Play DVD ISO's from big remote repository?

[aiken]

Hi, everyone.  I just found LinuxMCE and it looks fantastic.

I have a large array with hundreds of DVD's stored in ISO format.  They're currently in subdirectories, ie /Gladiator/Gladiator.ISO, /Gladiator/Gladiator_Disc_2.ISO, etc. 

I'm looking at picking up a dedicated HTPC/LinuxMCE box for playback.  But before I go that far, will someone kindly confirm or refute:

- That LinuxMCE will be able to mount my remote (FreeBSD) repository by Samba, NFS, or other means?
- That LinuxMCE will be able to read and catalog the big collection of ISO's?
- That I'll be able to import metadata to get the same result as if I had ripped the DVD's using LinuxMCE?
- That LinuxMCE won't do anything weird like modifying ISO files (even renaming, etc)?

Thanks in advance!

-b

[dopey]

I currently have a couple hundred iso's on a remote nfs share and LinuxMCE sees and plays them just fine.

I should probably mention that I didn't do it the "LinuxMCE way" as I just mounted the NFS share to /home/public/data/videos/movies manually. There are better ways to do this, but I have other reasons for doing it that way.

There are a couple of pitfalls. I could not get LinuxMCE to play the DVD until I renamed the iso's to .dvd (this really should change). LinuxMCE creates a second file with the same name as the iso only with an id3 extension to place all the meta-data in (in conjunction with the database). This is a good thing so all the meta-data is restored if you remove the drive (thus removing it from the database) and the put it back in, but it does add to clutter. LinuxMCE won't modify the iso file itself (unless you tell it to).

I haven't tried ripping from it, so I don't know about that.

[totallymaxed]

Hi, everyone.  I just found LinuxMCE and it looks fantastic.

I have a large array with hundreds of DVD's stored in ISO format.  They're currently in subdirectories, ie /Gladiator/Gladiator.ISO, /Gladiator/Gladiator_Disc_2.ISO, etc. 

I'm looking at picking up a dedicated HTPC/LinuxMCE box for playback.  But before I go that far, will someone kindly confirm or refute:

- That LinuxMCE will be able to mount my remote (FreeBSD) repository by Samba, NFS, or other means?
- That LinuxMCE will be able to read and catalog the big collection of ISO's?
- That I'll be able to import metadata to get the same result as if I had ripped the DVD's using LinuxMCE?
- That LinuxMCE won't do anything weird like modifying ISO files (even renaming, etc)?

Thanks in advance!

-b

Hi,

Can't see a problem with that other than currently lmce-0704 expects dvd iso's to have a '.dvd' extension. You could rename all your iso's to fix this or I guess create symlinks to each iso file in another directory that have the .dvd extension. We use to use the last trick to get .mpg files to play (you don't need to do that now). LMCE will initially scan your share for media and will create id3 files for each of your .dvd files these are used to contain meta data about the individual ripped DVD's (it will not modify the your .iso's). The process of adding a large amount of media to lmce's media database can take some time by the way ;-)

Hope the above is of help.

Andrew

[SIRKGM14vg]

The question that I have, which is kind of a follow-up question, is: Will I be able to play these DVDs on a Media Center Extender. To my understanding, this would me there would need to be DVD to MP4 transcoding. I'm not sure if LinuxMCE does that.

[Hagen]

The question that I have, which is kind of a follow-up question, is: Will I be able to play these DVDs on a Media Center Extender. To my understanding, this would me there would need to be DVD to MP4 transcoding. I'm not sure if LinuxMCE does that.

Media center extender (as in Windows)?
Or Media Director (as in LMCE)?
LMCE and every MD connected to it can play any media available on the internal net, that would be NAS/fileservers, MP3 players, MDs or the Core itself.