On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 11:15 AM, Stroller <strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk> wrote: > > On 16 December 2011, at 17:25, Mark Knecht wrote: >> ... >> I have no interest in tearing apart the DVD in any way. It was more >> about the idea of a fire causing the loss of maybe $15K-$20K >> investment over the years. I can rip all the CDs, keep the ripped >> version here to watch on the computer, and store the DVDs elsewhere, >> but that elimiates (generally) being able to watch special features >> which my wife and kid enjoy. > > I've been down this path fairly extensively. > > Use media-video/dvdbackup and mkisofs (from app-cdr/cdrtools) to create .iso > images of your DVDs. > > Store these on a Samba share, then use something like the PlayOn HD Mini or > the Western Digital TV Live! to watch them on your big screen TV. > > These players allow you to treat .iso files on the network just as if they > were actual DVDs and give you full access to the menus and extra features. > > I'm in the process of trying media-tv/xbmc instead - I believe it handles > menus, but haven't got far enough to test that (I just got video sorted on my > HTPC, now working on sound). > > dvdbackup will fail on a small number of DVDs which have been > "copy-protected" by making them non-compliant with the DVD specification (IMO > this is fixable in dvdbackup's code), but I'm getting at least a 95% success > rate. > > I have found writing dual-layer DVDs practically impossible. The failure rate > is way too high - even disks which burned "successfully" are unreadable on > another PC / player. > > Stroller. > >
Interesting info. Thanks. My new TV actually has a number of USB ports and I've managed to mount a USB disk with mp4 files created by Handbrake and play them just fine. I hadn't considered trying an iso file though. I'll give that a shot this weekend and see if it sees them. Unfortunately *.iso isn't on their recognized formats list, but it's worth a try. The nice thing about the TV is that it has lots of Open Source software built in and puts of nice folders showing the directories I've created and all the files in each directory. I'm currently experimenting with how much I can tolerate in terms of compressing the DVD info. I'll certainly look into dvdbackup. I tried to emerge it but I've gotten some sort of package block going on that portage isn't happy about. Thanks, Mark
