Thread: Boxee Box

Originally Posted by dalem

This is about viewing my own collection, not someone else's.

-dale

Isn't that what apple tv is for? That is, anything on a hard drive, whether over broadband or on your own hard drive.

Nifty Thread.
I am thinking of implementing a rather lower cost option.
Manually rip all dvds to Mkvs, make a little htpc with a low cost amd llano cpu and a wireless card and hook it up to my TV.

Originally Posted by dalem

I'm sorry, I'm running some things together. The actual movie playback is uncompromised and unchanged, but some of the animated menus and the like are a bit wonky. I don't yet understand it but I can live with that.

right, so you got a proper rip here. I'm thinking this is down to how the DVDs are authored and boxee's playback component might not be fully compliant with interpreting the menus.

Originally Posted by dalem

For instance, there is a thread on there stating that you can't pull a full menued iso of a multiepisode TV DVD and have it work right under boxee - the guys said you have to rip the individual episodes.

boxee cant read the menus properly.

Originally Posted by dalem

I tried it for fun with a Babylon 5 DVD, and the iso and menus work fine. There is a definite video quality hit, so I need to check the encryptions again, but the mechanical functionality and chaptering, etc., is all there.

If you ripped to iso you have a bit perfect copy. So content playback is the issue that is if there is no problem with VLC. You're not alone

ISO Issues
Chapter select ISO
Problems playing .iso files

Last thread talks about UPnP issues when using a NAS, the boxee UPnP client was not working very well. But when the person tried with a desktop there was no problem.

So something along the chain from the NAS upto the boxee playback component is not working.

Originally Posted by bolo121

I am thinking of implementing a rather lower cost option.
Manually rip all dvds to Mkvs, make a little htpc with a low cost amd llano cpu and a wireless card and hook it up to my TV.

Dale has a 60 inch plasma panasonic. He wants a bit perfect copy so there is no perceptible loss of quality.

I'd think ripping to an image file like ISO is the quickest option as there is no encode step just disk copy + decrypt. An added bonus of ripping to ISO is the DVD menu structure is preserved so the DVDs, 'in theory' should appear on the boxee just like they did on the standalone player.

Otherwise all the extra features get lost unless manually included with the MKV isn't it. To get all of them off hundreds of discs can be quite laborious. Granted if only the movie is required then just a decrypted file is all that is required.

Originally Posted by dalem

My home network is CAT5 not CAT6 so GBEthernet has to wait until I feel like redoing my cable runs.

You might be in luck if you have cat 5e instead of plain CAT 5.

Originally Posted by Double Edge

Dale has a 60 inch plasma panasonic. He wants a bit perfect copy so there is no perceptible loss of quality.

I'd think ripping to an image file like ISO is the quickest option as there is no encode step just disk copy + decrypt. An added bonus of ripping to ISO is the DVD menu structure is preserved so the DVDs, 'in theory' should appear on the boxee just like they did on the standalone player.

Otherwise all the extra features get lost unless manually included with the MKV isn't it. To get all of them off hundreds of discs can be quite laborious. Granted if only the movie is required then just a decrypted file is all that is required.

Hmmm, I only have a Panasonic 32 LCD HDTV so quality is not so absolutely critical for me. Plus I have disk space concerns.
If all you are doing is 1:1 iso copies with only DRM removed, Its pretty easy. No messing around with h.264 and encoder settings.

Originally Posted by Parihaka

Isn't that what apple tv is for? That is, anything on a hard drive, whether over broadband or on your own hard drive.

I thought it was more for streaming web content as opposed to basement content, but I could be wrong. If so, then it's the same thing as the Boxee I got.

Originally Posted by double edge

You might be in luck if you have cat 5e instead of plain CAT 5.

Cool, it's 5e. No wonder my buddy saw the spool and said "good choice".

And yes, boxee is having an issue with some ripped isos, but like I said before, they are laying the blame (or were last month) on a switch in their firmware that dumped auto-decoding, forcing the need for "clean" iso rips. The long thread in your list basically said "requires SAMBA", which is what I have set up on my server, so that can't be it. These rips are as clean as I currently know how to get them, but I'll try ripping out just an episode next, no menus, and see how the quality is.

I'm learning a lot, AND clearing shelf space.

-dale

Originally Posted by dalem

And yes, boxee is having an issue with some ripped isos, but like I said before, they are laying the blame (or were last month) on a switch in their firmware that dumped auto-decoding, forcing the need for "clean" iso rips.

You mean auto-decrypting. The free software folks get into trouble when they do DeCSS. 'Clean' here means you have to rip your dvd's with CSS removed.

Originally Posted by dalem

The long thread in your list basically said "requires SAMBA", which is what I have set up on my server, so that can't be it. These rips are as clean as I currently know how to get them, but I'll try ripping out just an episode next, no menus, and see how the quality is.

If its the encrypting then there should be no issue with doing an entire dvd unless there is yet another or series of bugs lurking.

Typical log from AnyDVD running in background:

--------------
Summary for drive D: (AnyDVD 6.9.1.0)
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH22LS40 LL02 000206092F9AK84938
Drive (Hardware) Region: 1

Current profile: DVD-ROM
Media is a DVD.
Booktype: dvd-rom (version 1), Layers: 2 (opposite)
Size of first Layer: 2071488 sectors (4045 MBytes)
Total size: 4142967 sectors (8091 MBytes)

Video DVD (or CD) label: BABYLON5_SEASON4_DISC1
Media is CSS protected!
Media is locked to region(s): 1 4!
Video Standard: NTSC

Structural copy protection not found.
Found & removed RCE protection!
UDF filesystem patched!
Autorun not found on Video DVD.
Removed CSS copy protection!
Bad sector protection not found.
Emulating RPC-2 drive with region 1!
-------------------

Dunno what else there is to remove, especially for a 5+ year old DVD set.

But I will persevere! This is too much fun and hip and space-savey not to push forward with.

-dale

That looks 'clean' to me