[DaveRobson]

First I'll explain my situation:

I am the engineer on a private yacht, with a current movie system consisting of Windows Vista Media Centre PC's, running My Movies, with a central NAS file storage of over 1000 movies and 1000 music albums. The Media Centre PC's are extremely slow, GUI is crap and very slow to load menu's and the owner wants rid of it. He also isn't willing to pay for Kaleiodoscape hence my trying other options. Let me also add here that I am extremely inexperienced with this field (I'm a mechanic!!) but have been able to learn a lot from the forums and online manual, which I have to say are excellent. I have downloaded and run XBMC on my Windows 7 laptop and was extremely impressed with it. On a recommendation I am planning on installing Apple TV 2's in each location on the boat (14) and keep the original file storage as is, on the NAS. I have bought one Apple TV 2 to play around with and test the speed of the menu loading and GUI etc to make sure it is OK for the boss, it must be a damn near perfect experience or I'll never hear the end of it. So here we come to the problem...

Apple TV 2 running IOS 4.2.1.
XBMC pre-10.0 GIT:4BO32BE Compiled Feb 19th 2011

I jailbroke the ATV 2 using GreenPois0n for windows, no problem there. Had to install XBMC using Putty as the Cydia download didnt work despite repeated attempts and 2 factory resets, but worked first time using putty. However, having now pointed the ATV2 at the NAS server I am discovering that it wont play back any of the Movies, with the following message coming up:

'Playback Failed. One of more items failed to play. Check the Log file for more details'

The entire collection of over 1000 movies is stored in .VOB format, ripped from the original DVD collection. I believe that this is a known problem, I have seen it alluded to in other Forum posts but haven't seen a solution for it, hence my posting a new thread on the matter for some clarification and advice. Apologies for my not posting the log of the problem, I dont know how to do it, if someone can explain it to me I am more than happy to post it.

So here's what it comes down to, and this is where I need the advice of the forum:

1. Is there a way I can get the ATV2 to play the .VOB files as they are?

2. If not, will the future updates of XBMC for the ATV2 include .VOB functionality in the near future? I can wait a few months if necessary

3. If I convert the movie collection from .VOB into another file format (from my tests this seems like it will take several months!) will I lose the movie quality? Can I upload BluRays in another format other than .VOB and still keep the quality? Can I keep the 'DVD experience' of having the DVD menu, optional subtitles etc under a new file format?

4. Can anyone recommend a currently available, relatively cheap alternative hardware that I could install instead of ATV2, preferably one that is small and quiet? I have looked at the Acer Aspire Revo but it doesnt seem to be very readily available, at least online. Is a Windows alternative the way to go?

Thanks for your comments and suggestions

Dave

[Starstream]

Problems with raw DVD rips are listed in the known issues sticky.

Cant answer the first two

3. You can use MakeMKV to process the VIDEO_TS folder into a single MKV file (main movie only) there is no loss of quality as it simply repackages the video and audio into the MKV container, the files play fine on my ATV2. Similarly VOB2MPG may work on DVD files which will dump the video and audio to a single .mpg file. The ATV2 cannot & never will play raw Blu-rays.

4. Boxee Box (XBMC fork) might be worth considering (it has automatic media scraping), it will handle the DVD's with menus and play Blu-rays (no menus for Blu-rays) so just use MakeMKV on the Blu-rays to do the same thing.

[milli]

when you have thousands of movies, it does not make sense to convert them in to a format which XBMC can play. Instead you are better of buying another media player such as boxee, wd live etc.


To answer your other questions:

1. It can play vob files with some limitations currently. If you search for my previous postings, i'd mentioned the behavior.

2. I don't think it would be hard to fix it. But only xbmc dev team can tell you when it would be fixed.

[DaveRobson]

Hi Guys,

thanks for your responses. I agree about the file conversion, I worked out if I set it up to run continuously it would take 4 months to convert everything! I have started setting the system up to run XBMC on the old Vista Media Centre machines, its not quite perfect as you still have to wait about 90 seconds for the computer to boot up. This may not sound like much of a problem but try telling that to a Billionaire! However, it's a big improvement on the old Media Centre system that it was running, and I will keep an eye out for .VOB functionality with the ATV2 and change over when it's available.

Thanks again,

Dave

[davilla]

Surely a Billionaire could afford several new macmini's rather than some old Vista Media Centre machines. The new macmini has a rather nice form factor.

[Doombelly]

Surely a Billionaire could afford several new macmini's rather than some old Vista Media Centre machines. The new macmini has a rather nice form factor.

Or donate to davilla and the guys so they will make vob, img and iso work on atv.

[DaveRobson]

Does the Mac Mini version of XBMC have full functionality for the .VOB files etc?

[davilla]

Does the Mac Mini version of XBMC have full functionality for the .VOB files etc?

yes

[rickwookie]

First I'll explain my situation:

...private yacht...

...over 1000 movies and 1000 music albums...

...isn't willing to pay for Kaleiodoscape...

...I'm a mechanic..

...each location on the boat (14)...

...it must be a damn near perfect experience or I'll never hear the end of it...

Sounds like a cool guy to work for.

[bircoe]

Just a quick question before I offer my solution... are the VOB's split (as they are on the disc in 1gb chunks) or are they single files?

[DaveRobson]

Yes the video files are split within a Video.TS file. I am currently looking at several other hardware options including Mac Mini, ASRock Vision 3D and Dell Zino HD 410, any comments about any of those options?