Re: Which digital media player plays full ripped DVD's ?
Kept trying tonight... All of this is over the network.
m4V, VOB, and ISO's play perfectly with VLC running on a PC and, last time I checked, a Mac. This is wired or wireless. I'm seeing about 10 Mb/s average network utilization for a VOB or ISO DVD playing on VLC. DVD menu, audio, video, etc. are perfect. This is what gives me hope that a digital network receiver could do what I want. Maybe I should find a cheap PC that's just fast enough.
m4v files, which I had previously transcoded from DVD's to use on iPhones/iPod's, play fine on the ATV (Boxee and XBMC) and on the Wii (WiiMC). Correspondingly, the network rate is around 1 Mb/s and the file size is about 1/10th that of a DVD.
DVDs, either VOB or ISO, don't work well on the Wii with WiiMC. The best case is that "buffering" pops up every few seconds to interrupt the movie. I also can't don't see a DVD menu.
Since the VOB's didn't work well on the ATV (Boxee or XMBC) I tried building some as ISO's. They still don't work well. Boxee locked up the ATV at least twice tonight. Sometimes Boxee plays, sometimes it won't play the movie at all, sometimes there's no DVD menu, etc. XBMC is also hit or miss.
It looks like the NTV550 is in the $120+ range and the Dune HD players are even more. I might be willing to drop $100-200 if I knew it'd work, but at that price I may at least try ATV Flash and see if their player can handle it. Then I also get into the question about the PS3 and the Blu-Ray I need anyway. It looks like DLNA is questionable (and wouldn't support DVD menus) as is hacking the PS3 and running a media player.
Re: Which digital media player plays full ripped DVD's ?
600+ dvd iso's playing perfectly on my atv1/xbmc, suggests something else is wrong with your particular setup.
I rip my dvds with full menus intact, and they work perfectly well.
Heck, with recent updates to xbmc, I even have full bluray ripped isos working with my atv + crystalhd + linux + xbmc. (well no menus on bluray, but they work perfect for dvd).
If you install xbmc for windows on your pc, add your media share(s) with your various files, you should be able to easily that xbmc supports pretty much everything, just like vlc.
If xbmc works on your pc, then you gotta figure out what is causing those problems. Maybe its over heating, since you are problems with both boxee and xbmc.
Also, the ATV has only 100mbit, not gbit. Perhaps your network switch or hub does not like mixed 100mb/gbit connections.
Re: Which digital media player plays full ripped DVD's ?
Thanks on the nudge for getting the ATV-1 to work with XBMC. I think it is working now with VOB's and ISO's.
The suggestion on running XBMC on my PC was helpful. It can even play one moving which VLC can't. It also, as you suggested, allowed be to see the XMBC supported DVD's but that something was probably wrong with the ATV.
I believe 2 things were wrong: 1) Previous versions of XBMC weren't as robust/reliable as 10.1. I noticed a big improvement in DVD playback when I tried recently vs. 6-12 months ago. 2) In the Apple TV settings, disable Dolby digital out. Prior to changing this, I had everything working but most DVD's wouldn't play audio.
For reference, the ATV-1 and my PC are both using wired ethernet: 100 Mbit for the ATV and 1 Gbit for the PC.
Now onto the Wii... I may need to try Orb or something similar if the raw DVD bitrate is problematic of 802.11g. It should theoretically be able to handle 10 Mb/s, but signal quality, interference, other clients, etc. could degrade the link.
Re: Which digital media player plays full ripped DVD's ?
XBMC is certainly working now with DVD VOB's. Having full access to DVD menus and bonus features is nice.
The only bump I've run into is with TV shows. If I want to maintain DVD menus and features, I must treat them as movies and manually add text files for the scanner. But then I lose the convenience of XBMC's TV navigator. The other option is to treat them at TV shows, but then I loose bonus features unless I specifically identify those features as episodes. There's probably a hybrid solution, but for now the movie option is working well enough.
I've started looking into options for transcode-streaming VOB format to local and remote devices, e.g. my local Wii or my remote iPhone. Orb did a little of this back in the day, but I don't believe it handled DVD's. It'd stream individual VOB's but wasn't smart enough to navigate the DVD, pick which track was the right one, attach movie names with VOB filenames, etc. I checked Twonky today, and it seems to do the same thing. Any suggestions?
