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Riggy · 2013-02-13, 12:44

Hello everyone,

A good little community here, I've learnt alot in the past couple of days, thank you.

I do have a question though as the idea of having a HTPC set up tends to be slightly different to what all the tutorials say.

In my house, I have a hard wired the office to the living room, so I can ideally stream any content I want to each room. I'm looking at building my HTPC with just a 60GB SSD for windows and XBMC and I was hoping to stream all my films from the office over a wired connection, which is where all my films are located. Is this possible? Will XBMC pick up the list of content from another source and list it like it would with it's own hard drive? Huh

Thanks
Riggy

Grubby · 2013-02-13, 12:49

Yes, this is something you can configure. Dont ask me more as Im just setting up myself, but you can add a source in the settings

**teeedubb** · 2013-02-13, 13:45

Yes. Share the content from the PC you want to with windows file sharing (aka samba/smb). On the machine you want to play the media on add a video source, select windows file sharing (could be called samba too, not 100% sure) and select the folder you want to add, then select the scraper you wish to use and update the library. The videos on. The PC will show up in the library on your htpc

Riggy · 2013-02-13, 13:45

I've being doing some research on ripping blu rays and maintaining the lossless DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD soundtracks, but at the moment it seems like it's a royal pain in the back side to maintain full quality of the soundtrack.Anyone got any thoughts on this and how you've got around losing quality on the sound?

I thought about, just ripping my DVD collection (Currently alot bigger than my blu ray collection) and just playing my Blu ray's as I normally would. :/

bluray · 2013-02-13, 16:25

You can simply rip it to BDMV or ISO, and it'll include all the original contents......AnyDVD HD is an excellent software for ripping blu-ray disc for backup....

Hooblue · 2013-02-13, 16:33

(2013-02-13, 16:25)bluray Wrote: You can simply rip it to BDMV or ISO, and it'll include all the original contents......AnyDVD HD is an excellent software for ripping blu-ray disc for backup....

This is what I do also. Most of my dvd's I rip to slightly lower quality, but most blurays I rip as an iso so as to keep all the HD sound and also all the extras.

Riggy · 2013-02-13, 17:52

Thanks for the input guys. I haven't found a very a precise guide on ripping blu rays when it comes to the soundtracks. I suppose the guides would have a lot of content to cover because of all the formats and software available. In anyDVD HD, are you able to reduce the video part down to 720 but keep the lossless audio?

I'm definately going to give AnyDVD HD a go tonight and see how it does. I need to start the ripping process because I have over 200 DVD's alone to rip. and we are in desperate need of room in the home! Big Grin

locoguano · 2013-02-13, 17:56

From what I understand, MakeMKV just grabs the contents of the disk and puts them into an MKV container, so all of the sound and video options are available.

http://www.makemkv.com/download/

Riggy · 2013-02-13, 17:59

Can you play MKV container's via XBMC? or have you then got change that into something that XBMC can play?

Sorry, these file types are new to me Smile

bluray · 2013-02-13, 20:11

(2013-02-13, 17:52)Riggy Wrote: In anyDVD HD, are you able to reduce the video part down to 720 but keep the lossless audio?

No, AnyDVD HD is not a transcoder. It is for ripping and removiing encryption only.....it preserves the entire blu-ray contents.....

nickr · (This post was last modified: 2013-02-13, 22:17 by nickr.)

(2013-02-13, 17:59)Riggy Wrote: Can you play MKV container's via XBMC? or have you then got change that into something that XBMC can play?

Sorry, these file types are new to me

Most definitely yes.

Having said that you need hardware capable of playing the contents of the file.

Any nvidia graphics card that supports vdpau will do it.

EDIT: ooops scratch that last line, i see your post is tagged "windows" - vdpau is the linux technology. I am sure similar considerations apply in windows, but I can't give you any specific hardware guidance on that.

locoguano · 2013-02-14, 00:47

XBMC plays MKV files. That is how I have backed up my DVDs. I use MakeMKV.

nickr · 2013-02-14, 01:36

It is what is inside the mkv that matters more. mkv is a container, it can have many and varied codecs in the streams that it contains.

If you back up a dvd with makemkv the video inside the mkv will be mpeg2. If you back up a bluray with makemkv the video will be whatever is on the bluray disk, most likely h264.