[RockDawg]

I tried searching, but I couldn't find anything definitive. I am getting ready to build an HTPC for XBMC solely for playback of ripped Blu-Rays. I know it handles the H.264 Blu-Rays, but what about VC-1?

[natethomas]

It works with the Dark Knight VC-1 pretty well. You'll probably need a decent processor for it though.

[RockDawg]

I'm planning on getting a C2D E8400 and from what I've read it should handle pretty much all HD.

[Arkon11]

RockDawg, I was thinking about doing the very same thing (building an HTPC with thats blu-ray capable), and I was wondering what the standard codec for encoding the rips are.

H.264 or VC-1?

[RockDawg]

I'm far from an expert about all this, but my understanding is that the video on a Blu-Ray disk can be encoded in either MPEG-2, H.264, or VC-1. If you do a straight rip of the disk you are leaving the original encoding intact.

[RockDawg]

What about audio? When I rip Blu-rays, what audio streams should I keep? I would want to keep any HD stream for the future, but what about know? Will XBMC down sample the HD stream to DD5.1 or do I need to keep that also?

[natethomas]

I'm actually out of my depth on that second question, partially because codec updates are coming rapidly. My understanding is that XBMC should eventually be able to handle all current audio streams. Of course, if you use an optical out, the best you'll be able to output is DTS, but if you eventually upgrade to hdmi, the higher bitrates might be worth preserving.

[Arkon11]

True (about preserving the higher bitrates) Storage is becoming so incredibly cheap these days that it'd be silly not to encoding for higher quality.

You may have a small hardrive now and may want to sacrifice quality, but I plan on keeping all the movies I encode for years which is why I want the most pristine quality I can get (without HUUUUGE file sizes of course )