Re: Should I re-rip all my movies??!!

[Sam Partington <sam.partington@xxxxxxxxx>]

I played around with both plex and boxee for quite a while, but in the
end
SWMBO just couldn't cope with it.  It was just a bit too clever.

Often it it would get stuck in a dvd menu and you couldn't press any
buttons to get to next page.  It was also difficult to set the language -
my wife is italian and our children are bilingual, so we have bought a lot
of DVDs in italy to help encourage that.  So a key thing is that the user
interface must be straightforward to select that.  For ages I struggled
with getting a media player to play VIDEO_TS but ultimately none of them
were reliable enough or simple enough.

So in the end I bought an ATV2. It many ways it is very limited, but in
fact we find that is it's main strength.  I re-encoded all my dvds to m4v
and added them to iTunes.  ATV2 doesn't do multiple languages, so those
movies with more than one language I would encode as Title (En).m4v and
Title (It).m4v.  Pretty dumb but very simple to use.

Downsides:
-  I don't have subtitles, which is a bit annoying because my italian
struggles when I'm watching a movie in italian without subtitles.  But I
manage and my italian is improving.
- I lose most of the extras. But really I hardly ever watch them, those I
like (e.g. Pixar movie shorts) I just encode manually.
- I have to manage the movies in iTunes which is a bit naff, but frankly I
find the plex media manager quite naff too.
- I don't get meta data like imdb ratings, synopsii(?), etc. But I can live
with that, and I still think I might find a way to scrape imdb and inject
the data into iTunes.

Upsides:
+ SWMBO can start it up and select what she wants in seconds, often she
wants to put a quick kinds tv show while she makes dinner.  Even my three
year old can drive the system - he scrolls down until he sees the picture
of what he wants to watch.
+ it never ever hangs or goes wrong. This is key because she has no
patience for that at all..
+ I also get the easy ability to watch movies on my macbook and mac mini
through iTunes sharing or front row
+ a nice simple remote on the iPhone. (though could get much better, and I
know plex/boxee have similar, probably better remotes).
+ we can use airplay to watch our photos/home movies on the tv straight
from the iPhone
+ a different activity on the harmony leaves the tv off and then we can use
the remote to play music.  Through airplay we can have the same music
playing on the mac mini, the ATV, and on an airport express which is a
fairly simple way to do whole house audio.
+ you don't have to watch or skip through lots of stupid adverts for movies
you've no intention of watching, and I don't have to navigate stupid dvd
menus which always annoyed me.

To re-encode I used HandbrakeCLI using a python script to drive it so that
encodes only happen at night and it's all totally transparent.  RipIt puts
the ripped movie into a Queue folder.  The script then detects it,
re-encodes it, adds it to iTunes, and moves the original to  a video_ts
storage drive.

TV Shows need a lot more hand holding because it's so hard to figure out
what's an episode and what's an extra.

The only thing I really miss in the whole system is that BBC iPlayer
*still* isn't available on the ATV2. But we can watch that on the mac mini.
I'm fairly sure an ATV app store is just around the corner, it's an obvious
revenue source for them.

Sam

On 3 November 2011 19:49, noeley1983pilot <noel@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> **
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> So as plex rumbles on, apple tv sits in the corner slightly unloved
and i
> head towards needing more SWMBO friendly options for movies etc around
the
> house I find myself wondering if I should re-encode all my movies?
>
> My understanding is that all the cool plex clients on samsung tv/bd
> players, lg tv's etc etc all transcode the content meaning they won't
play
> dvd rips from isos/video ts folders.
>
> Is this still the case??
>
> My entire collection of around 500 films are iso's or video ts
> folders.....so what should I do?
>
> As they're all ripped already I assume there's some reasonable
> handbrake/visual hub equivalents out there that could just be left to
churn
> through all the films over what would probably take a month or so to
> complete with me just selecting the title to rip etc now and again.
>
> But what to rip to?!?!
>
> Figured you all on this list were by far the best group of people to
ask
> so looking forwards to all the thoughts!!
>
> Thanks all
>
> Noel
>
>
>


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