I am going to start building my 1st HTPC. I have several questions since I am new to this side of PC's. This is what I am wanting from my HTPC and if you could lead me in the right direction to get that I would greatly appreciate it. I want to be able to store my dvd collection on the HTPC for playback - waht would be the best way for this? I want to be able to watch and record TV shows from my digital cable & STB. Also I want to be able to hook it up to my AV system for surround sound and keep all my music files on it so I can stream the music through my house. Any and all help is appreciated thanks..
You'll need a huge hard drive, and rip all the DVD's to it, or hook up a standalone multi-DVD changer. You'll need a tuner card with an IR blaster to control the STB (unless your STB has a serial input and you can access it from the PVR properly). You'll need a good surround (5.1 or 7.1) sound card in the PVR.
I was thinking along the lines of having (2) 500gb SATA drives for the storage. My STB does have a serial port so I am good there. Now the other ? I have is what would be the best format to rip the DVD's into? Using something like DvD Decryptor is a good program I know but it just rips the vob files straight across. Is this the best format to leave them in or should I try to convert into another format?
keeping the files in the vob format will keep the quality up. but you could rip them into avis to keep size down
Mpeg-2 is the format the .vob's are in. Quite large. Ripping to mpeg-4 (inside an avi container), is one method, and most people use XviD encoding for this. You will lose all the menu functionality, but still retain decent quality for the main movie.
