I had previously tried to get an Amazon Fire TV set up to stream movies from my Netgear NAS but had so many issues I gave up. Someone on the NAS forum recommended just buying a WD TV which is more suited to this task rather than trying to work a temperamental hack on the Amazon Fire TV.
Can anyone recommend the best tool to rip my DVDs on my NAS and what file format to use? I will be playing them on a 104" screen through a Hi-Fi based surround system so I want them to be in the highest quality format I can get with the best surround format available on the DVD. I will never want to play them on anything other than the big screen so I don’t need any “mobile” versions as well as the high quality ones.
File size is not an issue and neither will bandwidth as everything connected via Ethernet.
When I was trying to get the Amazon Fire working I experimented with MP4 and MKV. I was planning to rip the DVDs to MKV using MakeMKV, which I understand is uncompressed and should be a perfect copy- is this the best option or will I have issues with copy protection?
The NAS I am using is a 4 bay Netgear RN 104, this is not capable of transcoding – something which caused issues with the Amazon Fire TV.
Also I am not an expert in these things so the simplest option will be the best!
I do have BluRays too but I don’t really want to attack these at this time.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I am keen to get this right first time and don’t want to have to re-record my DVDs at a later date!
Cheers, I assume MKV files will need further processing before the WDTV can use them?
To be honest the Projector does a pretty good job of upscaling the DVDs so they look presentable, thouhg it’s pretty clear they are vastly inferior! We just want to be able to cut down on the volume of DVDs we have in the lounge, mainly as we don’t watch them much but don’t want to trade them in for the BluRay verison. A lot of them are TV series so native 576 anyway.
Most of the time we are watching online content or BR in 1080p.
I now have MKV files on my ND104 and can view them on the WDTV but they are skipping a few frames every second. Everything is connected via cables via a 100Mbps switch and there’s little other network activilty.
They are only DVD’s so they can’t be that demanding. We watch Netflix and Amazon prime in HD and Dolby Digital Plus and that’s perfect with no skipping.
Any ideas?
Sorry, I must be the biggest doofus on here and can’t seem to get anything working
I bought my WDTV live hub box a week ago. I’ve worked out how to get the device to stream wirelessly via a 2TB drive where the media files are. Now I want to movie all my DVD collections to WD TV in a digital format. I choose ByteCopy to do the work and save all my DVD to multi-track MKV on NAS server and then stream to WD TV. You may get a shot.
HandBrake is also a popular DVD ripping tool. It supports MKV and MP4 output formats which are the common video formats on TV. What’s more, if you try to rip copy-protected videos, this one can help you 404 | Page Now Found | WonderFox.
Btw, it’s also free. LOL
… are gonna look horrible no matter what you do
