HTPC finally complete

[jussi]

A while back I was asking questions about making an htpc and I finally finished it... well almost. I'm pretty happy with the result. The DVR works great but channel changing is a bit sluggish. I think it's either a defective IR blaster or some settings in the DVR software. Ironic thing is soon after I built the htpc I switched to directv and got a free HD DVR as part of their promotion.
XBMC is awesome. The designers did a great job and there are tons of add-ons for it. Although I must admit some of the guys at the forums don't look to kindly on newbs I'm in the process of ripping all my DVDs now and just playing them through XBMC. Does anyone know if DVD 9 is worth the extra space over DVD 5. Maybe it's just me but I can't really tell the difference. But then again I've only compared them on a 22" monitor so far.

Here's what I used in case anyone is curious:

What I wanted to do:

Output 1080 video
TiVO like DVR
Record HD content (still not accomplished)
Commercial skip
Play Music
Play all my DVDs from the hard drive and list them by genre, title, actors, etc
Play online videos (Hulu, youtube)
Surf Online (occasional use only)
Play Blu-Ray Movies (still not accomplished)



Software (mostly freeware since I'm cheap ):

XP
GB-PVR
XBMC (Media Stream and Aeon skins; ESPN and NBA plug-ins)
Hulu Desktop (for TV shows)

Hardware:

NMEDIA HTPC 100 Case

GA-MA78GM-US2H motherboad (great on-board video with HDMI so no need to buy extra video card)
LightScribe DVD burner (it was on sale )
1 TB hd
2 gig ram
Hauppauge PVR 150
Dinovo mini keyboard


I got most of what I wanted done. I still need a blu-ray rom and to upgrade to a HD capture card. Probably the HVR 1800 or 2250. I'm also still debating on how I'm going to store the DVDs. If making them ISOs is worth the time. Also if I should make them DVD 9 or DVD 5 format.

[SwingKing]

DVD-9 vs DVD-5 is just dual-layer vs single layer DVDs. If you're ripping DVDs to a hard drive, I'd get away from MPEG-2 (DVD format) and encode them either as AVI (XVID) or MKV (H.264) format. These are much more efficient encoding schemes and you can really reduce the file sizes. I encode everything as AVI files with an 80% quality level and movies come out around 2 GB. Quality on my 50" DLP is perfectly acceptable and most of the time indisinguishable from the DVD.

-- Ken

[germdoc]

You lost me after "HTPC"...

[Kristofor]

It's your personal preference regarding whether you want to do straight rips, transcode, or re-encode your DVDs. The DVD9 vs. DVD5 is arbitrary, some films are less than 5GB without any additional compression.

I do straight rips to .iso files. [edit: This is the fastest way to go as there is no post-processing or modification. Most of my DVDs are 5.5-8GB without modifying them /edit]. It does take more space, but the amount of space we're talking about is dirt cheap... I have 14TB in my media server, and if you were building it today you could spend the same amount and have 21 to 28 TB of space. If you have 300 DVDs to rip that can fit on 2 drives with plenty of space left over and you're at full quality with extras/menus, etc.

On Blu-Ray or other HD content the potential savings are much higher (20-30GB per film) so the case is somewhat easier.

On the flip side, if you want to rip out just the main movie and encode it to x264, XVID or the like there's nothing wrong with doing that. There would be some loss of quality, but it can be pretty hard to notice if you don't squeeze much.

I'd try it with one or two movies (maybe one special effects, another a drama) then sample back and forth and see if the impact bothers you or not.

There is a middle path as well where you simply strip the foreign languages and any other extras you don't want so you end up with just the main film and leave it uncompressed...

[jussi]

Thanks Kris. I'm going to hook it up the my 50" DLP and compare the different formats.

What program are you using to rip. I'm pretty happy with DVDFab but am curious as to what others use?

I found on average ripping to DVD-9 adds around 3GB (but I've only done a few DVDs) and you're right in terms of hd space nowadays it's pretty insignificant. I'll probably have to re-think that when I upgrade to blu-ray. XBMC can read DVD files (video_ts) so I didn't see any significant advantage in making them ISOs. Just curious as to why you did?

[jussi]

You lost me after "HTPC"...

Home Theater PC. Basically a computer that replaces you're home theater. For me it was mostly a cheap way to get TiVo.

[Alex Franke]

Good stuff, jussi -- thanks for posting!

[Kristofor]

What program are you using to rip. I'm pretty happy with DVDFab but am curious as to what others use?

I have DVDFab, but I also have AnyDVD HD ($) so for my normal ripping I let that run and just use imgburn (free). XBMC has a plugin/script available that will allow you to rip directly on that box if you're so inclined.

XBMC can read DVD files (video_ts) so I didn't see any significant advantage in making them ISOs. Just curious as to why you did?

Mostly just to limit the number of files and make them easier to manage these days (I have over 1000 DVDs/HDDVD/BluRay). In the past I also had some systems that couldn't play the raw file structures but could mount an ISO and play it like a regular DVD, but that's not an issue anymore.