MCE Update and DVD Changers
on 10.15.05, 12:01pm in home theater • share on facebook • comments (2)
While the news has spread pretty fast about Media Center Rollup #2 (I agree with Omar – terrible name – why not call it MCRv2005.02 while yer at it), Sean and Matt give the killer tip: How to enable DVD changer functionality without having a physical DVD changer. From Sean: "Now just add a watch folder in My Videos to look for the root folder the DVD image(s) are located in. You can play them from My Videos or My DVDs. The major downside is that your home-made DVDs don’t have cover art, which DVD drives/jukeboxes do."
I’ve been using My Movies since I setup my theater for doing something similar, but have been really considering moving my DVD library over to VIDEO_TS folders rather than storing ISO images. Why? I’m going to dump the piece of junk GoVideo D2730 that I’ve had so many problems with (I’ve never been able to get video working) and go with a Dave700 or a AVEL LinkPlayer so the living room and bedroom can also get streaming video from my DVD jukebox (i.e. my home server).
The only thing left for me to figure out: Codec hell. Right now, I think leaving them in pure MPEG2/VIDEO_TS is the way to go rather than investing the time to encode in WMV or MP4. Especially with the mix of Macs, PC’s, PSP’s, etc in the house.
vern (October 17, 2005 @ 8:20 pm)
When using My Movies, I have found it vastly more efficient, in terms of disk space AND time spent, to simply have the movie(s) as a single file, such as MPEG or WMV. For a while, I was converting everything to WMV, but I have backed off that significantly as of late, since I have only encoded about 26 or so of the nearly 600 movies I have. At the moment, I have about 380 encoded as MPEG with XVID.
The quality is great, and with My Movies, finding a movie is a snap. Plus, I don’t have to deal with the DVD Menu.
Of course, as you may imagine, I am also NOT including/encoding the “bonus” features or other menus. But that’s ok; if I really want to see them, I’ll just pull the disc out of the closet.
Steve (October 18, 2005 @ 6:24 am)
So you went down the MP4 route. I’ve been thinking of going that way, but have had problems with the D2730 and MP4. Right now, the simplest thing to do was basically use Nero to recode the DVD (stripping out extras, etc) and leave it in VIDEO_TS format. Of course, this is much larger than MP4, but seems more ‘compatible’.
Out of curiosity, what are the encoding settings that you’re using? I might give it a try.