what exactly do I need to do to view a 1080 blu-ray movie file with the wd? Assuming I can only access a media file through the USB port, what steps are involved in making that happen?
the model number of my wd unit is
WDBHG70000NBK
All of the previous players I have owned can only read a standard dos formatted drive - which, of course - wont work with a blu-ray MKV file of 7-8 GB and up… I’m basically a Mac use but I can format in ex-fat or win32 … And of course Mac format (HTFS?)
when I format a drive on my mac, I guess the option I should use is
MAC OS EXTENDED
NOT journaled - and not “case-sensitive” either -
okay, am going to try it now … I’m doing the formatting at my office, but won’t get to actually see if the WD drive can read it until tonight, because the WD unit itself is at my girlfriend’s house.
But this will be awesome, yes, to view a b-r movie this way - really looking forward to it. A small step for mankind, but a giant leap forward for me.
Using a filesystem with journaling disabled is not a great idea, so I would consider HFS+ to not be supported by the WD TV units (or Linux in general) at this point in time. FAT32 is inadequate for video files. exFAT is a proprietary, patent-pending Microsoft filesystem, so Linux support is always going to be problematic (it is also optimized for flash drives rather than harddrives, I believe).
The filesystem with broadest support at this time is, frankly, NTFS. However, Mac OS X has the most limited native support, and you will have to do some work to enable write capability. See the link and search I posted in the above linked thread.
using a separate flash drive for movie viewing on the WD is the easy part - that’s the least of my worries.
In the Lion OS days, I had an NTFS doo-dad installed. However, when I upgraded to mountain lion, I started with a new “clean” system, so the NTFS doodad, I believe, is NOT currently installed.
I’m going to try seeing if the flash drive I just formatted (journaling NOT enabled) will work, if not, I can start the process of installing an NTFS extension on the Mountain Lion Mac… I should hopefully be able to do this, although, as you say, it’s not instantaneous and it’s not as easy as just copying a movie file to a flash drive!
Sounds like you should just bite the bullet and reinstall a full NTFS driver. WIll probably be worth the effort.
If you are using a WDTV-specific drive just for viewing, in the sense that you copy the video files from another drive onto the WDTV-specific drive, then having having journaling disabled on the WDTV-specific drive is not a big deal. Journaling protects against filesystem corruption, however, so having it turned off on an important drive is not at all wise, and Apple won’t let you do that in many cases.
will hit the boards and see if I can figure out which is the best NTFS driver for Mountain Lion - since you’re not a Mac person, I don’t expect you to know…
I would just use HFS+ non-journaled. According to Apple journaling is more to do with servers etc. I assume all you are going to do is transfer some media files to the HFS+ drive and connect it to the player. If anything goes wrong you can always transfer them again. You should always have a backup of important files anyway and if you read the forums you will see users with other formats who have lost their files when using the WD player.
Yes! It’s always wise to try the simplest thing first - will know tonight where that’s going to work … I currently have a flash drive newly formatted in HFS MAC non-journaled, so I’ll see what happens.
Willfriedwald wrote:
will hit the boards and see if I can figure out which is the best NTFS driver for Mountain Lion - since you’re not a Mac person, I don’t expect you to know…
thanks again,
You are welcome, BTW. No, not a Mac user, but earlier searches showed that NTFS-3G ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfs-3g/)) can be used with OS X. This is the most common NTFS driver used with Linux, so is likely to be what WD TV units use. Thus, its use would probably provide maximum interoperabiliity between your Mac and WDTV.
File system journaling is definitely not useful only for servers. All modern filesystems are journaled: NTFS, ext3, ext4, HFS+, JFS, etc. Journaling helps prevent corruption and it vastly speeds up recovery from “crashes.” The latter factor is particuarly important with large drives. You do not want to have to run “scandisk” on a 3 TB drive! In fact, just a couple of days ago I accidentally powered down one of my 3 TB external video share drives while plugging another USB device in. Oops!! Since the drive was journaled, though, it took about 1sec to be made fully consistent when remounting it. Had it not been journaled, I could have been looking at running fsck (the Linux scandisk equivalent) for quite a while. So, no, journaling is definitely not a server only feature. Look at the Wiki page on it for more information.
yes, I believe that’s the driver / extension / doodad that I had been using with Lion & earlier… made it very easy to read and write to a drive that any windows user can read. Will let you know how it works out…
Yes, I read the link you provided. Apple likes to not scare their typical non-tech-savy users, however, so much of the info they provide is of limited value IMO. As I stated, all modern filesystems are journaled. That is not a Mac thing. Those of you who started using computers with Windows XP (or later) have probably used only NTFS (journaled), but older people, who had FAT filesystems (not journaled), have virtually certainly had the “pleasure” of sitting and sitting and sitting, waiting for scandisk to check and repair a FAT filesystem. And this was with drives of only a few GB. Trust me, you do not want to have to return to those days with multi-TB drives. Plus there is no reason to.
I agree that if he just wants to copy a few files to play from his “real” drive onto some temporary drive, then having that temp drive journaled isn’t critical. Of course one wonders how big his files are? Full-res blu-ray rips can be 25-30GB. It takes vastly longer to write such a file onto a flash drive than onto a spinning disk or SSD. Way longer than I would be willing to wait.
earlier searches showed that NTFS-3G ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/ntfs-3g/)) can be used with OS X. This is the most common NTFS driver used with Linux, so is likely to be what WD TV units use. Thus, its use would probably provide maximum interoperabiliity between your Mac and WDTV.
having personally checked the SMP or HUB, but older WD use a version of the Paragon NTFS driver
but either way ntfs-3g would still be a good choice
Anyhow, my non-journaled Mac flash drive worked wonderfully! Am very happy with that.
This was a 16gb flash containing a 7gb b-r film.
Will try to experiment with, say, a 100gb portable drive containing a 40gb film … Although I can’t imagine how the picture quality could be any better, or that the def could be any higher.
At some point, probably not in the near future, I’ll make the jump to a 3D TV … I wonder how big the MKV file wold be for a 1080 blu-ray 3D movie ?
Glad you got file to play. How long did it take to put the 7 GB file onto the flash drive?
Blu-ray movie rips are generally in the 20-30 GB range (movies only–not entire discs). I have been using Handbrake to compress some of my rips for use with a standalone SMP and a smaller TV. Using fairly high quality settings, the resulting files are in the 6-10 GB range typically. On a 40" (1080) TV, I would be hard pressed to tell the compressed version from the original. On a 55" TV however, you can see the difference quite easily. The compressed blu-ray versions still look better than most DVD rips though–usually much better.
What is “optimal” will depend on your goals. I wanted to have most blu-ray rips end up in the 5-10GB size, still look good on a 40" TV, and not take excessively long, since I was shrinking 100 files. Note that I am creating MKV files from MKV files.
I use the CLI version of Handbrake so I can run scripts to automate shrinking (have all the movies in a directory compressed with identical settings). Here are the HandbrakeCLI video settings I ended up using:
You should be able to figure out how these correspond to the GUI settings by looking at the CLI documentation.
Originally tried medium speed setting. About 10% smaller files, but much longer time to process. Too long.
Processing times and resulting sizes can vary greatly. At best on a four-core PC, it takes 2-3 hours to compress a movie, but some have taken nearly 24 hours. Depends on the picture complexity. While most B-R movies end up compressing down to 6-8 GB, some do not. Worst has been The French Connection: 29GB → 23 GB! Would obviously need to reduce the quality setting quite a bit to get that down <10GB.
