[LB06]

Neither are ideal. It really depends on the situation which solution(s) you should choose.

If your sources mainly consist of downloaded HD stuff (usenet, torrents) I'd strongly recommend an HTPC with XBMC or something like a Popcorn Hour. I recommend this because you should definitely not overestimate the capabilities of hardware based solutions such as BR players or TVs. With DLNA you might be able to stream everything from your NAS to your TV or you BR player, but if those devices don't know what to do with it you're basically out of luck. Most HD stuff is contained in an MKV container for example and most devices refuse to read (demux) the MKV container, rendering your entire HD collection useless.

You'd have to let you NAS do remuxing or even worse, transcoding, which will result in a huge loss of quality and uses huge amounts of resources (in terms of CPU power and in terms of time). Trust me this is not worth it so if you mainly have MKVs go with an HTPC or a Popcorn Hour.

But if you want to play BR discs or BR rips (iso's or the BR file structure) you might want to buy a separate BluRay player (and a burner in the latter case), since XBMC is not very good (yet) at handling BR discs/rips which means you'll still have to do remuxing or transcoding, but this time TO mkv.

If you have mixed sources I'd recommend both, unless XBMC gets fully featured BR support of course :p.

edit:
The Popcorn Hour C-200 also seems to optionally contain a BR player so I assume it knows how to handle BR discs and rips. This might be ideal if you want an integrated solution instead of 2 devices, 2 remotes and 2 interfaces. (Sorry XBMC)

[poofyhairguy]

I keep hearing you guys speak about playing your Blu rays in XBMC. Sorry to be a noob, but how are you doing this in XBMC if its not supported? Is there a guide or a link that explains how to get this setup?

Step one: Get AnyDVD HD and let it crack the disk.

Step two:

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002

[LB06]

Step one: Get AnyDVD HD and let it crack the disk.

Step two:

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002

Yeah remuxing to mkv is possible, but a bit tedious. Especially if you have to rip it from a physical disc first. I prefer a good 1080p encode (ESiR, CtrlHD or the likes): it saves a lot of space and somebody else has gone through the trouble of ripping and encoding for me .

I try to limit remuxing to those movies I really want in top notch quality. Or when there's no decent encode available but only a rip. Or if the rip is decent but I want the HD audio track and there's no separate flac available.

[poofyhairguy]

I try to limit remuxing to those movies I really want in top notch quality. Or when there's no decent encode available but only a rip. Or if the rip is decent but I want the HD audio track and there's no separate flac available.

I agree with that.

[Sam.Nazarko]

What I do is rip the movie from the disk to a m2ts file. The key software is tsmuxer. There are front ends to tsmuxer - ClownBD and ToNMT (my preference). Some people use MakeMKV to rip the movie to a mkv format. I use anydvd hd to decrypt the disk.

These give you the movie. The disk menus/extra features/forced content aren't included.

TsMuxer has a GUI of it's own (see TSMuxerGUI)

Step one: Get AnyDVD HD and let it crack the disk.

Step two:

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002

Or use aacskeys, I've used it on my HD-DVD and Blu-Ray collection with dumphd and it's a nice little Java program that dumps the whole disc and you can do whatever you want with it.

Regards your setup, anything you can do on your Blu-Ray player like DLNA and NetFlix/Pandora can be done on an HTPC. If you want a BD player as well just get something like Asrock which has a BD drive. If your happy with an HTPC now, get another rather adventuring into the unknown. If you do wish to get a BD player and want to stream video to it make sure your library is compatible with it's specs (codecs, bitrates and profile settings)

[NotShorty]

I found AnyDVD + MakeMKV very easy, FWIW.

NS

[eg4190]

Why not just spend a little more on the HTPC and make it a more robust system with a Blu-Ray drive? Then you can install Windows on it, which will let you play Blu-Rays, stream Netflix and Hulu, and use XBMC for everything else. As an added bonus you can play games and browse the web.

Hardware acceleration of HD video isn't in the official Windows build yet, which is part of the reason there's such a strong bias in favor of the XBMC Live build on this board, but with any decent low-to-mid-range CPU that's really not an issue at all. If you care about streaming online content and playing Blu-Rays, then the ION platform running XBMC Live probably isn't for you. I think it's better to spend $500 on a larger mATX system than $300 on an ION box and $300 on a high-end Blu-Ray player.

[poofyhairguy]

Why not just spend a little more on the HTPC and make it a more robust system with a Blu-Ray drive? Then you can install Windows on it, which will let you play Blu-Rays, stream Netflix and Hulu, and use XBMC for everything else.

If its just yourself that will enjoy the box then having a jack-of-all-trades HTPC is fine. Get a little keyboard and mouse, and build a Micro ATX HTPC that can do everything you want.

But if you are like me, and you depend on others using the system (in my case my wife), then this option is unacceptable. There is no way to make that all easily workable and switchable from a single remote, and the death to a HTPC in a family is the first time someone has to pick up a keyboard to use it.

Simply put, if you want others to accept your work and use it then often the best method is to make is as simple as possible. The upside to a dedicated Blu Ray player and a dedicated XBMC box is that EVERYTHING can be controlled by a Logitech Harmony and the Harmony can easily switch between the desired tasks.

I would in my case much rather spend the $300 on the ION box and the $200 on the nice Blu Ray player than $500 on a HTPC my wife can't control...

[west1134]

Well over the weekend I went into Best Buy to see if they would come close to matching the "wish list" I had created on Amazon price wise. Thinking they wouldn't be able to touch it, or match it since its from various online vendors.

I ended up walking out of there with everything on my list for almost $100 less than Best Buy retail pricing and about $60 less than Amazon.com plus I didn't have to wait for it to come in the mail.

I opted to go for the Blu Ray player to give it a shot and see, knowing if it didn't do what I wanted I'd take it back. I then also bought a center channel speaker, new Amp, and a subwoofer to complete my 5.1 system. BTW Definitive Technology makes a kick@$$ sub!!! If your in the market, check them out! I was totally blown away!

So as for the Blu Ray player (Samsung BD-C6500) I can say I was impressed! It does everything it claims to be able to do, and unlike a lot of the reviews I read up on it, it was NOT hard at all to get going, connected to my wireless network easily enough and got everything working almost immediately. The Pandora app, weather, games, and other apps are also very cool. Plus the Netflix, Blockbuster, Vudu, CinemaNow, etc. apps are killer for watching a movie on the fly vs. driving to a video store.

As for the "Allshare" feature which is what I was worried about the most. Allshare is designed to allow you to connect the Blu Ray player to your network and stream media to it, similar to XBMC. After setting it up last night (You have to download some software from Samsung which claims not to work with Win 7 but it ended up working fine for me) I can say that overall its OK. It does what I need it to do, but it certainly doesn't have a pretty GUI like XBMC does to go through your media. It also has problems playing some of my files depending on what file extension it is. And lower quality downloads look like compete crap and/or don't play and I'm thinking its almost literally a live stream vs. buffering up any part of it. So on a scale of 1-10 I'd give it a 6.

Overall I'm happy it can do what I wanted, but I'm still going to go for building up another ION system to put down there in the future and have both (which is what many had recommended previously in this thread).


Again thanks for the input!

[eg4190]

If its just yourself that will enjoy the box then having a jack-of-all-trades HTPC is fine. Get a little keyboard and mouse, and build a Micro ATX HTPC that can do everything you want.

But if you are like me, and you depend on others using the system (in my case my wife), then this option is unacceptable. There is no way to make that all easily workable and switchable from a single remote, and the death to a HTPC in a family is the first time someone has to pick up a keyboard to use it.

This is absolutely true. I tend to leave XBMC on most of the time, which is easily controllable via a universal remote, but everything goes haywire if I exit out to the desktop and then my girlfriend or my roommate wants to watch something when I'm not in the room. And my girlfriend is a professional digital video editor! I don't get what it is about task switching via the wireless mouse and keyboard that's so difficult, but it undoubtedly does kill the experience for anyone else.

Something to keep in mind for whomever happens upon this thread.

[poofyhairguy]

This is absolutely true. I tend to leave XBMC on most of the time, which is easily controllable via a universal remote, but everything goes haywire if I exit out to the desktop and then my girlfriend or my roommate wants to watch something when I'm not in the room. And my girlfriend is a professional digital video editor! I don't get what it is about task switching via the wireless mouse and keyboard that's so difficult, but it undoubtedly does kill the experience for anyone else.

I think the phenomenon is very explainable.

People hate learning new GUI interfaces (and by this I mean normal people, not us) because of the effort involved. That is part of the reason why every Windows have a start button in the same place.

But people have grown to accept that each piece of equipment- phone, DVD player, TV, Cable Box, PS3, etc. - is going to have its own interface. They have to accept that fact and so they do. They grab the remote and try.

But when you get into running different programs on one box, suddenly you are multiplying a difficulty they dislike and one box has many different interfaces. Suddenly it becomes hard and not worth doing, especially if a keyboard is needed.

Part of what makes XBMC magical is by using it you can confuse people from thinking they are using scary and nerdy computers to using media appliances like a TiVo. When you get past XBMC that magic is gone and there is no way to get it back.

So buy the Blu Ray player- I really like the one the OP purchased. Enjoy the Pandora and Netflix.

Then buy the ION box and let your friends and family members enjoy your media in a way that makes them comfortable.

[InLovewithXBMC]

poofyhairguy, really good points. Thanks for sharing.

Btw..I am using MakeMkv now. Going BR disk to MakeMKV, with AnyDVD running in the background.

When using MakeMkv, I remove all subtitles(except forced), select the audio track that I want and the largest file.

Am I losing video or sound quality when I rip to .mkv? Am I missing something? My understanding that its simply making one file with no compression straight from the disc.

[Flomaster]

so now the wife wants t get rid of our bluRay player and the 50 some odd moveis we have.

is my zotac ion atom 330 with 4GB of powerful enough to use the swiss army knife addon to turn my blurays into mkv files ?
http://code.google.com/p/swiss-army-knife/

I'd have to buy a bluray burner and that can be had for about $110 on newegg.com http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6827136181

-=Jason=-

[poofyhairguy]

Am I losing video or sound quality when I rip to .mkv? Am I missing something? My understanding that its simply making one file with no compression straight from the disc.

Yes, when you use Make MKV it just extracts the core audio track. You have to use the guide I linked to in order to decode the HD audio to 8 channel PCM to be put in the mkv container.

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002