I use my HTPC to run XBMC for when I'm watching videos on it, but also have TVersity running for when I want to stream videos to the Xbox360 upstairs. In addition, if your HTPC is beefy enough, you could look into running TVersity on it so you can transcode streamed files to the 360/PS3 on the fly (will depend on hardware and how everything is connected, wired vs. Blue DVDs as I love the special features and easter eggs on them). iso files so it plays it exactly as if the disc is in the drive (I did this with my Red Vs. I found a website that had a tutorial somewhere (can't remember now and at work but will post a link later tonight), but I believe you can find a BluRip thread over at the Doom9 forums.Īlso, is your HTPC actually going to be doing HTPC duties or more NAS duties? If it's doing actual HTPC duties, I'd recommend XBMC as a front end as it has native support for. I'd recommend looking into BluRip as it seems to be pretty highly regarded. I'm still experimenting with Blu-rays but did get some successful results using AnyDVD HD to do the decrypting and BluRip to rip the video and audio.

mkv (no compression) video of the episode/movie I want, then usually throw it into Handbrake to compress it a bit. iso, MakeMKV to grab the videos I want from the. Or BRs in general are a load of buggy crap.įor DVDs, I use a mixture of DVDDecrypter to create an. I'm using PowerDVD v11 on Win 7, but it's a load of buggy crap. SkyMonkey - what do you use AndDVD HD for, if you rip with CloneDVD and transcode with Handbrake, if I may ask?īonus question - what's the best PC software for *playing* Bluerays. Anyway, hardware targets would be PS3, Win 7 HTPC, tablets and smartphones and iPods.

Regarding ripping to a compressed format - I need to consider the 'container' and the 'video file type' right? Has anyone published a matrix of available combinations and compatibilities with different players? I think that would be handy. And still a practical limit of maybe 400-odd movies on even a top-end NAS box, which limit we certainly wouldn't exceed for a long time, but I *can* see it being exceeded. That's still £1.33/movie in current storage costs. Maybe to an AppleTV/airplay device too.Ĭan ISOs be compressed, eg with NTFS filesystem compression, and can they be mounted from a compressed state? As an ISO could be up to 40GBs or more, even a 3TB hdd would only store, at most, 75 movies. If I were to rip BRs to ISOs, then I can mount them later and get all the menu features, etc right? Is it possible to edit the ISOs to leave out crappy FBI warnings, 'anti-piracy' propaganda, foreign-language audio tracks, etc? Would there be any issues mounting/playing these ISOs over a LAN using DLNA or whatever? At the moment my main PC does everything so that's not an issue but in future I'm looking at a 12-18TB (ie 6-bay) NAS box as a media server that would feed to a PS3, HTPC and tablets. Personally, I just rip as ISO files using AnyDVD HD, mount them in VirtualClone Drive and playback from my HTPC using Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater. There are half a dozen programs for this, including Ripbot264, Handbrake, BD Rebuilder, etc. So they convert to H264 and compress the files to smaller sizes. Not all configurations will play though, as your player might not recognize VC1 video in an mkv container (for example). Most people are converting to mkv or mp4 files, for compatibility across different equipment. ClownBD Copier is one step in that direction, keeping the main movie and the menu, but it isn't highly recommended so far. Taking out sections while retaining menu functions is problematic, and I don't know of any program that exists now that will work well for this. MakeMKV will also convert the main movie to an mkv file (without compression). You can rip the entire movie to the hard drive, or you can make a main movie backup without extras or menus. When ripping blu ray, you have two main choices on what you keep.

MakeMKV seems to be the slowest at updates to deal with new encryption. You have to update the beta key each month (the new key is posted in their forum). The third program is MakeMKV, which is free to use while in beta, and it seems to stay in beta perpetually. DVDFab is also popular and their free section works to decrypt blu ray as well as dvds, though it lags on updates compared to their commercial version. I own it and am pleased with its abilities and frequency of updates. AnyDVD HD is the one most seem to prefer. There are three main choices for ripping blu ray.

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