[mythtv-users] Any Blu-Ray success stories?

[Scott Alfter]

On Thu, September 11, 2008 7:38 am, Mitch Gore wrote:
> no...no good stories.  there are ways but you need to rip the disc first
and have one beefy computer.  You might want to start reading before
impulse buying.
>
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD

A week or two ago, the local Fry's had several shopping carts full of
HD-DVD movies to unload at $7-$10 each, plus Xbox 360 HD-DVD drives to
read them for $40.  I know HD-DVD has pretty much been passed by in the
marketplace, but the price was low enough that I could try experimenting
with it.  (The drives are long since gone, but they still had lots of
movies a couple of days ago.)

The hardest part of ripping ended up being figuring out how to add UDF 2.5
support to a pre-2.6.26 kernel (had to use that because VMware Player
won't work with 2.6.26; I'll probably end up switching to VirtualBox in
the near future if it'll work with 2.6.26).  Once that was done, DumpHD
ripped Caddyshack pretty easily.

The tricky part since then has been playback and/or transcoding.  Video
works well enough, but audio appears to use some extended form of AC3 on
which both mplayer's AC3 decoder and the hardware-based AC3 decoder in my
speaker system both choke.  I've not gotten a Subversion build of mplayer
working yet, but EAC3To works under Wine to convert audio from EAC3 to
AC3.  I can have mplayer grab video from one file and audio from another
for playback, but I end up with sync problems.  Transcoding also tends to
lead to sync problems, but I suspect this is mostly the result of using
separate files for source video & audio as I've had similar problems in
the past encoding separate files from other sources.

(I figure that even once all of the movies I have are ripped, the Xbox 360
HD-DVD drive will still be useful as an external DVD-ROM drive.  (I've not
checked, but Netflix might still have HD-DVDs in circulation as well.)  It
plugs into any computer with standard USB cabling.  A remote comes with it
that's similar in layout to an MCE remote, but it appears to send
different codes than the MCE remote that my living-room frontend uses; it
might still be usable with an IR receiver and lirc.  The only annoyance is
that it uses an external power supply; the other 5.25" drive enclosures
I've bought in the past have had internal power supplies.)

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail)
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/          Top-posting!
 \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden          >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?