Bringing Movies Onboard?

[hellosailor]

challis-
Movie ripping is indeed much more complicated than music, but not always so. If you are using DVDs, there's a lot of support for it. BluRay, much less support and more problems with copyright protection schemes.
And then, regardless of which media is your source, there are some questions about playing the movies. If you are playing them on a computer, no problem at all, whatever the rip software made usually plays by just clicking on it.
If you are trying to play them from a file server, or play them on a "smart tv", often one extra layer of complications because the smart TV's tend to be really dumb, and you need to convert the movies to a format they can read, like mp4.
I suspect they are dumbed down on purpose so the tv makers don't have to argue with the copyright lobby. The bright side of this is that when you convert them into mp4 files, the files are way way smaller than the originals, so you need less storage space.
Sometimes you can even find the appropriate software in the office supply stores, like Staples. In a real box and all. Still unlikely for BluRays though.

[Cormorant]

As Chemist mentioned above, MakeMKV works well on BluRays. Then you wind up with an MKV file of your movie, which might not play in your TV for instance. . . . So then you can use Handbrake or VLC to convert that to MP4 and you're good to go on nearly all platforms.

It's all pretty straightforward, and you can leave it running in the background doing all that processing while you're getting other work done.

[Moonos]

Originally Posted by Cormorant

So then you can use Handbrake or VLC to convert that to MP4 and you're good to go on nearly all platforms.

Careful when using MP4. Many tv's such as Samsung allow video playback from a hard drive straight into USB port. Samsung, while it mentions supporting MP4, I have found it to be very flaky with actually playing all types of mp4 files. I can't commenton other tv's as Samsung is my go to brand generally.

Also, many media players and tv's have issues with hard drives larger than 2 Tb. Something worth checking...

[Liltttzr]

Challis- I agree most is to complicated. One way we do is to play the movie regularly on a blue ray or DVD then use honetech box to rip or copy over to a hard drive . It is just like using a old VCR just press the record button. As far as the file formats that why we went with the WD HD TV box they play about every format and connect to any TV!

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