HDD Media Player Device Question

[Helios]

Im looking into getting one of these
Google

Im not sure which one yet so any advice on that would be great.

More importantly I have a basic usability question.

Can you save a bluray straight from a standard bluray player to the drive? I dont have a bluray drive in my laptop.

 

[ped]

Hi,

I have the popcornhour A110

You just put a SATA hard drive in load your files via usb or network and your good to go, it plays virtually any file right upto 1080p.

As to your question, you may have to go for the C200 which you can fit a BR reader into

There are cheaper players out there but the popcornhour is considered the industry standard and there are regular firmware updates for it from Networked Media Tank

It all depends on how much $ you want to spend.

 

[Helios]

I was just hoping that there was a device out there that I could just send the usual HD signal from my ps3 to that would save it to a hard drive on the fly.

Nothing is ever that simple though.

I have read about running linux on the ps3 and then just ripping it to the hard drive but then I would need a way to transfer it to the HDD player.

 

[ped]

I have read about running linux on the ps3 and then just ripping it to the hard drive but then I would need a way to transfer it to the HDD player.

Why? if you rip it directly from the PS3's blu-ray drive, to the PS3's hard drive, why would you need a seperate HDD player to watch it? , just play it on the PS3?

 

[Helios]

Why? if you rip it directly from the PS3's blu-ray drive, to the PS3's hard drive, why would you need a seperate HDD player to watch it? , just play it on the PS3?

I have the 120gig HD but I was hoping to put my whole bluray collection on it. I would think I could only fit maybe 15 blurays on it with other game data and downloads etc.

 

[ped]

Does the PS3 allow you to attach an external HD (via the USB ports) ?

 

[DTR]

On a media players I have had a few Popcorn hours from the A100 and the A110. It was a great media player when nobody was making anything that played MKV or some of the other commonly used containers. The GUI is very basic even if you use a jukebox plugin and navigation when skipping around in a video can be a little slow.

I am a big fan of XBMC. The Gui is fantastic. The file support is second to none. The video navigation is quick and it has a manual adjustments to every aspect of the video. It is the full package. I have been using it since it was XBMP on the original Xbox. I have one of these now PROVANTAGE: Asus EB1501-W0167 N330 1.6G 2GB 250GB W7HP running the Linux based version of XBMC Live using the Nvidia core to handle video acelereation. It works great on all my 1080P media. I also have a Harmony 880 remote that goes with it. This may be more of an Investment than you are looking for but you can also take any old PC that has a PCI-e slot and buy a cheap Nvida card with HDMI and turn it into a XBMC media box. The Live platform is by far the best performing as it is running a striped out bare bones Ubuntu distro. I also have an old Mac Mini running XBMC Live and an Acer Revo that is similar to the Asus EEEBox but it did not have a cd drive and came without an OS for $200. But still sported the Nvidia Ion graphics platform running XBMC Live.

For the movies if you use a good encoding program and step down to AC3 5.1 you can get each bluray movie to an average file size of 3GB with great quality. I use MeGui for encoding, Eac3To to rip out the audio and encode it in AC3 5.1 and MkvMerge to merge the X264 stream and the AC3 into a MKV container. This way you can fit quite a few movies on a single hard drive.


Afterdawn and Doom9 are some great sources of information and of course XBMC.org.