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[FearMeAll]

Originally Posted by FastRedPonyCar

It lives..



Still trying to decide what the best movie management solution is... boxee, windows media center, powerdvd 10's menu, etc...

Windows 7 with XBMC has been working wonderfully for me. I stream all my HD movie rips, which are reencoded with BD Rebuilder, (150 so far) from my office pc thanks to the easy homegroup feature.

XBMC is great because of how it organizes all my TV shows as well by the title, season, and episode and the scrapers work great. My office pc does nothing but encode video and store it these days. But that's what 4.75 terabytes is for I guess.

I have never used boxee, but I really love XBMC. I would never use Windows Media Center. I tried it once and ran into problems immediately. XBMC is great because of how it can adjust for overscan and have custom aspect ratios for each movie as well as offcenter the timing of the video, audio, or subtitles if you ever have a syncing problem.

[FastRedPonyCar]

That BD Rebuilder worked perfectly! Thanks for that info! It took the disk and let me rip it down to a full uncompressed single 44 gig file. I think right now, I'm going to see where I'm at as far as remaining storage space goes after all my movies are on the harddrives and then probably as I start on the bluray's, I'll compress some that aren't as spectacular to look at as others to help manage space.

I'm also entertaining the notion of getting one of those external 3~4 drive raid boxes that's E-Sata and just putting huge drives into that to use if I end up filling all 4 hdd spaces in the case.

also, once I built the library for XBMC, it worked perfectly.


It did however take about 7 hours to finish re-encoding gladiator... I may do what you do and use my beast at work for bluray encoding. It's got a pair of W5590's and 16 gigs of ram. Only problem is that I would have to get another bluray drive to have here for the disks :/

I guess there sort of cheap at this point. Either that or get an E-sata external enclosure to put the drive I've got now into and just take it to work when I need to rip them down. I guess I TECHNICALLY don't need it in the machine at the house if all the video's are going to be on the drive anyways...and I always have the PS3 in a pinch.

[FearMeAll]

Originally Posted by FastRedPonyCar

That BD Rebuilder worked perfectly! Thanks for that info! It took the disk and let me rip it down to a full uncompressed single 44 gig file. I think right now, I'm going to see where I'm at as far as remaining storage space goes after all my movies are on the harddrives and then probably as I start on the bluray's, I'll compress some that aren't as spectacular to look at as others to help manage space.

I'm also entertaining the notion of getting one of those external 3~4 drive raid boxes that's E-Sata and just putting huge drives into that to use if I end up filling all 4 hdd spaces in the case.

also, once I built the library for XBMC, it worked perfectly.


It did however take about 7 hours to finish re-encoding gladiator... I may do what you do and use my beast at work for bluray encoding. It's got a pair of W5590's and 16 gigs of ram. Only problem is that I would have to get another bluray drive to have here for the disks :/

I guess there sort of cheap at this point. Either that or get an E-sata external enclosure to put the drive I've got now into and just take it to work when I need to rip them down. I guess I TECHNICALLY don't need it in the machine at the house if all the video's are going to be on the drive anyways...and I always have the PS3 in a pinch.

I let the movies encode before I go to bed. It's best to let it run all night. I encode it down to 720p (which is my projector rez) with 640kps 5.1 audio and they always stay under 5 gigabytes and look and sound the same to me. I still can't believe the quality I get for 4.16 gigabytes on a 2 hour movie. I never see any blocking and really if you want to go 1080p just let it encode at DVD9 capacity. You will be completely shocked at the results. I know I was. I still can't believe it and I've encoded my entire library for streaming.

The x264 codec is absolutely amazing. I love also how BDrebuilder does 2 pass encoding without you having to do anything.

I'm not kidding on my projector it is impossible for me to decipher the difference of a 44 gig blu ray m2ts file and a 4 gig. One of my best friends came over to see Watchmen(which is a 3 hour movie) and we watched the whole thing on the projector. Afterwards I said that the movie was only a 4.16 gig file he flipped out. He thought we were watching the actual blu ray disc.

If you want gigantic files still you are free to do so, but just play with smaller files and see if you can decipher a difference. For video there isn't hardly any. People get hung up on the lossless audio but I can't tell. 106kbps per speaker is a high enough bitrate for me, but everyone has their choice.

Below are screens of the blurays I've ripped at 720p..all of these movies have been forced to stay under 5 gigs. Take into account jpeg compression. They look better as bitmaps. No blocking artifacts.

[FearMeAll]

Originally Posted by FastRedPonyCar

That BD Rebuilder worked perfectly! Thanks for that info! It took the disk and let me rip it down to a full uncompressed single 44 gig file.

If you just want uncompressed video use Tsmuxer. Just put the corresponding blu ray playlist file into tsmuxer and let it rip to a single m2ts file. Or it can let you keep it as one file in a movie only blu ray structure for disc burning. It has been an invaluable tool. http://www.smlabs.net/tsmuxer_en.html

With backing up your own movies the only troubles you will have will be subtitle related. Digital subtitles are a pain the butt. I usually burn them into the video by running the movie playlist(dragged and dropped like with tsmuxer) into avs video converter(with the correct subtitle enabled) and let it encode at a ridiculous bitrate then mux (tsmuxer again!) the 5.1 audio with the high bitrate file THEN let bdrebuilder do it's thing. This may not work with some movies but if you use XBMC you can get srt subtitles somewhere and sync it up with the movie and you are good to go.

District 9 is an example of a big pain in the butt to back up. Video and audio work great but you have to get SRT subtitles. I finally figured that out.

This has been WAAAY more convenient than running the blu ray. No trailers, no crap, just play. My blu ray discs can collect dust now for all I care. Right now I stream my movies to my living room hdtv(an old 65" 1080i behemoth) and the basement projector. Using joy2key I mapped each media center pc to work flawlessly with my xbox controllers. I just start up the pc and it goes straight to xbmc. I had to create a batch file that would delay xbmc's startup so it would work properly whenever I fired up the pc, so now I finally have everything seemless.

I got the Wizard of Oz blu ray now. Off to encode.....

[FastRedPonyCar]

thanks for the info. I'll definately give 9 gigs a shot for the next one I rip. (probably the Life series)

And do an A/B Comparison between the disk and the rip.


Next question... both my 1TB drives will be full tomorrow and I'm probably not even half way done!!

I'm looking at 2 TB drives and the black caviar is honestly too expensive for pure data storage IMO. I've read that the WD green's have the "head parking" that can cause premature drive failure and/or skipping during video playback.

The Samsung F3 2Tb drive has a lot of favorable reviews and I recall that the F1 and F2 both also had excellent reviews. It's also pretty fairly priced.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-202-_-Product

[FearMeAll]

Originally Posted by FastRedPonyCar

thanks for the info. I'll definately give 9 gigs a shot for the next one I rip. (probably the Life series)

And do an A/B Comparison between the disk and the rip.


Next question... both my 1TB drives will be full tomorrow and I'm probably not even half way done!!

I'm looking at 2 TB drives and the black caviar is honestly too expensive for pure data storage IMO. I've read that the WD green's have the "head parking" that can cause premature drive failure and/or skipping during video playback.

The Samsung F3 2Tb drive has a lot of favorable reviews and I recall that the F1 and F2 both also had excellent reviews. It's also pretty fairly priced.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-202-_-Product

Be careful with 2 terrabyte drives. I have 2 hitachi drives and I had to RMA twice to get one of them to work. ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145276 ) I don't know about the other drives that much. Don't get performance drives just something stable.

If you want to ensure perfect 1080p I would encode at maybe 11 or 12 gigs and allow the audio to encode as well. I would probably stick with dvd 9 size, but depending on enthusiast in you you will need to experiment a lot to find your perfect medium. Mine was 4 gigs at 720p. It takes a long time to fill up 4 terrabytes with that.

[FastRedPonyCar]

yeah I wasn't too terribly concerned with getting a 5400 rpm drive. Especially considering the 1 TB version lays down these types of numbers

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/sto...3-1tb-review/1

And supposedly the 2tb version has very similar numbers.

3 year warranty on it so it's not too bad and I always run both spinrite and HDtune pro scans to check for surface defects and bad clusters before anything goes on the drive so if there's anything initially wrong with the drive, hopefully those two will spot problems.

[NaitoSan]

I was going to wait for Panasonic's 2011 Plasma model but decided to buy this after reading many great reviews about it. It was also on sale for $800. It's LG 37" LE5300. I was fortunately to get one with IPS panel. The picture quality is excellent with perfect uniformity. I'm very happy with this TV especially it's my first with LG (usually go with Samsung). Might take more pictures later especially during daytime.

Product info: http://www.lg.com/us/tv-audio-video/...v-37LE5300.jsp

This picture was resized because of file size.

[Rogozhin]

An older pic:

[mullet]

Samsung 61" LED DLP

ONKYO TX-SR607 7.2-Channel Black Home Theater Receiver
Polk Audio Monitor 60 Black Floorstanding Loudspeaker
Polk Audio CS1 Black Center Channel Loudspeaker
Polk Audio Monitor 30 Black Two-way bookshelf loudspeaker
Polk Audio PSW Series PSW505 12" Powered Subwoofer
Sony Blu-ray Player BDP-N460

HTPC
ASUS M3A78-EM
AMD 4850E-X2
HIS 4670 1GB
G-Skill 2x2 PC2 800
WD 640GB & Deskstar 400GB
LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD
Hiper 580 PSU
Silverstone SST-LC17
Windows 7 64bit
Mediaportal 1.1.1 (Maya Skin)
ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre 3 Platinum

[trivium nate]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...3&Sku=V25-3259

Samsung 55" LCD LN55C630
http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-LN55C6...0&sr=8-1-spell



Yamaha RX-V467 525W 5.1-Ch. 3D Pass-Through A/V Home Theater Receiver
Onkyo 110W speakers for front center and surrounds
Onkyo 230W 10" powered subwoofer
Sony Blu-ray Player BDP-N460
Directv HR20-700 HD DVR
XBOX 360 Elite



I need to do a little wire management and clean up the stuff behind the equipment