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I found a home theater configuration expert!

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superboyac:
http://blog.insanegenius.com/2011/04/archiving-my-cd-dvd-and-bd-collection.html

I love this guy's blog.  I just found it, and he seems to have written in great detail all the things I've been trying to do lately.  And his tastes seem to be right in line with mine.  First, his primary goal is to store all his media onto hard drives, which will be multiple terabytes.  He has over-engineered it, like I would, and he's running a Windows server with the NAS for storage.  He uses MakeMKV for the video ripping (as I would), and he stores his catalogs using the collectorz software (which i also use).  He even talks about how to setup XBMC and Boxee for the home theater.  it's a great article for anyone going through this.

I love how he is doing this from a home user, home theater perspective.  It's difficult for me to understand all this stuff because all the information out there is about businesses and their requirements, and all the technical jargon associated with it.  It's hard to understand how that translates to a home user.  So this guy is really great with that.

lotusrootstarch:
Hmm, I agree with a lot of what he did in networking and storage areas, nevertheless the post is about content ripping/organization and not home theater entertainment.

all my ripped media in uncompressed format, I really need that much storage

--- End quote ---

This is highly unlikely. Pretty much nothing you get commercially available comes as "uncompressed". Even the BD 1080p m2ts file-based containers are quite lossy to be fair. The quality of the source is all the matters, converting a lossy format to lossless doesn't add any benefit. RAW format doesn't give you any plus unless the source format was RAW already.

I use MakeMKV for ripping DVD’s and BD’s... Below are screenshots of MakeMKV with the stream selection screen for a DVD and a BD:...
--- End quote ---
What he did not tell you is that authentic BD discs are encrypted using AACS, in order to rip them you need a decrypter such as Slysoft's AnyDVD or at minimum a bunch of BD+ decryption keys. You cannot expect it to just rip BD by clicking "Start"... there's a reason why film industry is packed of millionaires. ;)

I am currently using Boxee Boxes for media playback.
--- End quote ---
I failed to understand the whole point of getting all the "RAW" stuff ripped just to be played on a basic device like Boxee. There's no HDMI 1.4, poor DTS support, only plays 1080p video at 30fps maximum, 100Mbps ethernet...

Also there's no mention of any proper home theater component (no Boxee Box is just a networked player, not an entertainment-grade home theater device).


I think this is another example of getting 10% return on a 200% over-investment.  :D

JavaJones:
I would venture to guess this person might have a Windows Server setup with domain controller and DNS setup for other reasons. It's certainly totally unnecessary for media archival and shared access, and in fact would tend to make management of it more complex (though admittedly gives more control if needed). Other than that what he's doing seems to make sense and be potentially applicable to your situation.

Lotus makes a good point about the quality of playback and feature support on the Boxees, but just because things are being ripped in "lossless" (in this case more like "not recompressed") format doesn't mean they have to always be played back with maximum fidelity. It's clear the person's choices are largely driven by archival needs in addition to playback and it's generally a good policy to rip media at max quality so that as your playback systems improve, your media keeps pace. An exaggerated example would be if someone ripped a bunch of HD movies to SD because they did not yet have an HDTV. Then when they got an HDTV they'd have to re-rip all their media to HD to take advantage of the new capabilities, whereas if they'd maintained the original (HD) quality of the media to begin with, they would immediately see benefit.

- Oshyan

superboyac:
What he did not tell you is that authentic BD discs are encrypted using AACS, in order to rip them you need a decrypter such as Slysoft's AnyDVD or at minimum a bunch of BD+ decryption keys. You cannot expect it to just rip BD by clicking "Start"... there's a reason why film industry is packed of millionaires.
-lotusrootstarch (August 31, 2011, 08:11 PM)
--- End quote ---
I don't think you need AnyDVD for MakeMKV, at least not from what I understand.  I have both, and if I'm not mistaken, the advice from MakeMKV was that Anydvd is not necessary; it can take care of all that itself.  That's why i like MakeMKV so much, it really is a one-button, one-click ripping procedure.

The other thing that many people don't understand: I'm not trying to make the cheapest rig possible.  I'm trying to make a really nice, elegant setup.  So I'll spend a little extra to get a few nice things.  And after I rip something, i don't want to worry about ripping it ever again...I want, in the purest form possible, that disc in my computer.  From there, i can re-encode it to whatever I need.  The goal is to rid myself of the discs.  If this means I need to get several hard drives, so be it.  Again, I'm not trying to be perfectly efficient here...I'm trying to be elegant and robust.

Here's how I look at it.  I've spend many many hours/days/weeks of my life dealing with all my media over the years.  backing up, moving to discs, copying back to the drives, organizing files, renaming files, encoding files, looking for lost discs...I spend a lot of time with media.  I'm trying to cut out all of that annoying stuff and we now have the technology to do it.  i will pay a premium for a super-streamlined access to my media.  I watch tons of movies, I listen to tons of music, I record, i write, I spend most of my free time with this stuff.  It's as important to me as anything.  I will go to great lengths to make this all a better experience for me in any way.

superboyac:
I've never understood how a software player can downgrade the quality of a loaded video for playback.  Can anyone explain this?  I remember hearing about this when Win7 came out, and people were saying if you don't have the right licensing, the hardware will downsample stuff.  Where is this all controlled in the OS or software?  What settings do I look at?  What are the key vocabulary terms?  Let's take KMP for example: where is all this happening?

I'm curious because if I spend top dollar on a nice rig, I want to set everything up for maximum quality playback.  I don't want any desampling or loss in quality.  I have wondered about this for a long time.

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