My DVD ignorance

by **Seppey** on Thu Dec 04, 2003 4:40 pm

Hello all,
This is going to sound totaly stupid but I have the Music section totaly figured out. I was trying to use Xlobby to control a DVD changer (due to high quanty of DVD's). I can not find any support on this.

But now the real question. I have no idea how to use Xlobby for DVD's, I mean do you rip them somehow onto the hard drive like a mp3? In doing this do you lose and picture quality or Dolby digital? how much disk space does a average movie utilize?

Sorry about all the ignorance...

Seppey

by **Hiller** on Thu Dec 04, 2003 6:42 pm

Hey Seppey,

The way XLobby was origionally setup was to play ripped DVD's straight off your hard drive using a software DVD player like Theater Tek or Zoom Player. A ripped DVD that has not been compressed and has had subtitles, menus, warning, and other extras stripped from the rip takes on average about 5 Gigs.

Hopefully someone will correct me if I am wrong but I believe that through using the "offline" feature, you can play DVD's from an external player. You should be able to do this through Girder. I actually asked Steven about adding this feature a while back so that people with many DVD's in a huge player could enjoy XLobby as much as everyone else. I have been busy lately with my projector and getting my HTPC together so I haven't had much time to help with docs. I think this would be one of the first that I write though. Using Girder to interface with other hardware...

I don't know if that fully answers what you are looking for but hopefully it will get you started.

Steve

by **trevis** on Thu Dec 04, 2003 7:08 pm

Search for DVD Decryptor or DVD Shrink you'll also want to find a copy of a program called D-Tools. The first two applications will all you to rip a DVD to your hard drive, the third will allow you to mount the ripped DVD (which will be an an ISO file) as if it were a real physical drive. Those applications arent too teribly hard to figure out. If you download them and play with them for a little while you should be able to get it going in an evening.

by **stevenhanna6** on Thu Dec 04, 2003 8:21 pm

this might help you get going

http://www.xlobby.com/downloads/files/howtocopyadvd.zip

by **Tracie** on Fri Dec 05, 2003 3:10 am

Hi Seppey,

This thread is extremely informative, as well as the 101 version (if you search that same forum for "Ripping 101", you'll find it - it's huge-mongous long by now, which is why they started 102).

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthre ... did=320902

To get you going, you can use Steven's guide, that is a good one to start with. This is the process I use & it works pretty good:

1. Rip entire DVD using DVD Decrypter in File Mode, & I Select All files to rip.
2. I process the movie using either DVD Shrink (my personal choice) or Ifoedit, stripping just the movie, 1 sound track & 1 set of subtitles (no menus or extras). This can be a little tricky because sometimes one program will have a problem processing the files - when that happens use the other one (if you read the Ripping 102 thread that I linked to, you'll see what I mean about that). Using DVD Shrink you can compress the movie if you want, but it usually means losing some quality along the way.

That's it - you can play your movie using almost any of the software players out there. It's pretty easy - I've done all of my DVDs using this method & I've only come across a couple that have given me difficulty & that was just with the processing. All of the programs mentioned are free so it's just a matter of learning them. You'll find that sitting down, hitting play & having the movie start up with no menus, FBI warnings, previews, etc. is pretty damn cool. You won't want to go back. The only downside is that you need big hard drives to make this work. I'm actually getting ready to build a server for this (a friend was kind enough to give me a server tower complete with 440BX mobo & P3 500).

If you need links to get the programs say the word. I can post them, but I've got them bookmarked on another computer so I can't do it right now.

by **jazbo** on Thu May 20, 2004 6:48 am

Is there a quick and easy way to fix audio sync problem once the DVD is ripped to HD, without using five different programs like some how-to guides instruct you to do?

Thanks,

by **AirPost** on Thu May 20, 2004 7:18 am

Try reclock. If you are using Zoomplayer, it will show up as an option under Audio Renderer. See pic below:

http://ogo.nerim.net/reclockfilter/

by **jazbo** on Thu May 20, 2004 8:26 am

AirPost,

You came through again!

Ok, let me try that. Now taking it slightly off topic, I have some DVDs that zoomplayer (with PowerDVD decoders selected) would not play properly, but play perfectly with PowerDVD itself. Any idea how to fix that? I suspect it might be a PAL disc issue, but can't be sure...

Cheers,

by **AirPost** on Fri May 21, 2004 12:49 am

Not sure about the others but I have had problems using powerdvd decoders in Zoomplayer. Using Powerdvd directly everything's fine. I switched to using windvd decoders and it seems to be more stable when used with Zoomplayer.

You might want to check the Inmatrix forum, maybe they have a solution for that.