive crashed and I lost a bunch of DVD and Blu-Ray rips, it would not be a big deal as I'll rarely have the need to view/burn those rips anyway.
I've compared 1080P to 720P and for the videophile, definitely 1080P is a better, but for my kids and me, it's really just creating an unnecessarily large filesize in my mind just putting more of a load on my storage capacity, my server (when transcoding) and my network bandwidth. If once in a blue moon I want to watch something in its 1080p glory, I'll just pop the BD in the machine. Anything new I've never seen, I just rent/stream the BD from Netflix anyway.
So I'm guessing the best format is to transcode the BD using a program that can transcode M2TS 1080P files to 720P VOB? Am I correct to understand it is impossible to stream video with DTS / True HD, etc audio to the PS3 - it has to be converted to AC3 in the VOB?
If I want to get filesize down even further is really the only feasible solution to transcode to 720P resolution, X264 in an MP4 container? Realizing I can't pass through AC3 or DTS in MP4, it has to be transcoded to AAC. I did this with music videos using a CRF of 20 and the quality is quite good and size is 25-30% the size of the source VOB. I don't think I want to do this with movies though, I want high-quality 720P with little or no additional artifacts.
Any suggestions from those that have already walked ahead is greatly appreciated.
* I'm primarily setting this media library up to stream music videos during parties, and give my kids a good selection of classic movies and animated features that I know they like to watch over and over again. They've just destroyed our DVD collection and I'm not going to let that continue to happen, especially with Blu-Rays. I myself am not the time that is a movie junky that likes to watch movies over and over or just have bragging rights that I have 200 titles on my server.
I'm getting ready to start ripping Blu-Rays and am wondering what people's opinions are on a good method based on my needs/setup.
I've got powerline ethernet (only give me about actual 25mbit/s bandwidth), but will soon either put in Wireless-N or hard wire ethernet so lack bandwidth shouldn't cause a problem.
Storage is going to be a limiting factor as I don't really re-watch a lot of movies so I'm not going to spend the time and money to setup a 2TB RAID 5 array when I know in another couple years, I'll be able to stream most any movie I want in hi-def via Netflix or some other provider. I've got a 1TB and a 640MB drive. I'll use the 1TB drive for media storage and backup the important stuff (home movies, mp3 collection, photos) on part of the 640MB drive or use online storage. If my drive crashed and I lost a bunch of DVD and Blu-Ray rips, it would not be a big deal as I'll rarely have the need to view/burn those rips anyway.
I've compared 1080P to 720P and for the videophile, definitely 1080P is a better, but for my kids and me, it's really just creating an unnecessarily large filesize in my mind just putting more of a load on my storage capacity, my server (when transcoding) and my network bandwidth. If once in a blue moon I want to watch something in its 1080p glory, I'll just pop the BD in the machine. Anything new I've never seen, I just rent/stream the BD from Netflix anyway.
So I'm guessing the best format is to transcode the BD using a program that can transcode M2TS 1080P files to 720P VOB? Am I correct to understand it is impossible to stream video with DTS / True HD, etc audio to the PS3 - it has to be converted to AC3 in the VOB?
If I want to get filesize down even further is really the only feasible solution to transcode to 720P resolution, X264 in an MP4 container? Realizing I can't pass through AC3 or DTS in MP4, it has to be transcoded to AAC. I did this with music videos using a CRF of 20 and the quality is quite good and size is 25-30% the size of the source VOB. I don't think I want to do this with movies though, I want high-quality 720P with little or no additional artifacts.
Any suggestions from those that have already walked ahead is greatly appreciated.