DVD FAB Products Discussion Thread

[maineman]

Not me. Only thing blue i have here is blue LED's

Hehehe, I've got some of those too

Sorry, I am not quite sold on the value of BR, so I am not in any rush to experiment with it, sorry.

Yeah, I'm right there with you buddy. My son has a PS3 and you toss in a BR and it sure looks fine, no argument there, but not enough better to convince me I want to lay out the $.

I've got the same feelings about BR too but I have some comments on the WDTV thingy. Reports here in OZ suggest that you can have problems streaming HD content from external USB drives dependent upon the chipset used by the HD enclosure.

I far prefer the players that I import into OZ which hold the HDD internally but currently they do not play BR. What they do though is play H263 AVI's perfectly and with a 1Tb drive fitted internally, I've got a readily accessible library of around 1000 movies.

There are stacks on the eBay US site for around $100. Just use "Hard Disk Media Player" as your search criterea.

So Greg, is this an easy swap with the 1 TB hdds?
I've got 5 1TB drives and will probably keep going this route...although I do love to burn to those round "plasticy" things.
Something about an old dog and new tricks?...

I just bought another house and I'll be setting up some sort of system to stream, but I have no idea really...what I need/want.

I had been thinking about the WD player too, but I'm in need of some serious education...

[GregiBoy]

I'm certainly not playing as we have sold literally thousands of them here in OZ and I have been actively involved in firmware and alpha and beta testing for the past 7 years.

There really are only a few minor hiccups.

1. The internal hard disk MUST be formatted as FAT32 and maximum partition size of 500Gb. You can easily change partitions with the devices remote. We have tested up to 1.5Tb which costs around AU$150.

2. I have spent some considerable time on fine tuning a Fab profile to give me the best results. It is a heavily modified variant of the generic.avi.xvid.audiocopy profile. I always rip the DVD to HD first and produce the mobile file from there.

3. We have had some problems with Samsung TV's connected via HDMI as they are not HDMI 1.2 backwards compatible. The players are generally HDMI 1.2. The workaround for this is to connect by component.

There is another added bonus in that this class of players will also play your MP3 collection and digital photo collection.

There is still another option above these which is "Network Media Players" or "Network Media Tanks" but usually they are far more expensive and a whole new ballgame.

[GregiBoy]

If I was setting up a system from scratch, I would use a combination of what I have running here.

My top-of-the line system is a Samsung LA52A850 TV to which I have attached a USB Caddy that I can just pop drives in and out of. The TV has a player inbuilt and will play movies, mp3's and images directly from the inserted HDD. It will also stream the media files over a network using uPnP (I use Twonky on Linksys NAS 200s and also my servers, total storage about 8Gb at the moment but always seems to be expanding). The Series 7, 8 & 9 Samsung TV's all purportedly do this.

For other TV's in the house, I would use one of the Hard Disk Media Players.

I generally have between 6 and 10 different players connected at any one time doing various stages of testing/development so if you guys want any tips/info, just ask.

As a general comment though, I find the el-cheapo chinee players as good as, if not better, than the "BRANDNAME" ones and at half the price.

[GµårÐïåñ]

I'm certainly not playing as we have sold literally thousands of them here in OZ and I have been actively involved in firmware and alpha and beta testing for the past 7 years.

Forgive me for not being clear in my rush, I mean playing with the variations of the current implementations. I took from what you said that it was not quite resolved with some new capacities, if I misunderstood I am sorry. That's what I meant by playing and if I am wrong about that, I am sorry, my misunderstanding then.

There really are only a few minor hiccups.

1. The internal hard disk MUST be formatted as FAT32 and maximum partition size of 500Gb. You can easily change partitions with the devices remote. We have tested up to 1.5Tb which costs around AU$150.

Wow that kind of sucks, you lose alot of capacity due to the cluster block sizes of FAT32. There are alot of wasted blocks. So it seems they are using the USB/Thumbdrive system of scaling.

2. I have spent some considerable time on fine tuning a Fab profile to give me the best results. It is a heavily modified variant of the generic.avi.xvid.audiocopy profile. I always rip the DVD to HD first and produce the mobile file from there.

That seems logical, I always do the rips to disk first before I burn them. Seems similar concept, even though we are ripping different things for different reasons and way of usage.

3. We have had some problems with Samsung TV's connected via HDMI as they are not HDMI 1.2 backwards compatible. The players are generally HDMI 1.2. The workaround for this is to connect by component.

Wow, already and HDMI limitation huh? Well yeah the component adapter should help with that but still there might be a loss of performance and quality. The more connections there is introduced in the chain, the more anomalies and distortion is added to the output.

There is another added bonus in that this class of players will also play your MP3 collection and digital photo collection.

Well that is nice to get it all under one roof. I guess I am a uniquely different style of doing things. I like my pictures on the computer and my music on my Zune and my videos on disc. My Zune has the video, picture, radio, games, music, wireless, xbox 360 share and so on but I hardly use all that

There is still another option above these which is "Network Media Players" or "Network Media Tanks" but usually they are far more expensive and a whole new ballgame.

Yeah I have looked into building that and the closest I came to that realization was when I built it for someone who COULD afford it and it came out ssswwweeeettttt but too much for my blood. The only good thing is that I can say, been there, done that only wish I had it for myself.

[GregiBoy]

Nah, no component adapter. No loss in quality as component can run to 1080i but as a general comment, I always set the players to 720p as I think that the $4000 TV's upscaling is always better than the $100 players.

All the players that I have here have inbuilt HDMI, Component, SVHS and composite outputs and 6 ch analogue, DD5.1 Co-Ax & optical so there are not to many situations where you do not have at least one alternative connection method.

If you are looking at any player, I suggest that you ensure that they have something similar.

Also, on the FAT32/NTFS sizing, I don't really regard it as an issue with the cost of 1Tb drises being uner AU$100. If I need more space, I just buy another drive.

[W&B]

This is really great info!! Thanks to everyone

[GµårÐïåñ]

Nah, no component adapter. No loss in quality as component can run to 1080i but as a general comment, I always set the players to 720p as I think that the $4000 TV's upscaling is always better than the $100 players.

Agreed, generally the TV has better upscaling than the player, you are wise to choose that method.

All the players that I have here have inbuilt HDMI, Component, SVHS and composite outputs and 6 ch analogue, DD5.1 Co-Ax & optical so there are not to many situations where you do not have at least one alternative connection method.

Sounds right, no arguments there. My cousin is a professional sound guy (producer, drummer, mixer, etc), my brother, rest his soul, used to play bass and 6-string, he was a great video editor and me, jack of all trades in our little family, we do alot of major studio functions for NBC, ABC, Fox, HBO, and Universal Sports and so we deal with quality v. efficiency all the time and you'd be amazed at the number of caveats present in doing so. HD it or compress if for streaming, HD at what level for DTV while keeping it clean for classic cable and etc, there is a lot of decisions but most of the time the quality is unnoticed by the people, the technical difficulties are often behind the scene. So we are pretty good at picking the best audio/video and encoding choices, part of life for us.

If you are looking at any player, I suggest that you ensure that they have something similar.

very reasonable.

Also, on the FAT32/NTFS sizing, I don't really regard it as an issue with the cost of 1Tb drises being uner AU$100. If I need more space, I just buy another drive.

Yeah with the price of the drives nowadays not an issue but the quality of the drives makes for an issue as the larger the capacity with the lower/inefficient clustering, the more corruption, performance and loss of data you will suffer. It is not about the cost of capacity, its the cost of the outcome and reliability and efficiency generally.

[GregiBoy]

Don't have a problem with the efficiency as the demands of the players on the HDD is quite low and reliability is not an issue as I have an effective backup strategy in place.

My main library(s) are held on NAS's with mirrored drives and I always have at least 2 external copies.

I am quite paranoid about this as I have invested a heap of time in tagging all the files with genre, director, date, actors etc and I have done over 1000 movies and that is without complete TV series sucah as 10 seasons of Stargate, NCIS, 24, etc, etc. I use ABCAVI tag editor and export the data to an Excel spreadsheet which I maintain faithfully.

[GµårÐïåñ]

Don't have a problem with the efficiency as the demands of the players on the HDD is quite low and reliability is not an issue as I have an effective backup strategy in place.

My main library(s) are held on NAS's with mirrored drives and I always have at least 2 external copies.

Understood but that still stems from the lack of hardware reliability. We are moving away from quality work and putting the burden on the user to have extensive and often expensive implements in place to cover for it. Many drives are bad out of the box and we have drives we used for 20 years that don't even have a single bad sector, so that's what I mean. The backup is all good and well and I have something quite similar if not a bit more complicated due to varying content but doesn't diminish the root that the hardware is no longer reliably manufactured. What we do to protect ourselves is the consequence of that.

I am quite paranoid about this as I have invested a heap of time in tagging all the files with genre, director, date, actors etc and I have done over 1000 movies and that is without complete TV series sucah as 10 seasons of Stargate, NCIS, 24, etc, etc. I use ABCAVI tag editor and export the data to an Excel spreadsheet which I maintain faithfully.

Same way, I actually have an Access DB that maintains them and I am able to track location, name, content, genre, year, quality rating, recently implemented actors and been preparing to transfer over to a SQL db instead and make the db internally available on the LAN. I include outside cover copy, dvd face covers, those that have the generic or blank ones, I try to include the best custom cover I come across out there or make my own. We each have our own extensive infrastructure and mechanism to protect things but the fact is the paranoia of losing data stems directly from the lack of quality and reliability of the hardware we are forced to use today.

[GregiBoy]

I tend to disagree on the expensive implementations as the price of hardware now is minimal.

I still have the first hard drive that I bought for a PC and it still works as you say but it was 5Mb (Yep Mb not GB), and cost me $2000.

I can now buy 2Tb, 400 times the capacity for $200, a tenth of the cost.

If you want to pay for high quality drives, they are still available but again are a lot dearer than the el-cheapos, so really the onus is on the user or their IT gurus to use the most cost-efficient equipment taking into consideration how valuable their data is and the impact downtime will have on their operation.

e.g. The last 146Gb SCSI drives that I bought for a server implementation cost AU$455 while the last SATA 1.5Gb i purchased cost me AU$146.

[GµårÐïåñ]

I tend to disagree on the expensive implementations as the price of hardware now is minimal.

I still have the first hard drive that I bought for a PC and it still works as you say but it was 5Mb (Yep Mb not GB), and cost me $2000.

I can now buy 2Tb, 400 times the capacity for $200, a tenth of the cost.

If you want to pay for high quality drives, they are still available but again are a lot dearer than the el-cheapos, so really the onus is on the user or their IT gurus to use the most cost-efficient equipment taking into consideration how valuable their data is and the impact downtime will have on their operation.

e.g. The last 146Gb SCSI drives that I bought for a server implementation cost AU$455 while the last SATA 1.5Gb i purchased cost me AU$146.

I'll take the better, higher quality, reliable 146 GB SCSI for $500 over the unreliable and shaky 1.5 GB SATA for $150 any day. The difference is obvious.

[GregiBoy]

Totally agree for the OS but for data I will take 2 x 1.5 Tb (typo before) mirrored in a NAS box for about the same price.

I think my oldest NAS is about 2.5 years old and hasn't missed a beat and besides the storage, I run Twonky on them under Linux as my uPnP server.

[GµårÐïåñ]

Totally agree for the OS but for data I will take 2 x 1.5 Tb (typo before) mirrored in a NAS box for about the same price.

I think my oldest NAS is about 2.5 years old and hasn't missed a beat and besides the storage, I run Twonky on them under Linux as my uPnP server.

For the OS or ciritical operations, I have been going more SSD but also high tolerence drivers that are more failsafe and even then I have the system doing a Software/Hardware mirror in case there is a physical crash. As for the data, I have a 4 TB NAS using a 4x1 X-Raid configuration which is running on a 3 year old box that started as a 1 TB 4x1 configuration and runs a debian based linux OS that interfaces completely with windows, linux, mac and even has ability to run its own DNS/DHCP/Web/FTP servers and I usually connect to the backbone of it with SSH and transfer to and from the core using SFTP but mostly just access it in the network as secured shares. It also has full HDMI and digital entertainment streaming capability. That's just for my data at home, work, a full rack and well story for another day.

[GµårÐïåñ]

GB, thanks for the chat today, I am heading home everyone. I wish you a great evening and hope you have a wonderful tomorrow. I will try and catch up with you all later when I get home. Take care.

[W&B]

Well after doing a little research I'm leaning toward the WDTV. To mention a few of the reasons, it supports FAT32, NTFS and HFS+ (no journaling) (never heard of that last one personally) almost any file format and its not mentioned on the product page but apperently it will handle ISO and VOB files (I read in a post by Complication it won't play a full disc rip with menus of DVDs so guessing main movie only). The key things that swayed me was it doesn't matter about the HDD format and I wanted the NTFS format so I can store large files without splitting them. It plays the .MTS format which means it will play a ripped BR and if some reading this says "but DVDFab outputs .M2TS and not .MTS" its simple, just rename the file extension from .m2ts to .mts and it will work as I tested this with Powerdvd 8 and it played exactly the same. I seen some youtube videos also about it, onscreen it looks like the PS3 basically. easy to navigate your way around. It not only outputs HDMI in full 1080P and for those who don't have a HDTV well thats not a problem either since it also has composite video outputs but that method will restrict your audio to basically 2 channels and the HDMI supports all the hi-def audio formats. As Maineman stated I'll still burn those round plastic thingys also to protect my original investment (boys and their toys). Gregiboy I really do appreciate all the great info posted and everyones views.