DVD BluRay Media Streaming? The way Forward???

[admin_exported]

I have just started to consolidate my mp3's and ripped DVD's onto a NAS device and streaming them to my TV, and the quality and ease of this process has got me thinking about the future of audio and cinematic media, as well as the best way as a consumer to set up your home cinema system.

I make the following assumptions, your speaker set-up will not change regardless of your format choice and your AV amp will play the central foundation to any home entertainment system with either a TV or projector providing visual output.

So that leaves the format war and how to hang everything together.

My first quandary is do you really need a standalone DVD or BluRay player? Why not rip your movies and stream them to wherever you like in the house (so long as you have media streamers in these rooms), this way you only need a physical player in your PC?

Then we have music, why not simply stream your CD content? This seams a little more expensive at the moment compared with movie streamers, with devices like the Sonos and Squezebox in my opinion leading the market in terms of quality and function respectively.

At the moment I have a separate Hi Fi set up and separate AV set up totalling 2 amps, a CD player, a DVD player and 8 speakers along with all the interconnects and speaker cables and now added a NAS device and media streamer. Surely as a consumer this can be consolidated without too much of a sacrifice in quality? What about TV feeds, we have terrestrial signals via your aerial, satellite feeds, cable providers and now internet TV, the choice is bewildering.

So to summarise my question would be as a consumer what options with pros and cons are there to provide multi media entertainment in your home, sounds like a simple question but it's not and will provoke passionate opinions from all sides i suspect?

What's your thoughts on an ideal home soloution within a resonable working mans budget?

Kind rgeards

Dave.

 

[Anonymous]

I'm looking forward to the day when I get all my music and movies via the interenrt from sudscription services and don't even need the hard copy to rip to anything.

We're well on the way to that. I hardly buy CDs anymore as I subscribe to Napster and can stream their whole catalogue. I've just got the Sony S370 BR player because, as a subscriber to Lovefilm, besides the bluerays I get through the post, I can stream films from their site; a free extra available to subscribers.

Now, the films are generally older or less well known ones and are only DVD quality. But it's a new service and a start. As broadband capacity gets better, I can (hopefully) see them putting the whole catalogue on the streaming service in HD.

The audio quality of the Napster tracks is not brilliant, but again as storage and internet capacity gets better, surely that can be sorted.

That's the future I'm hoping for; hard to tell how long it will be before we get the quality and content selection we want from such services though.

 

[Anonymous]

Sounds like you're already doing the 'ideal home solution' - ripping to a NAS and streaming from there.

The solutions available at the moment are really a variation on this theme - you could stream from your NAS to pretty much any wi-fi enabled streaming device, such as a Squeezebox or a Sonos unit, provided the formats you've ripped to are playable by the device.

There's portable solutions, something like the iPad comes to mind (there's an app that will let you stream and convert to an iPad-friendly format on the fly)

The only thing that isn't quite so consumer friendly yet is Blu-ray ripping - there are tools to do this, but the process is far from 'one-click' and the large capacity hard drives needed to store multiple terabytes of data are, at the moment, still fairly expensive.

 

[Anonymous]

Agree with the comment about the end of having content on physical disks. It really is bonkers buying everything on disk and then needing to rip, store and stream it to the device you want to watch it on. Spotify has totally changed the way I think about listening to music and I welcome the day when the same happens to film as well. Although for many people the lack of "ownership" will be a major barrier, for young people who are growing up with streaming media and downloads this won't even be an issue. So more likely that is the way forward.

 

[Anonymous]

I've had a setup like that for a year. For music I use a Sonos. I store BD iso's on my pc and use that as a player. I'll never go back. BD's start instantly, instead of having to wait for a player to read the disc. As for the "lack of ownership", I couldn't care less, I much prefer to have a nice long list of titles on my pc, simply clicking one and watch it start instantly.

Setting it up is a bit of a pain though. You're talking about NAS storage, but a normal home network simply does not have enough bandwith for a BD stream. There are solutions out there (for instance by using dual HDMI cables as network cables), but they're expensive. It's much simpler and cost effective to not stream them but just store them on the pc you play them with. Keep in mind you will need plenty of harddrive space though, a typical BD ISO is at least 30 GB, but more often 50.

The other thing is getting HD sound to work. There are plenty videocards out there now that are theoretically able to pass HD sound over HDMI, but actually getting it to work is an entirely different matter. I finally succeeded in lighting up the DTS HD Master logo on my receiver using Media Player Classic.

 

[indyjase]

KevinOK, hi there, I've been doing a similar thing as you, streaming around the house, but now I want to take the plunge and put my blurays onto my NAS, all I am missing is a graphics card that I can get HD audio with to go into my onkyo 605. Which one would you recommend I figured that it will be an ATI card, which is fine (currently using Nvidia 9600gt 1 gig and was about time to upgrade anyway....) I game a little but not a whole lot, PES and the odd racing game, but thats about it. I am pretty tech minded so setting up a card is not too much of a big deal. I also use media player classic as well as TMT 3 in prep for HD audio on bluray, so on that front I am fairly well set. Any help would be fantastic, many thanks Jase

 

[Anonymous]

Any Radeon HD5### should work just fine. If just for playing BD's, I would just get a passively cooled HD5450. Cheap and silent. If it's gaming you want, probably best to get something a bit faster. Do make sure you get one that has some space between the DVI and HDMI ports. On some cards these are located so closely together that's it's impossible to fit both cables simultaneously. On some cards the s-video port is located in between the HDMI and DVI ports, that works.

I could not get TMT 3 to light up DTS HD or TrueHD icons. Same with PowerDVD. Media Player Classic is the only one that works for me.

I like the idea of streaming off a NAS, but I just couldn't get it to work. I realize that in theory there should not be any bandwidth problems (a BD is max 48 Mbit, and in practice more like 30 Mbit max), but on my Gbit network it would start to stutter after 5 mins or so. Maybe it's the network overhead (error correction for instance) or more likely my switch clogging up. I'm sure this can be fixed, but I got tired messing with it and just stored everything on my pc. Would be interesting to hear how you get on.

 

[Anonymous]

I was using my ps3 but it sucks for MKV and M2TS x264 1080p files, it stutters all over the place even with 200mpbs powerlines.

I am going to buy a cheap PC and put a HDMI graphics card in it and hopefully put it on this new PC , if thats possible.

And stream from pc to pc, should be able to get a cheap pc for 80.00 hopefully + graphics card

 

[scene]

I've been looking at the whole idea of having a centralised repository for all my media - CDs, DVDs and BluRays (down the line, when all this becomes legal of course...)

If you're looking at a device to playback already ripped and stored on NAS DVDs or unencrypted BluRays then the WD TV HD streamer is probably your best bet, especially as you can get it for about £80. Sonos or Squeezebox to play back the music.

If you want to have a one box rip'n'play solution, a decent PC with a DVD/BluRay drive, with MyMovies and AnyDVD HD installed. MyMovies will give you extensions to Windows Media Centre to make it look like a £10K Sooloos and AnyDVD HD gives some essential extensions to ripping facilities...

I've gone down the Dell Zino with BluRay, 6GB of memory, ATI 512MB video card with 64bit Windows Professional and a 1TB drive. This will act as my ripper and NAS until I get a proper, multi-drive RAID6 (probably) box next year. Installing MyMovies and AnyDVD HD. Really want to use WHS under VMWare so I can set up MyMovies to autorip any disc inserted - but I've got a bit of work to do. I'm going to create a thread with my trials and tribulations on this project soon...

 

[Anonymous]

I forgot about that WD Live Thing.

Dont need a PC downstairs, just want something that will handle 1080p MKV files.

Nice 1

 

[Anonymous]

Sorry forgot to add:

Which is the WD one that does not need the USB HDD to be attached? I want to stream direct from PC upstairs to this box downstairs.

Cheers

 

[scene]

canada16:
Sorry forgot to add:

Which is the WD one that does not need the USB HDD to be attached? I want to stream direct from PC upstairs to this box downstairs.

Cheers

Sorry - it's the WD TV Live - £85 on Amazon.

 

[Anonymous]

77.00 at tesco

I think its the same.

 

[scene]

canada16:
77.00 at tesco

I think its the same.

Think that may be the WD TV HD - which is USB only... Tesco page doesn't mention ethernet, and the box is black. Think the WD TV Live is darkish grey...

 

[Anonymous]

Oh well, even at 80.00 seems a bargain for what it does, PS3 is starting to get on my nerves.

it wont allow me to put files bigger that 4.5gb on a usb stick, and wont take MKV. and M2TS files, which are some of the best formats for HD .

Its like sony has never heard of HD formats, or files bigger than 4.5gb, even though they claim its a all in one media centre.. LOL

 

[Anonymous]

I have been reading your posts with interest. Can you tell me what you are using to rip DVD's and BD's - I have used things like DVD Decrypter in the past but found that it won't rip newer DVD's anymore. I have found some other software on the net but this hasn't been particularly reliable - for instance I haven't been able to find anything that will rip Avatar. I want to build up a library on my laptop for when I am travelling and possibly upload movies and tv to an i-pad. Any suggestions gratefully received

 

[Anonymous]

That's technically illegal.

There is always that debate, about "BACKUP" It says at the start of the film you cant copy it.

But wait a minute... If its mine and I am only doing this just incase my disc gets ruined.

But that does not seem to fly with the powers that be, but I am sure no one has been arrested over making copies of his own DVD's and keeping them and not selling them.

 

[scene]

fishheskettpark:I have been reading your posts with interest. Can you tell me what you are using to rip DVD's and BD's - I have used things like DVD Decrypter in the past but found that it won't rip newer DVD's anymore. I have found some other software on the net but this hasn't been particularly reliable - for instance I haven't been able to find anything that will rip Avatar. I want to build up a library on my laptop for when I am travelling and possibly upload movies and tv to an i-pad. Any suggestions gratefully received

Depending on geographical location, the creation of backup copies of DVDs and BluRays can be illegal.

However, you might want to look at AnyDVD HD from slysoft as an example of software that allows the creation of such copies in those locations where backup copies can be created. This is the software that I have looked at with a view to using it to make such copies, as and when the law permits, I hasten to add. It also has many features that can be used for the ripping of CDs and non-encrypted DVDs/BDs anywhere and is frequently updated with new features and patches.

 

[cram]

+ 1 on AnyDVD. Pretty much one click useage. Works with Avatar. If they come across a disc they can't cope with a new update is generally released within days.

I store all my blu rays on a NAS drive as ISOs. I can they play these around the house on various PCs. The PC for the lounge is hidden away in the garage and controlled via a combination of a Harmony One remote and a wireless keyboard.

 

[Anonymous]

Dumb question, if I were to live in these countries, like canada, would I need a blu-ray burner or just a player, and how big are these files?

How do you get them small enough to keep and stream, as I would assume nothing really would stream a 50gb file over homeplugs?

 

[cram]

AnyDVD just copies the files from a disc into either a bluray folder structure or an ISO. They are the same size as whatever the original disc is (typically 30 - 45 gb). There are ways to do movie only copies (but that is not a feature built into AnyDVD - google ClownBD). There are also utilities that downsample the video quality to reduce file size but I've never bothered with that.

 

[scene]

canada16:
Dumb question, if I were to live in these countries, like canada, would I need a blu-ray burner or just a player, and how big are these files?

No burner required - only a player, as I assume you are making your legal canadian backup to hard disk.

How do you get them small enough to keep and stream, as I would assume nothing really would stream a 50gb file over homeplugs?

If you make an ISO copy of the disk they're as big as the image on the original BD - i.e. upto 50GB.

If you rip out the TS, they can be a lot smaller, but still tens of gigs...

You are only going to stream the playing image over your ethernet-over-power network. So its bandwidth not total size that is the issue. If you've got "Homeplug AV" plugs, then you should be able to stream HDTV (i.e. bluray) over them - it's what they were designed for.

NB: you need to update your profile if you're living in Canada, as your profile shows you as GMT+0

 

[cram]

scene:You are only going to stream the playing image over your ethernet-over-power network. So its bandwidth not total size that is the issue. If you've got "Homeplug AV" plugs, then you should be able to stream HDTV (i.e. bluray) over them - it's what they were designed for.

I've tried homeplugs in my house - for me DVD was fine, bluray wasn't up to it. But of course its all dependent on your wiring and things like that.

 

[scene]

cram:
scene:You are only going to stream the playing image over your ethernet-over-power network. So its bandwidth not total size that is the issue. If you've got "Homeplug AV" plugs, then you should be able to stream HDTV (i.e. bluray) over them - it's what they were designed for.

I've tried homeplugs in my house - for me DVD was fine, bluray wasn't up to it. But of course its all dependent on your wiring and things like that.

Yes, I've heard that too... No substitute for proper CAT6 cabling and gigabit routers (OK, CAT5e at a push).

 

[Anonymous]

This has provoked a lot of replies based around streaming media content, so it seems to be the way forward.

Just for curiosities sake I will explain how my current system is set up.....

I rip my DVD's (for backup) to my NAS this is done by copying the DVD first then converting to MKV files using DVDFab, the NAS box is a home built FreeNAS.

I stream the media from the NAS box using Xtreamer (over wireless) which is a cracking device for around £100 and supports HD and more file formats than most, they are on the verge of releasing a movie jukebox, similar to popcorn hours, which allows simple browsing of content. This is conected to my AV amp via optical digital and my TV via HDMI.

As for MP3's I again store these on my NAS and stream via the Xtreamer to my AV amp, the quality is not as good as pure CD playback on my Marantz CD and AMP but I am going to look into the squeezbox solution as FreeNAS supports a Squeeze server option.

What provoked this thread was the fact I was looking for a new AV amp, I currently have a Marantz SR7300 which sounds very muscular but not too detailed with music and as I was wondering if I should be trying to combine both music and AV into one or keep them separate?

I can definitely recommend the Xtreamer and the FreeNAS.