The Home Cinema Topic - How To Rip Your DVDs page1

BUMP.

It's my birthday next week, and as I can't think of anything else that I want, I'm wondering if I should try and nab a decent surround sound system. As it stands I don't have anything - Speakers, decoder box thing, controllers, etc, so it'd need to be a complete bundle. Thinking 300-odd quid is probably my limit, so are there any decent ones at that kind of price? Lots of connectors would be a bonus, too.

The Panasonic ones were really good when I was last picking up a home cinema set. You should easily find something decent with £300 to spend. You might have trouble finding anything with more than one optical input though! But an optical switch only costs a few quid.

My parents are thinking of getting this TV as our other one broke.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B007 ... d_i=468294

Anyone got it or know anything good/bad about it? I'm not all that clued up on tv's but looks like a good tv to me.

Frank wrote:BUMP.

It's my birthday next week, and as I can't think of anything else that I want, I'm wondering if I should try and nab a decent surround sound system. As it stands I don't have anything - Speakers, decoder box thing, controllers, etc, so it'd need to be a complete bundle. Thinking 300-odd quid is probably my limit, so are there any decent ones at that kind of price? Lots of connectors would be a bonus, too.

I got an Onkyo one last year for £350 (ONKYO HT-S5405B 5.1 Home Cinema AV Receiver Speaker Package)
you can easily find one for less than £300 that is pretty decent.

Make sure the Amp has an HDMI IN, so that you can connect your blu ray player to it via HDMI and then your receive to your TV via HDMI. So that the sound can be sent via HDMI to get 5.1 HD sound.

Right, thinking that it's probably about time to dump my Popcorn Hour (the blu-ray playing functionality seems to have ground to a halt - The Extended cut of LOTR won't work on it, and neither will Les Mis, so I imagine that most new films are going to have some trouble). So I've just bought that... Cyberlink PowerDVD thing for my PC, which seems to have no trouble playing anything.

So I can use PowerDVD or whatever it's called to play back all the blurays, but are there any fancy YAMJ style index.html software I can get for showing all my downloaded films/tv shows in a nice tidy manner, rather than using the default Windows explorer?

No idea what it'd be called, but hopefully that makes sense.

You could use XBMC to display your media and set it to use PowerDVD as an external player: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=116724

I use Media Browser which works inside Media Center for Windows 7 (or Vista if you're backwards). Not sure if they are supporting Windows 8 yet. I have a metro type theme so it looks similar to the 360 dashboard (but more usable and minus the adverts!)

I never got around to doing a write up for setting that up but I could probably knock something together if people would find it useful.

I have just rehosted the images in the DVD rip guide. Hopefully they're in the correct order and make sense :dread:

Just been trying to see if I can access the hard drive in my desktop PC from other PC's on the network for movie streaming and stuff, but VLC seems to have trouble with larger films (was trying the Hobbit fan cut, and every 15 seconds or so the picture goes totally grey and it pauses (presumably while it tries to buffer the next few seconds)). Anyone know if there's any easy way to make it stop doing that? It'd be nice if it could start buffering and then play it smoothly once it's actually loaded enough...

Would've thought the router would be fast enough to manage the bitrate of a downloaded movie (it's a Nighthawk. They're always banging on about how good it is for this kind of stuff...), but obviously not... :dread:

Fixed the streaming issue by just using a homeplug and plugging the downstairs PC into the internet :shifty:

Got another question now - Has anyone had any success digitizing their 3D film collection? Just discovered that CEX will give me £20 for the 3D Extended Edition of the Hobbit and I might be able to get even more for it on ebay, so I was thinking about ripping them, but apparently the 3D files makeMKV rips can't be played back in 3D through Kodi/PowerDVD (but they can apparently work with Side-by-side or Top-and-Bottom 3D videos...)

I haven't even managed to get Kodi to work with SBS 3D mkvs either. So if anyone's got any advice there that'd be helpful!

Frank wrote:Fixed the streaming issue by just using a homeplug and plugging the downstairs PC into the internet

Got another question now - Has anyone had any success digitizing their 3D film collection? Just discovered that CEX will give me £20 for the 3D Extended Edition of the Hobbit and I might be able to get even more for it on ebay, so I was thinking about ripping them, but apparently the 3D files makeMKV rips can't be played back in 3D through Kodi/PowerDVD (but they can apparently work with Side-by-side or Top-and-Bottom 3D videos...)

I haven't even managed to get Kodi to work with SBS 3D mkvs either. So if anyone's got any advice there that'd be helpful!

Sorry never saw your old question! I always recommend cabled connections for HD video. If you can't run a cable then those homeplugs are really good (and they're cheap these days too). Wifi just isn't good enough, N wireless routers usually do the trick but it can be hit and miss still depending on interference from other devices/neighbours etc

Does VLC play 3D video? I haven't got any myself but I would imagine the only thing you need to worry about is what type of 3D you rip them as. I also have zero idea about codecs and compression rates etc.

So I'm not much use (other than answering your year old question which you answered yourself :slol:

)

Im currently ripping all out DVDs to a NAS box so we can declutter the sitting room and remove and chance that the baby will pull the rack down on herself! My next step will be to sort out how to play everything on the various TVs in the house. I see a couple of Raspberry Pis in my near future.

Rax wrote:Im currently ripping all out DVDs to a NAS box so we can declutter the sitting room and remove and chance that the baby will pull the rack down on herself! My next step will be to sort out how to play everything on the various TVs in the house. I see a couple of Raspberry Pis in my near future.

They're meant to be really good!

I'm so busy these days I have kind of given up on all this kind of thing. I have my server still and I have all my movies and tv shows on there. I'm about 3/4 way through my music collection too but that's slowed down lately as I have all singles and one off left to rip :dread:

I still play them all through a little windows computer. I currently don't even use a GUI like I used to and use the regular Windows navigation via explorer.

The old software I used to use has been updated so much now that I can't run the latest version without a ton of other work involved (it needs later versions of Windows server which would mean installing on my current server etc)

I haven't had any issues with SBS 3D on Kodi/Plex. Just play the video and turn 3D on via your TV/projector, should work fine. I don't recall issues with Kodi menu overlay, I think there's a built in solution, but Plex does look janky until you turn off 3D mode.

I've never managed to find a "3D on" option on the projector, so I might have to read the manual and see. Would an option like that mean you could just play the SBS file in VLC (or on a PS4) and the TV/projector should do the rest?

After further investigation, I *do* have a 3D button on the projector! Great success. Thanks Holpil :wub:

Just been testing it with the 3D Rogue One trailer while I think of a decent film to try it out properly with. Any suggestions?

Anyone still use Plex? I was watching something on my Amazon Fire stick downstairs perfectly fine on Friday night, then when I tried to watch something on Saturday absolutely no device in my house can access the strawberry floating library any more. Their official help is just "lol sign out and sign in" so I was wondering if anyone else had some more useful ideas? Nothing has changed in the network, and suddenly everything has fallen apart :dread:

EDIT: Never mind. Think I might have fixed it! Had a muck about with the Network settings on my PC and now it appears to work. Wtf

The Home Cinema Topic - How To Rip Your DVDs page1

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