Now I'm no geek, nor a technophile, but just love my PC's and what they can do for me. In particular, I love the whole concept of media centre. But why is it all so damned difficult?? No wonder it's not wider used and it could be massive. Add ons for this, tweeks for that, hacks for who knows what. Bloody hell I just want it to do what it says on the tin. Trouble is.... there is no tin. Maybe that's the fun for some people, the searchig and finding out. For me, well I've got a life and it's all too short for farting around like this.
I have several media centres and finally got them running fairly well, mainly to watch my ripped DVD's (now there's a challenge) stored on WHS and networked via powerline adapters or wifi. Just upgraded my main machine to Windows 7 after all the good reports. Problem now is it won't play my DVD's and I seem to be back to square 1.
Is there anything special I need to do in W7 to get ripped DVD's to play or is it basically the same tweaks as Vista??
Is there an idiots guide anywhere to remind me what I need to do to get media centre working properly??
Thanks
Billthebodger:Is there an idiots guide anywhere to remind me what I need to do to get media centre working properly??
hack7mc.com all the information you need is there, it's all very straightforward...
good luck,
sid
First just want to let you know ripped DVDs will work in Win7, just a few questions.
Are your ripped DVDs stored on the Win7 or on another PC on your Network?
Are your ripped DVDs in their own folder like? D:\DVDs\Ice Age\VIDEO_TS D:\DVDs\Heat\VIDEO_TS.
How deep is the folder structure is it more than 3 folders deep eg D\DVDs\AnotherFolder\AnotherFolder\AnotherFolder\ AnotherFolder\Video_TS.
Are your DVD folder a Shared folder?
How have you ripped the DVDs are they in a VIDEO_TS folder with the VOBs inside?
Richard Miller MCE MVP
i can understand and sympathise entirely, the answer for me at least was to have a dedicated machine, it serves no other purpose than to be my media centre, i run Vista and have run W7 on it and it just works perfect , never crashes, and on the main works out of the box
agreed its not relevant to your situation Bill but it was the answer i found that worked
As Richard has mentioned though, W7 when i had it installed was A OK , it worked perfect and was even better than Vista MC , dependant on how you have ripped your dvd`s you should have no problems , and with W7 you can now play Vobs easily with the play all feature
if you could explain in what format you have ripped your dvd`s into perhaps we can all help to solve your issues
Thanks very much for your prompt replies, much apreciated.
My ripped DVD's are all on my WHS machine in the videos folder:eg Network\Server\Videos\Ice Age\Video_TS
So yes, they are all Video_TS with VOBs inside. I'm ripping them via a USB Blue Ray Drive attached to the WHS machine using AVA Movie Disc Copier. AVA is brilliant by the way, pop the disc in and wait for it to eject when complete, all sorted, now that's my kind of technology.
And now I'm a little embarrassed, as it's working, sort of but not sure why. I've been trying to access the DVD's in Media Centre via the Video Library in Pictures and Videos. I can find \\Server\Videos and there's my DVD's without any artwork. Click on one and you get just one Video_ts file which will play but it's not the whole DVD.
This morning, for this post, I started MC and found Movies, Movie Library and it just works. Now I agree Windows 7 is great.
So now I feel a bit of an idiot! The moral.... Spend more time investgating before expressing your frustrations.
Thanks again.
Dont feel embarassed Bill, the amount of times i have asked for help when the answer has sometimes been right there is countless, glad your all sorted, and i am intrigued by the software you mention ...sounds very interesting
ah i see its a stand alone machine ... what format does it output the Blueray to Bill ??
Now that's a really good question Gadget. Unfortunately, I haven't actually tried Blueray yet. I'll try one tomorrow morning and let you know.
Ah well, two steps forward and one back. Put a Blueray disk in the drive and,,,,,,,,nothing happened so remote desktopped into WHS:
"Disk is not formatted" error box
"Windows cannot read from this disk. The disk might be corrupted, or it could be using a format that is not compatible with Windows".
I'm using a Liteon Blueray Drive, standard Blueray disk (National Treasure2) and WHS has AnyDVD-HD installed plus AVA Media add-in (commercial version of My Movies).
As standard DVD's and music CD's rip OK, I suspect it may be a codec thing but I have no idea really.
That's just what I need, brilliant.
Sorry to revise and old thread but my problem is similar.
I have a computer that has all of my media on it. Movies mostly ripped to dvr-ms because I used to use an extender. Recently I built a new htpc running Windows 7 that I now have attached to my TV in place of the extender. So far, everything has worked great. HD television works great and streaming (wired) my dvr-ms files from the other computer works great. I'm using Media Browser.
Now I've decided it might be nice, since I should be able to, to have the whole disc and all of it's menus etc. So I ripped a movie to video_ts folders and tried to play it from the same share I have been playing other files from. I can't get anything to play smoothly. The movie will play and then just freeze then try to catch up. The same movie ripped and converted to dvr-ms will work fine so I'm guessing playing psuedo-dvd is the problem.
Maybe re-ripping as ISO is the answer? Maybe I should try a 3rd party tool like powerdvd or TMT3? These are standard def, old school DVDs (don't own any BRs yet) so they should work.
More details based on Richard's post above:
They are on another computer running windows 7.
Yes. Exactly like this.
They look like this:
f:\moviefolders_f\video\dune\video_ts
or via the HTPC:
\\mediaserver\moviefolders_f\video\dune\video_ts
This, this is a shared folder so I can get to it from the HTPC
Yes
Home Built Media Server | Windows 7 RC (x86) | HP MediaSmart Connect Extender | www.TechLifeWeb.com | Twitter: @techlifeweb
Hi guys,
I sometimes struggle to understand why people want to retain the entire DVD / Blu-Ray on the media center. Some discs have you p***ing around for ages before they will let you play the movie and swallowing up storage space with extras you'll watch once if at all.
For me direct lossless conversion to MKV is the way to go, preserving the orginal video and audio streams that were on the source material.
MakeMKV is a one stop shop for this, allowing you to RIP straight from the disc to MKV with no middle steps. Another great thing about using this tool is you can select just the audio tracks you want saving more space on your system. ( a few true-HD sound tracks can add gigabytes to your storage needs ).
So my advice is , unless those discs have some extra content you want to keep , think of them as purely a transport media , rip direct , and enjoy the un-fettered content.
Dale
VMC 32Bit, 7MC 64bit, 7MC 32bit, 36TB Home Media Server, VOIP.
kingtone: Sorry to revise and old thread but my problem is similar. I have a computer that has all of my media on it. Movies mostly ripped to dvr-ms because I used to use an extender. Recently I built a new htpc running Windows 7 that I now have attached to my TV in place of the extender. So far, everything has worked great. HD television works great and streaming (wired) my dvr-ms files from the other computer works great. I'm using Media Browser. Snip
Snip
Obvious first question for me is have you tested playing the ripped folders locally on your HTPC ? Rather than down the network ?
Also what speed is your network ?
When i was running 100mbps home network, i used to suffer from some play back issues on ripped DVDs ( ie video_ts folders etc ), these went away when I upgraded the network to 1gbps. From memory, the VOB format is a little clumsy on how it stores the actual movie data making it not as efficent as DVR-MS since it doesnt lend itself well to operating in an enviroment that potentially requires buffering to cope with momentary drop offs in the data stream.
Test the folder locally, that will rule out any oddites of network and codec issues. See how that goes and we can take it from there.
Da1ek, thanks for the comments. I have lots of movies converted to dvrms because when I had an extender that was the best way to get fidelity and ff/rew. Thought I'd try the full dvd route and realizing it is more trouble the worth. I've never tried mkv because I've always heard it was a pain to get working in Media Center. Thanks for the tip on makemkv.
it was a pain to get working in Media Center. - it is true!!!
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