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bdee1
Senior Member
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I have all my DVDs ripped to my NAS and i am able to play them on my jailbroken appleTV via xbmc - it works really well.
I am starting to buy some blu ray movies and am thinkign abotu gettign a blu-ray drive for my computer so i can rip them to my nas and play them on my appleTV.
what i am wondering is if appleTV will be able to play the blu-ray rips from the NAS without lagging or stuttering.
has anyone had any experience with this?
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With my very limited experience with Blu Ray on the ATV2 I can say it will play them. I have only tried with compressed Blu Rays though in a .mkv file with about a 8000 bit rate. If I remember right that is getting close to the limit for what the ATV2 can handle.
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I use DVDFab and Handbrake to back up and convert. DVDFab will rip it to your hard drive and HandBrake will convert it to .mkv and compress it based on your settings. DVDFab will compress and convert as well but I am not a big fan of the video quality it produces. As far as the settings for Handbrake I just use the default ones, just play with them and see what works for you.
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barrmy
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same process for me, handbrake has a ATV2 preset (.m4v) and I have had no issues with anything converted
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With all due respect, what many here are describing is not what I (or, I think, most people) would consider to be a "Blu-ray rip". A rip is usually considered to be a "straight rip" with no further compression/transcoding going on. If this is what the OP has in mind, my experience has been that if the Blu-ray was encoded with MPEG4 and does not have any subtitles, then I have been able to play them smoothly. Note that I just rip the main movie and the non-lossless audio track.
As alluded to above, there are some caveats:
1) The source must be encoded in MPEG4 as the ATV2 can decode this via its hardware GPU. Any other encoding format will require that the ATV2 attempt to decode it via the CPU, and it isn't up to the task.
2) A lot of Blu-rays have forced subtitles these days. My experience (using an older XBMC build, so maybe some improvements have been made here) is that the ATV2 w/XBMC wasn't up to the task of doing the on-the-fly subtitle overlaying without stuttering (or crashing).
3) Remember, you can only output at 720p.
4) These Blu-ray rips are very large and will require a very fast network. Attempting to do this via Wi-Fi is asking for trouble. And even hard-wired w/SMB may be problematic, depending on the bitrate of the movie.
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I've yet to see the ATV2 handle a full/uncompressed copy of Avatar.