I know enough about DVDs/video to get by but I have one big goal. I want to take all of my movies from DVD, shrink them down to about 700MB each (or 128MB to put on iPods) and then store them on a oversized PC with a couple terabytes of space. I would like to sit in my chair and call up any one of these movies or TV episodes and watch it. I would like to find a hardware device that I could put in the car for similar reasons. I could take 40-50 movies for the kids and have them in place without taking all the DVDs/VHS tapes. I have used DVDFab to turn a movie into an AVI File or iPod (I assume Quicktime ?) file. I have even burned one of them to a DVD and played it on a DVD player that plays these types of files and it didn't look half bad (on a Sony 57" HD tv). My question is what is the overall best video format to use for something like this? Quicktime, DivX, some other? I know there are more variables in play but just looking for suggestions from folks who know more about this subject. Thanks for any help or pointers.
Taking the iPod into account, I guess 640x480 AVC (encoded to iPod specs). But then that won't play on your SAP. For a car you could use a PC, that way you could playback any filetype (within reason since fanless CPU's aren't that powerful). iPod's also support SP MPEG-4, which your SAP would support (DivX is MPEG-4), just probably not with the mp4 container and aac audio and since SAP's support most ASP features you would generally want to use them to get a better quality/size ratio. Fact is that there might not be a common format, at least not that looks good in all cases.
Thanks for the info. What is 'SAP' and 'ASP'? The basic requirement though is to just be able to build a jukebox of movies I can call up and send to the TV. I can see both the 'Generic' and 'iPod' outputs of DVDFab work fine when burned to a DVD and then played on the HD TV. I just wanted to find out which I should use in the long haul as I have about 1000 movies and 10 sets of episodes so I don't want to encode them into the wrong format if possible as it will take a long time as is. I guess the biggest issue is piping these files from the PC directly to the HD tv as the whole reason to build this hard drive jukebox is to keep the movies available immediately without intermediate media. I need to learn what cabling options to use to get this from PC to HD-TV.
SAP = Stand Alone Player. ASP = Advance Simple Profile SP = Simple Profile My server PC is connected to my HDTV via VGA. Movies played back via mplayer look fine. CPU is only a VIA 1.5GHz but it plays back SD MPEG-4 with pp enabled without any problems (this is with apache, mysql, postfix, etc. running in the background). You could also get something like a Zensonic Z500.
Sounds like you are already doing what I want to do. I also would like to set up a few php pages and mysql to make this 'database' easier to navigate. This Zenzonic looks very interesting but I hate to ask what the price is. I need to look at my Sony HD and see what it accepts and then check my PC GeForce FX 5200 and see what it puts out. Hopefully I only need a cable. Thanks again for the very useful information.
Yep. I have all my stuff in a database with a php frontend. Only problem I had was originally it was limiting my resolution to 800x600. Had to edit my xorg.conf with the refresh rates from the TV's manual. Now I have the resolution set to I think 1280x768 (display is only 1366x768 (so not true HD)). Z500 was $500 AUD when it came out. Not sure about now, but atleast they have a much better firmware for it now then when it shipped.
So what format do you rip your DVDs to ? Do you have a sample of html that will call one of these you could share? Thank you.
Doesn't matter what I rip to. mplayer supports just about everything. I started with DivX3 though, then moved onto DivX3 SBC, then XviD, now x264 and XviD. I still have a MPEG-4/avi capable standalone, so alot of rips were encoded to be compatible with that. No html, php, but only as a database. Doesn't actually call anything and a lot of stuff is on disc.
Actually it does matter to me as I am trying to learn from someone who has had success. I still can't understand your setup. You say you use php but you don't? I know php can generate dynamic pages once you have navigated through your database to select a title. What I don't understand is how that video file gets to your TV from your PC. The goal is to hook up my PC to my TV (not sure of the options but a cable hookup is first thought but this Zensonic product may do that for me?). I would like to have my web/php front end show up on my TV and allow me to navigate to the video file I wish to play. Once I find it I would click 'Play' and sit back and watch the show. Is this similar to what you have accomplished? I appreciate your help on this, thank you. Rick
No. I just use php as a catalogue to keep track. Could modify it to play video's, but that would mean playing them in the browser (VLC, Osmo4, etc. plugins). I guess php can execute mplayer, but only really useful for generating thumbnails and stuff. To do what you want there are probably better approaches than php. Maybe something like: http://oxine.sourceforge.net/ ? or media centre if you want to run windows. Probably something that can interface with mysql if you still wanted to use that as a backend rather than browse files.
