McWilliams’ World

In previous posts I’ve been telling you that I’ve been dumping my DVD’s onto my PC for streaming to my Xbox 360s (I have two).

Right now I think I have around 50 movies dumped at around 1.5gb to 2.5gb each on my new Maxtor 500gb external drive. We’ve watched a few movies over the last few days and they played over my 802.1g wireless network without hiccup. The movies looked as good as the DVD version without the need to find a disc and put it in the player. Very cool.

Converting, as stated before, is lengthy. I’m guessing I’m able to convert probably 6 8 movies a day – I’m going to for quality rather than size (although size is a concern). So HandBrake has been chewing away, non-stop for the last week or two.

The tools I’m using? DVDFab 5 (to rip the movie to my hdd), HandBrake to convert to an MP4 movie and the Zune software to stream to the Xbox 360. I’d use Windows Media Center but the way I have my wireless network setup – Media Center won’t work plus I don’t think MC will stream H.264 MP4 (correct me if I’m wrong).

Some wishes I have:

• The ability to embed DVD cover art. Right now, all that is displayed is a frame from the movie. I’ve read reports that MP3Tag can do this but I’ve been unsuccessful in doing so. It’d be nice if HandBrake handled this or someone turns me onto a good tool that does it.
• Parental Controls or the ability to tag movies as to their rating via the Xbox/Zune. Right now all movies are available to view from the menu. It’s not like I have a ton of inappropriate movies for my kids, but there are some movies I’d rather my kids not watch. Coupling a rating system with the Xbox 360′s parental controls would be nice.
• Much faster encoding. But once it’s done, I guess I won’t have to do it again.
• Sightly better interface for HandBrake. It still has a lot of exposed advanced features that I’d rather not see and have that stuff tucked away under an “Advanced” button/tab or something.

Storage may not be an issue either. Although I think 500gb should be enough to hold my most viewed movies, I managed to score another 500gb drive (for a total of 1 terabyte for those not good with math) free via www.externaldriveoffer.com/. You just sign up for a Discover credit card, get approved and activate it by making a purchase, balance transfer or cash advance and they’ll ship you the drive (6-10 weeks after activation). I’m patient. I can wait. I waited nearly a year for $1000 gift card, I can wait a few weeks for a hard drive.

So far I’m very pleased with the results and the extra flexibility. After the Xbox 360′s fall update I’m strongly considering signing up for Netflix and being able to stream unlimited movies through my Xbox and get DVD’s for about $9/mo.

Okay, I’ve had it. I wasted hours this weekend trying out other MP4 video encoders such as AutoMKV, MeGUI and nothing compares to HandBreak’s ease of use. I’m no video expert – nor do I want to be. I don’t want to know what all the terminology is; I just want to plug in my video’s, choose the target format, some very basic quality settings (or just choose a profile that is right for what I’m doing) and hit go. HandBreak does that. It hides most of the mumbo-jumbo.

The programs mentioned above have unnecessarily difficult setups, settings, and operations. Most required additional programs or files to be downloaded and placed in certain directories. Ach… too complicated. Fail!

Only complaint is that the process takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r! Nearly 2+ hrs per video. One thought is that it’s doing a two pass conversion; meaning that it runs through the movie twice to get the best possible quality. I may just try a single pass and see what happens if there is any difference ’cause it’s just too slow. The nice thing is that I can queue up x number of movies and let it chew.

Took the family to see Narnia yesterday and I liked it very much. There are a few nitpick things that I’d like to point out:

• You can tell when the actors are against a green screen. We’ve come a long way in 100 years of movie making but this one is still a sore thumb
• Once all the kids are in Narnia…they’re thrusted into the conflict without really exploring the back-story. We only get to deal with their reluctance and a quick betrayal. Granted they only have about 2hrs to get everything in, but I’d like to see more of what was happening in Narnia; I also have not read the books so I don’t know if there is any back-story

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. The special effects were great; many mythical creatures; great environments; super CGI work. I was also fighting very hard not to cry but I lost that battle a number of times; the imagery was too powerful for me – in a good way. I just couldn’t separate myself from what was going on as much as I tried. You may feel differently but don’t be surprised if you start shedding a tear or two.

It’s a keeper in my book and will be getting the DVD once it comes out.