Uncompressed DVD Collection in Movie Library

[Fromage]

Hello everyone. This is my first post at TGB. I have a WMC7 setup with five Xbox 360 S Extenders. I want to be able to put my entire DVD collection in the WMC Movie Library. What I would like to achieve is a way to store and watch movies in uncompressed format. I've searched these forums and found stuff on Handbrake, MakeMKV, and other apps, but If possible I don't want to do any video encoding/recoding/transcoding. Suggestions?

[Doctor Feelgood]

Not sure it is exactly what you are talking about, but I may do something similar... I use WinX DVD Ripper Platinum - http://www.winxdvd.com/dvd-ripper-platinum/ - to rip my DVDs without conversion. It can do all kinds of conversions, but it has a 'copy' feature which just rips the audio and video as is. It creates .mpeg files that are about equal to the original size of the film on the DVD. It is great since there is no loss in quality, audio/video sync issues, or compatibility issues - but you will need some serious disk space if you have a big collection. My 250 movie collection is just over 1TB, which makes sense if you think each DVD is probably 4GB or so.

[Fromage]

I want to keep the movie as close to original as possible (in both visual and audio quality). I read somewhere that you can combine the VOBs into a single file and rename them to mpeg and that would be an original copy.

On a side note... I have discovered that the "optional media update" on Xbox requires you to log into Xbox Live every time you use it, and that is quite annoying since I have 5 Xboxes and only one XB Live account (which I never use because I only use the Xboxes for WMC Extender)

[Cyterio]

In the past I used DVD Shrink. It has an option to completely clone your DVD, full menus and all. You have the ability to rip just the movie portion, full quality, along with whatever audio tracks you want. Its free and very easy to use.

[Fromage]

Another requirement is that the extender must be able to Fast Forward/Rewind the video. I dabbled a little with VOB2MPG v3 and I cannot FF/RW.

[werds]

Another requirement is that the extender must be able to Fast Forward/Rewind the video. I dabbled a little with VOB2MPG v3 and I cannot FF/RW.

You can use almost any dvd copy software to handle that. I personally paid for DVDfab (there are other free options available). This ribs is into video ts and audio ts folders and is pretty much a straight dvd. I too kept my library like that and only re-encode blu-rays so that they take less space.

As for my extenders (I too have 5 xbox 360's) I set up Media Browser 2.6 and placed all my movie libraries in that. I then installed transcode 360. This allows the xbox 360's to play them with ffw and rewind since the pc transcodes on the fly. There are many other options but this sounds closest to what you are asking.

[brantmacga]

i use VideoRedo; i copy my DVD's as an mpeg2 .wtv file. Works perfectly on the extenders and ff/rr with no problems.

[Fromage]

Is there a video format that I can use that does not require the "Optional Media Update" from Xbox Live (other than WTV)?

[Venom51]

Another vote for DVDFab.

[bobbob]

makemkv rips everything to full quality mkv's. you still need a splitter to play the mkv's within wmc but this is by far the easiest and highest quality solution i have found. and its free

[leroys1000]

I havent looked for a while,but there was instructions somewhere on the web to make
media center recognize iso's.
That way you could use iso software to make exact iso images of your disks and just play the iso's.
Looks like one way here.....
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/11071/au ... ia-center/
Might check into some of those to see if they fit your needs.

[barnabas1969]

Extenders will not play an ISO file. This works on the pc, but not on extenders.

[werds]

Extenders will not play an ISO file. This works on the PC, but not on extenders.

Correct but you can setup transcode 360 to transcode the iso files that the extender is reading so that they are playable on the extender. (Then again using transcode 360 may require a bit beefier setup for some. for example on my i3 530 system transcoding a dvd is childsplay, but transcoding a blu-ray rip pegs it severely)

But it is doable!

[barnabas1969]

I thought Transcode 360 was for XP and maybe Vista, but not for Win 7 (especially 64 bit). Do you have any references to set this up?

[werds]

I thought Transcode 360 was for XP and maybe Vista, but not for Win 7 (especially 64 bit). Do you have any references to set this up?

I used the pdf that was for Vista. I currently run Win7 64 bit and can say that it definitely works! (Although as I have mentioned previously I needed to turn off ALL microsoft products that do any form of updates otherwise it ruins the registry and the ability for transcode 360 to work... learned that the hard way before!)

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/06/setting- ... w-kid.html

http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permal ... ng-special

[rvbarton]

Another requirement is that the extender must be able to Fast Forward/Rewind the video. I dabbled a little with VOB2MPG v3 and I cannot FF/RW.

You can use almost any dvd copy software to handle that. I personally paid for DVDfab (there are other free options available). This ribs is into video ts and audio ts folders and is pretty much a straight dvd. I too kept my library like that and only re-encode blu-rays so that they take less space.

As for my extenders (I too have 5 xbox 360's) I set up Media Browser 2.6 and placed all my movie libraries in that. I then installed transcode 360. This allows the xbox 360's to play them with ffw and rewind since the PC transcodes on the fly. There are many other options but this sounds closest to what you are asking.

Does your xbox 360 recognize the movies on your HTPC, after installing transcode 360? My xbox will not recognize the movies I have in the video tx and audio ts format. This may be what I'm looking for to allow my xbox to recognize all movies on my HTPC running windows 7 media center.

[werds]

Yes my xbox 360 recognizes and plays everything in my library. But I installed Media Browser and then transcode 360 and configured the extender settings for transcode 360 within the media browser configurator (and the transcode 360 settings using its separate configurator). (I also used media center toolbox reset to hide the WMC movie library and created a cool movie icon so that when people look for movies it opens up Media Browser 2.6.2)

The only issues I have are as follows.

1. It does NOT play dvd menus and with some dvd's bypass the menu while on others will just flash up an error message - So you MUST rip only the movie, which for me is ok I just rip movie only in dvdfab without compressing or anything else and it provides TS files etc.

2. You must NOT allow any microsoft software to regularly update - this can easily jack up the transcode 360 install because part of setting up transcode 360 to work with media browser takes some registry key changes. I had previously run into a problem where it suddenly stopped working on my extenders and I couldnt figure it out until months later it dawned on me that it must have been a security patch or an update from MS that tweaked the registry.

3. Since it is transcoding on the fly when playing to extenders some file types will peg the HTPC processor to the hilt (for example I have a few uncompressed Blu-Rays in my library and it pegs all 4 threads on my i3 530) Nothing that really is visible at the extender head end but depending on how the system is used and by whom it MAY be an issue (one of the reason I am upgrading to a 6 core since the majority of our movie watching is currently through the extenders and with multiple people watching different movies the horsepower is justified) With simpler file types like DVD's the processor has no issues. Also Transcode 360 creates a temporary buffer file and you can choose how many files it keeps on the hard drive - this way if it is 4 or 5 movies that are repeated regularly it accesses the saved buffer file instead of transcoding anew. (I have a 3 year old in the house so there are 4 or 5 movies that are on heavy rotation, after the initial transcode it accesses the buffer files until expired or until they are bumped out of rotation according to my Transcode 360 settings.

4. The instructions I followed were for Vista and transcode 360 does not appear to be an actively updated program anymore. I am running my HTPC on Win7 64 bit and it works perfectly fine for me...YMMV

[werds]

I thought Transcode 360 was for XP and maybe Vista, but not for Win 7 (especially 64 bit). Do you have any references to set this up?

I used the pdf that was for Vista. I currently run Win7 64 bit and can say that it definitely works! (Although as I have mentioned previously I needed to turn off ALL microsoft products that do any form of updates otherwise it ruins the registry and the ability for transcode 360 to work... learned that the hard way before!)

http://www.hack7mc.com/2009/06/setting- ... w-kid.html

http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permal ... ng-special

So recently upgraded the SSD drive in my WMC setup... and apparently somewhere in recent history (the past month or two) the transcoding has stopped working! Any movie that had previously been transcoded plays on my 360's but any new ones give me a transcode error So I was planning to reinstall everything from fresh and come to find out all of the links are dead and I can't locate the original pdf instructions or the files...

Since I had a working system and a HUGE collection of dvd's ripped in .ts file structure... I stayed on Media Browser 2.x something with transcode 360 and never updated... so does anyone have a working alternative here? Or am I going to have to go the dreaded route of transcoding several terabytes of movies...

Note - I am asking in case someone either has the original files and pdf stashed someplace and is willing to share or to see if there is a better setup softwarewise that my kids and wife would be happy with. Currently they love the way it is setup (stayed on MB 2.x version because the alphabetical scrolling list folder structure with a single poster to the right makes it fast for my wife and I to browse through when the kids are trying to figure out what they want to watch... I couldn't seem to duplicate the look on MB3 and beyond the last time I tried..)

Since I have been contemplating a fresh rebuild of my WMC machine I would need to get a resolution lined up for this issue first!

[werds]

On a good note, fixed my transcoding problems by adding the extenders as authorized users for my shared folders (weird that it worked properly before and that somehow fixed it lol). Still would love someone to either have the original pdf and files or a new alternative so that in the future I can re-do the whole setup from scratch!