710 or 810???

[sdsnyr94]

krys - I've seen that issue as well, and if you remove the extra languages (including one's with directors commentary) you can get down smaller. I've had a couple of movies go from about 7Gb to under 3Gb after removing the fluff using DVDfab5.

Colin- saving 10-20% per video does add up over time... especially if we ever do get to where Linux and Blueray play nicely. I would prefer not to transcode the videos because I don't want to lose any quality (unless it's some boring chick flick). It's bad enough I complain about jitter that my wife doesn't even notice  .   (Maybe transcoding would clear the jitter.. food for thought.. )

Speaking of Blueray, has there been any advancement in the Linux Community for getting LEGAL playback support (Yes, I understand this is not a LinuxMCE problem)?

If you took a BlueRay DVD and Ripped it on a Windows Machine ( I don't have Blueray yet, so I haven't researched if this can be done) and transferred the files to LinuxMCE... will it play in HD? I'm sure that this would present a legal issue, so this is more curiosity since it's on my mind now.


Directing back toward my original topic (710 or 810) .... are the Insteon home lighting products supported in 710? I seem to find conflicting reports on the web. I will not be attempting this for a little while.. but do I need to wait for 810 to do this? 

[skeptic]

Let me just add my 2 cents.

For the jittery issue, try doing a quick reload.  If this resolves the jittery playback, then you've ran into an issue with Xine_Player that has been described as a memory leak.  I get it, others get it.  It's a small annoyance, but a quick reload only takes a few seconds so it's not a huge issue.  If that doesn't resolve it, make sure the video plays fine elsewhere and maybe look at top from a console while you are playing a movie and see if something is eatting up your CPU/memory.

For ripping DVDs I'm a big fan of HandBrake.  I rip/transcode my movies to h.264 and typically end up around 1-1.5G.  On a 32" 720p LCD I can't tell the difference between ripped and original.  Other advantages are I only have the movie, no need to go through a menu, although some may think it's a disadvantage because you can no longer get to special features or alternate endings and such.  HandBrake can burn the subtitles into the video so no worries there, although I have ran into the occasional movie where it didn't correctly determine the subtitle track and had to set it and re-rip the movie.  If you haven't tried the latest HandBrake, give it a shot.  The GUI is now working under Linux and it's improving quickly.

My 750G drive is almost completely full.  If I didn't rip/transcode I'd probably need 4+TB of data, going back to when 1TB was quite a bit more than $100.  I'd also need the physical space for the extra drives.  If I never transcoded a movie and bought a new drive whenever I ran out of space, I'd likely be out at least $500, my core would be full internally, and I'd have 2 or 3 external drives stuck outside of it.  Or more likely, I'd have bought the bullet and spent even more $ for a dedicated NAS setup.  I currently have 910 videos in LMCE, although to be fair over half of them are TV series episodes.

[sdsnyr94]

skeptic- I have done quite a few quick reloads of the router. The reason for this is that I have movies that are also on a Freenas server, but that server wants to drop offline repeatedly (online is unchecked in the administration web page) and I need to put it back online and go a quick reload to see those videos. This should  be resolved in the next few days as I rebuild a new Core in my house. (As stated earlier, the build I have now is temporary) I should be putting enough storage to hold all my movies locally on the core.

Your comment about Xine_Player sparks my interest though. I did not have the jittery issue when I was using Mythbuntu, and I was using the same hardware. I believe Mythbuntu uses the MythTV internal viewer for the videos, and the issue I got with that was choppy, freezing video usually during high action sequences, but I did not have the jitter issue.  You could generally watch a movie like 'The Wedding Crashers' without issue,  but 'Iron Man' was nearly unwatchable at points. If this is an Xine issue, is there a way to tweak or update it to help resolve the issue?

Being fairly new to Linux, not sure how to check CPU/Memory to see if there is an issue. Can someone point me to a link where I can find those directions?

Thanks for the tip on handbrake, I will try that.

[colinjones]

in the device tree config for your NAS share, change the protocol from "cifs" to "smbfs" and reload, you may find that it stays online after that.

[sdsnyr94]

Thanks Collin, I'll try that. I thought it might of just been a kink in my current setup and would clear itself when I rebuild.

I should have my new build setup this weekend and if I have any issues, I'll start a new post (this one already has gotten off the initial topic).

Thanks to everyone for their input.