Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler [HOW TO] Stream Music and Video around the house

Fixed it for ya.

AnyDVD to rip the copy protection off the disk then you can chop it up with Handbrake .

Yes, I use the above to rip my BRs to my HTPC. You will pay a fee for ANYDVD but it is well worth it if you plan on doing a lot of them. Small note: You need ANYDVDHD for BRs. Obvious from the web page, but just in case.

It is also useful if your PC's video card (or any device in the middle) is not HDCP compliant. Otherwise, even if you try to watch a BR that you own and even if you try to play it from the original disk, you get an error accusing you of stealing it and you can't watch it. ANYDVD works in the background as soon as you insert the disk to remove this stupid form of copy protection.

I made sure I bought a HDCP video card in my last build but it seems that when I add my receiver to the middle I get the error. It's only HDMI 1.0 so I suspect that might be the issue. In any case, ANYDVDHD gets rid of this issue at the source.

I have no moral issue using software that allows me to watch something I paid for. My issue is in being forced to use it in the first place.

CV : I think MakeMKV will be your friend there (http://makemkv.com/).

Blu-Rays have several accepted codecs for both Video and Audio.
Video is one of MPG2,H264,MP4 or VC1.
Audio is one of AC3,DTS or LPCM

In any combination, MakeMKV will extract the tracks from the BluRay and store them into an MKV file without tampering with the original content (it will just decrypt the AACS stuff on the BluRay if there is any).

Once you've got the MKV file(s), you can pretty much cut/chop/join/reencode/compress any which way (you'll probably want to use VirtualDub at that point).

"Backing Up" media you own is perfectly legal :-)

Let me know if you need any help with that.

Murph : If you use VLC version 2.x+ and add libaacs (google is your friend there), you'll be able to play any Blu Ray natively anywhere and on any ouput.

In fact, CV, you'll probably want to use VLC to playback your MKV files as you can create playlists with them.

Mad Beggar.

Have you guys give Plex a try? I run the server on my Mac Mini and use the clients on my Roku, iPhones, iPads, etc. LOVE it.

Thanks for the tips, guys. I'll check out the recommended software sometime. I may be slow with that, but I'll get to it. I've been lacking motivation lately. My NAS started giving me some kind of error beeping a couple of weeks ago, and I still haven't gotten around to figuring out exactly what the problem is. I imagine it's some kind of drive failure, but I haven't done ANY troubleshooting. Probably because I can't spend the money to replace drives right now. In the meantime, I do worry about the media drive in my computer going belly up and me not having a backup.

CV : If you can gather up about 55 bucks in loose change, I would suggest looking at Carbonite... for that amount, you get a full year's worth of unlimited backups.

Now of course, the other issue is : How much media do you actually have. Uploading that much data could be a painfully slow process and costly if your ISP has data transmission quotas.

99 bucks will give get you a 1TB or 1.5TB drive pretty much anywhere these days.

If you really want to get fancy, 120 bucks will give you a couple of 500GB drives you can use in Raid 1 (Mirror) to be on the safe side :-)

Mad Beggar

I use Crashplan. ~$100/yr for unlimited online storage.