Archive for the ‘Blu-ray’ Category

Blu-ray upgrade to kitchen HTPC

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

I Spent time upgrading the kitchen HTPC to include a Blu-ray drive over the weekend; I’ve found that since the kitchen PC has been in place I use it for ripping DVDs more than I do the DVD/BD drive installed in the chimney breast in the lounge; mainly because it’s always on and also because it’s an easier terminal to use just in terms of ergonomics. I currently rip any DVDs across the network to the external drives on the lounge PC but if that’s not on, they end up on the C:/ drive of the kitchen PC and I drag them across later, now of course I can include ripping Blu-rays from the kitchen as well.

The drive is an LG multi-drive that’s a discontinued model now, but I’ve had it for a while. So empty the shelf, swing the PC around, open its case and install it…

N.B. To help with the cooling I’ve also butchered some ducting to the rear vent and led that up behind the shelf and out the top of the cupboard; it used to get quite warm in there before.

Kitchen PC Blu-ray upgrade

Not sure I’ve ever stated what this PC is built on; an aBit NF-M2 nView mobo, AMD 5600X2 CPU, 4Gb RAM, ATi 4550 HD graphics card (with HDMI), Compro VideoMate S350 DVB-S card, LG Blu-ray ROM, 400Gb Samsung HDD and Windows7 of course. It’s quick to boot into Windows, but needs a few minutes to steady itself so I want an SSD for this instead; the SSD in the lounge has proved incredibly nippy and improves reaction times of the Media Center interface greatly.

You can also see the Intelliplug in the background that powers up the AegoM speakers when the PC is on.

Kitchen PC

Once all done it’s put back together and slid back into place. I’ve also butchered the front of the case to help improve airflow through it; the front trim had no vent holes whatsoever so that was taken off to get air over the hard disk. It may not be pretty, but it is very functional.

Kitchen PC

And you’d never know it was there (you can just see the USB IR sensor poking out the top of the right-hand cupboard).

Kitchen PC

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DVD Library in Media Center

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

This post covers how I store both my SD and HD film discs. First off, Blu-ray…

I use Slysoft’s AnyDVDHD (always the latest version) and by right-clicking the tray icon I can create an image from the disc, just always remember to ‘keep protection’, this way any bugs or issues within AnyDVD won’t be copied to hard disk with the image. The resulting ISO that is created is then mounted with Slysoft’s Virtual CloneDrive, then played in the latest version of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra V8. I don’t have any fancy Library interface for these films, I just prefer to keep it simple and browse them in Windows.
Next up, SD DVD and the Media Center Library…
There is quite a lot out there on how to do this already, but they seem to be incomplete guides as I still couldn’t get it to work and had to sift through several threads on other websites to piece it together, so start by enabling the ‘DVD Library’ in Media Center; read this Knowledge Base article (a quicker way to run regedit is to press ‘windows’ + ‘r’ then type regedit and hit return).

To put DVDs onto hard disk I use DVDFab Decrypter as it’s updated regularly and enables you to only take the main movie with selected audio tracks. When putting a DVD onto hard disk this will give you VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders contained in a folder called the title of the DVD which is in another folder called either Main Movie or Full DVD (depending on what you take off the DVD). Each DVD takes about 20 – 30 minutes.

Now my Main Movie folder sits on its own drive(s) (I use a couple of 500Gb Western Digital MyBooks with another couple of internal 500Gb drives). By just taking the Main Movie I’m averaging about 4.5Gb per film.

Note: You may not have to follow the mounting instructions that follow. Try jumping to the bottom and just adding your DVD backup folders in Media Center first.

Media Center still won’t recognise these folders if you add them to your Media Library; it will only read them off a mounted folder. To do this:

  • create a folder on C: drive called whatever you want (I created folders in C:\ called DVD01, DVD02 etc…), they’ll always be empty so don’t be too fussy about them.
  • Then right click on My Computer and select manage.
  • Under Storage you’ll see Disk Management, select this and you’ll see your drives.
  • Right click on your hard disk that holds your DVDs and select Change Drive Letter and Partitions.
  • Then click Add and select ‘Mount In The Following Empty NTFS Folder’ and point it to your empty folder(s) you created somewhere on C: drive.
  • Then finally in Media Center under your DVD Library, right click and add your DVD01 folders to the library.

So now you should see them appear in your menu albeit without artwork. There are two (easy) ways to do this. You can either find the DVD’s artwork and save as ‘folder.jpg’ within the DVD’s folder, or you can use dvdxml.com and download a small .xml file into each DVD folder, this will trigger Media Center to go online and download artwork and a film description from AMG.com. There are other ways to create your own .xml files but I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort!


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