Be Excellent To Each Other

Looks interesting. Plug a drive into it and a TV and it plays full HD. Some of the video forums are buzzing about it as it seems to play pretty much any format you throw at it:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/161524/show_product_reviews

Hmm.

I'd be more tempted by a PS3, since it would play games too, but that looks pretty neat.

Presumably you need an HD tv, though, right? Cos otherwise that doesn't sound that nifty.

Not sure. The spec does list a composite out so I'm assuming that would be a straight composite PAL signal.

Thing is on all the forums I'm looking at, everybody is buying them as cheap HD players for demos or use at trade shows where you need a loop. Nobody really cares if it can do SD or not as you can use a 20 quid DVD player for that. This is a relatively cheap solution for HD. Apparently you can just bung a USB stick on it and you are sorted.

Yeah, so it's not a cheap way to make an SD play HD. Puh.

Can you get SD to play HD? I did not think that was possible.

Exactly. Therefore this isn't news. Dog bites man.

It is if you wanted a cheap way of putting HD programs on said HD tv without Sky HD or Freeview HD..

If you can afford an HD tv you can afford SKY HD, you cheapskate.

I wouldn't want to pay a subscription for Sky, it's hundreds of channels, all full of bullshit, and despite paying for it, it has more adverts than terrestrial.

I refuse to pay sky an extra £120 a year for a few HD channels

I have three TV channels, and watch one of them, for reference. But I'm not the one on about WOOO TEH AITCH DEEES

Isn't it hard to buy a TV that is not HD these days?

HDTV is worthwhile for blu rays, 360 and legally acquired backups of films.

You're possibly assuming one needs to buy a TV if one already has one that still functions. I've never replaced a TV until it's broken.

No I was assuming that if anyone bought a TV it would be more than likly be HD, as new SD tvs don't seem to be that common.

OIC. Well, I'm fairly sure there are still a lot of them around, even CRT ones.

To be honest the only CRTs I have seen in the last few months have been at the recycle centre..

*Whispers mournfully*: Both my TV and monitor are CRT's.

Mr Chris is missing the point. The box is ideal for those of us who create our own HD content or, critically for you lot, if you (legitimately purchase - Ed) HD content on the internet. Simply copy the content to a USB stick, walk to your living room, plug it in to the box and you are away. No burning or faffing around and the box seems to play most formats.

I am tempted..my DVD player accepts USB and is great for playing programs through... a HD would be cool too

A man with good taste.

That Amstard Monitor is it of a CPC464?

Is this kinda redundant for people with Xbox or PS3 and stream stuff that way (or, copy on a stick/drive and plug into the console) ?

6128. You can tell as it has the connector for the 12V DC required by the disc drive.

Not if you'd prefer a tiny box for the job that is easily transported.

Better codec support. For example, H.264/MKV won't play on either console.

There's a number of these boxes, with some interesting variants, for example this:

lolol

Thats lovely!

Question! What are the best codecs? I'm currently backing up DVDs I own to MKV, because I lost my beloved DVD Shrink in the computay move. But! I am also backing up to 'highest quality' MP4, just in case. Which is right?

There Will Be Blood somehow blew up to around 10gb, which isn't so workable in the grand scheme of things...

I don't have the name of the program to hand (although I think I've posted it on here before), but there's a bit of software that takes an MKV and dumps the audio/video streams, untouched, into an MP4 container which will play perfectly on a PS3. Of course, it's not as convenient as downloading a file straight to a USB HDD and then plugging it straight into the Western Digital box, but it's only a little bit of extra faff.

360 owners are SOL, though.

Incidentally, I'm rather intrigued by the media playing possibilities of the Acer Aspire Revo R3600L; it's a low-powered destop PC (kinda of the desktop equivalent of a netbook, in fact), but it has the nVidia ION chipset -- which the Linux version of XBMC natively supports for high-def playback. In other words, £150 and a little bit of playing with XBMC Live will result in a high-def XBMC box, which for me is pretty much the holy grail of media players. About the only thing it doesn't do is support infra-red remotes; I'm sure a bit of digging around the XBMC forums will come up with a solution to that, though.

Yeah, there are two; GotSent and MKV2VOB. You're right on all counts there. It's not an MP4 container, though, it's a VOB (which is deeply weird if you think about it, and putting a H.264 bitstream in a VOB violates all sorts of standards but for some reason the PS3 plays it).

You can't always do it untouched though. If the MKV has AAC audio in it (you often see that on US TV rips, though not often on movie ones), then unless your PS3->amp connection is over HDMI you almost certainly won't get surround sound. And some rips I've seen have AC3 soundtracks at bitrates that are higher than DVD support, which seems to drive my amp into a tizzy; I have to transcode those. And subtitles are a pain in the arse as the PS3 has no subtitle support (so they need to be "burned" into the video, so to speak).

Not quite true, GotSent has an "Xbox 360" preset. However it does some transcoding (I think), so it lowers quality and takes hours.

That is a very nice idea! The remote problem is probably easiest solved with a Microsoft Media Centre remote and USB dongle? I'd be surprised if XBMC didn't support that.

Those aren't codecs, they are containers. There's no one-size-fits-all solution to this because a lot depends on what you want to do with the files afterwards (where do you want to play them, mostly); however if you're making compressed backups that are bigger than the original DVD then it's definitely not the right answer!

For DVD backups I'd be tempted to go for vanilla Xvid or DivX in an AVI container, with the original DTS or AC3 soundtrack, and targetting 1.5-2Gb for a film. H.264 in an MP4 or MKV (possible with AAC audio) can give you better quality at smaller file sizes, but AVI files will play on a wide range of modern devices, like games consoles, these USB playback devices we're on about, even my TV (a Samsung) will play files from a USB drive.

I forgot to mention -- whilst the MKV2VOB process is fairly painless, when you copy a mate's ~700Gb movie collection, it's still not trivial. And then once you have VOBs, none of your mates who use media PCs for playback instead of a PS3 can copy the files back off you, unless you keep both VOB and MKV copies on myyour NAS. Talking hypothetically of course. Ahem.

Heh, I'd just returned to edit that! Yeah, I meant M4V (I think) for 'MP4' and mumbles for 'VOB'. Ahem.

I'd only be playing them, via VLC Player, on my MacBook, so I'm not too bothered about compatibility. Just want the best quality for for the file size. On Windows, that meant as close to 4gb as possible (FAT32 FTL...). I don't really see the difference on TWBB between 4gb M4V and 10.5gb MKV (with H.264 video), which suggests I may as well go with M4V... but, you know, 13" screen ≠ big screen telly.

But yeah, either way 10.5gb is wrongness.

M4V (and M4A for that matter) are actually just MP4 files with different extensions on. The data is the same. Some Internet people seem to favour the former extensions for some reason I don't fully understand.

Yeah, you have to consider screen size too. But from an SD source (it is a DVD source, right? Not a Bluray ISO or something?) 4Gb should be plenty of filesize. The orginal MPEG-2 encoded VOBs would only be 6-7Gb or so. I doubt even on a 40" screen there'd be much to pick from between those two file sizes.

Note that there's nothing inherent in mp4 vs mkv that should lead to that file size disparity. The underlying transcode process is being passed different parameters.

Which brings us on to, what ripping software are you using? Handbrake is my usual suggestion, and it has a useful selection of presets for various target devices.

Having sat on the toilet and read a 10 page article all about these things just a week or so ago I conclude that the Icybox MP3010HW is the best of the bunch.

The WD unit is a bit crap because quote



Icy box

http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.a ... tid=frooct

91 sovs 99 pee

The Engrish on that page is making my head hurt, but let's see:

Major demerit. FAT32 is limited to 4Gb files, which is no damn good in this day and age; but if you are putting a drive inside the box you don't want it to be read-only.

However:
Now this, I really need. I stream from my NAS directly to the PS3, which is elegant in that I don't have to have a PC switched on but a pain in the ass that I have to mess about with a UPnP server on the NAS. Which is difficult and painful.

If this thing would talk directly to my NAS and stream over SMB instead, that'd be very nice.

However the CLL spec page makes no mention of codec support. http://www.digitalversus.com/article-501-4309-254.html:

So that's no damn good then. And also this would be a pain unless you had a HDMI amp:

I've probably said this before, but my research on this topic suggests the Popcorn Hour is the best one of these things, incidentally. I should have mentioned that earlier. It's what I'd buy if I didn't have a PS3.

This is the point at which I stop trying to sound clever.

Yep, just from DVD.

I had originally been using Mac the Ripper, but it was splitting my rips into three or four VOBs. Which sucked.

My current software is Handbrake. I was asking those particular questions because they're the options I use most regularly from it. TWBB took fucking hours: I chose MKV/H.264. I guess I'll keep faffing around.

Why are you choosing that directly? If I was you I'd just be using the presets (⌘T) because they'll set a huge number of H.264 advanced options for you as well. I don't do a lot of SD->computer ripping... but try Basic|Normal to start with, and maybe High Profile|Film as an alternative. Apple|AppleTV might be worth a look too.

(Don't use the TV setting, it's doing deinterlacing; you probably don't have any interlaced DVDs).

Honest answer is I didn't notice that sidebar at first. So I looked on the drop down and went with what I inferred from Wiki was likely to be poshest.


Cool; giving it a go now!

It's easy to overlook; not a great piece of UI design.

Still... giving... it a go...

1hr 16m to go. Something's not right here...

Maybe. Maybe not. Depending on options, H.264 encoding can take aaaagggeeesss, or be quite quick. I would let it finish.

Oh, it has two 'passes', apparently. One's over quite soon, while the other takes a couple of hours. I was wondering why the time remaining would always jump when the status bar was at half-complete.

Ah yes. This is because you are on a "target bitrate" setting. That means the filesize is effectively fixed for a given length of video. So, the first pass is a trial encode at that fixed bitrate; the encoding engine makes notes of where it had more bits than it really needed (talking heads) and where it needed more bits to do that section of the film justice (fast moving full-screen stuff). Then it does a second pass, learning what it used in the first pass to decide how to distribute the budget of data you've given it to play with to give the best file quality.

The other option in Handbrake, Continuous Quality, works differently. That simply makes the bitrate up as it goes along. This is faster to encode, but you won't know ahead of time what size file you are going to get; that's probably the option you want.

Informative stuff there, Doc! ^_^


Sounds that way, yeah.