streaming DVD's from computer to TV

[rudeguy]

Any tips on this? What's the best way to do this with blue ray movies?

 

[Slick5150]

Are you talking about hooking a computer up to your TV directly? Or streaming from a computer, over your network to the TV?

If the latter, you'd obviously need something connected to the TV capable of playing the videos, either a HTPC or a dedicated device like the Popcorn Hour A-110 (or one of its many many clones).

 

[rudeguy]

yep...talking about streaming over a network. At least that's my goal.

 

[kalrith]

I would think ripping the disc to the hard drive would work best. As Slick said, you'll need some sort of media extender like the Popcorn Hour, XBOX360, etc.

Is it an option to run a long HDMI cable and use your TV as a second monitor? That would probably be the lowest in cost and easiest to set up.

 

[Slick5150]

Originally posted by: NSFW
yep...talking about streaming over a network. At least that's my goal.

well, if you do want to deal with Blu-Ray movies, you're options become much more limited. I've just started playing around with this for curiousity's sake. Ripping the M2TS file to a hard drive, then streaming it to my eGreat M34a (popcorn hour clone). It works fairly well. Preserves the original video and HD audio. Obviously leaves pretty huge file sizes (20gb - 35gb range I think). If you were to want to compress then down to an h.264 MKV or something, that's a much more complex process and takes many many hours to do.

Just doing DVD backups and whatnot is obviously a whole lot simpler.