Best way to play DVD's on the computer?

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: superbooga

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
You know... Looking at HD at an electronics styore is retarded. Why?

Because at Circuit City and Best Buy they split the signal between 10+ TVs. Degrading the image ALOT. At stores like SOund Advice they have perfect color calibration in a controlled environment. Both are not what you see at home. Now, I can hook my PC to his TV. Why would I do this? It's not MY tv. Think about that...what is better on your setup is NOT and I repeat NOT always the same on every setup. Not to mention one little fact that I never pointed out.

Image quality is all subjective. No matter how you try to count pixals/lines, zoom way in and pickout jaggies etc etc. It's all up to the individual viewer to decide what is good to their eyes/ears.

Stores generally won't use the splitter on HD-DVD/BD material. If they do, then something is really wrong with them.

I'm glad you finally used the "subjective" word. Now you won't have to argue if someone claims standalone playback is better, because it really is subjective.

However, don't expect PDVD to get any better any soon. It's a lousy company that got lucky with DVD.

They do split the HD content. Unless they hook a BD player to it and play a movie, they use a DirectTV system that is split between multiple TVs.

Cyberlink isn't a lousy company. They have the best DVD solution for your PC and offer free updates to keep up with compatability with the newest disks (just like a stand alone player has firmware updates). At least they don't make you buy a new version saying "now support for disks released this month"

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: coolpurplefan

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd

Originally posted by: taltamir
I see alot of tangents here about HD...

Wasn't the original post about regular DVDs?
As for it... I know that in media player classic you can set higher quality resizing algorithms that take extra cpu to use...

Overall though, the best thing to do is get HD rips as x264 MKV files.

I've been wondering about something like this. Is there a way to rip/transcode my HD DVD collection to video files playable from my HDD?

I was wondering something similar. I ordered a DVD and was wondering whether I can use PowerDVD or Nero to encode it. My two video cards either have Purevideo or AVIVO. Does anyone know which one I should use? (I'm going to google but just in case someone has a quick answer.)

Well, I can rip/decrypt the DVD and get it into my HDD and play it in PowerDVD file mode, but is there a way to only take out the main movie and the audio stream I want and put it into one file. It's more convenient than going through my DVD collection and grabbing disks and swapping them.

This kind of borders on copyright infringment in that knowing how to do this could be used for illegal activities. Any mods reading this and feel this is inappropriate here then please say so.

 

[coolpurplefan]

Originally posted by: cmdrdredd
This kind of borders on copyright infringment in that knowing how to do this could be used for illegal activities. Any mods reading this and feel this is inappropriate here then please say so.

Uh, I'm talking about my own DVD (and it's on trading anyway).

 

[wittangamo]

Don't want to go off on another tangent, but the Digital Millenium Act is the result of intense (and expensive) lobbying by the studios working technologically illiterate (and greedy) congressmen.

It makes it illegal to circumvent the copy protection on any DVD, even if you bought it and merely want to make a backup. The only fair use exceptions are for journalists and educators.

I'm not saying it's logical or fair, but that's what the law says.

On the HD DVD/Blu-ray front, there are currently no simple ways to split files like DVDshrink, etc, do on the SD side. There are some smart people working on it, but right now ripping to your hard drive is simple -- spanning disks or dividing content is not.

What can be done is authoring your own HD DVDs on standard DVD single- or dual-layer blanks. If you have source material, say from an HD camcorder, capture from satellite or OTA HDTV recording, you can chop up the mpeg2 files, transcode them with MovieFactory and burn them with Nero.

There's a guide in the HD DVD software forum at www.avsforum.com if you're curious.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: wittangamo

Don't want to go off on another tangent, but the Digital Millenium Act is the result of intense (and expensive) lobbying by the studios working technologically illiterate (and greedy) congressmen.

It makes it illegal to circumvent the copy protection on any DVD, even if you bought it and merely want to make a backup. The only fair use exceptions are for journalists and educators.

I'm not saying it's logical or fair, but that's what the law says.

On the HD DVD/Blu-ray front, there are currently no simple ways to split files like DVDshrink, etc, do on the SD side. There are some smart people working on it, but right now ripping to your hard drive is simple -- spanning disks or dividing content is not.

What can be done is authoring your own HD DVDs on standard DVD single- or dual-layer blanks. If you have source material, say from an HD camcorder, capture from satellite or OTA HDTV recording, you can chop up the mpeg2 files, transcode them with MovieFactory and burn them with Nero.

There's a guide in the HD DVD software forum at www.avsforum.com if you're curious.

Well, I have found software to take out only the main movie, the audio stream(s) I want and any subtitles I want. However the resulting file is roughly 10GB on average for a HD DVD movie with a DTS-HD or TrueHD soundtrack. This makes it very unlikely that I would be able to use this as I would need a very large array of HDDs to store my collection.

Better to just get the disk off the shelf.

 

[kmmatney]

Going back to the OP's orginal question...

I just use the free program VideoLan to play DVDs. Dvds look fine on my 1080p monitor, not perfect, but reasonably good for such a low resolution source on a high resolution monitor. VideoLan has very good cropping and aspect ratio options as well.