HDD Media Player with DVD (VOB) Play-Back

[Gruce]

I'm looking to maybe by a HDD Media Player, the type that is an enclosure that fits our own HDD. I knew they could play Divx, MP3 etc but didn't know they cold play "DVD" until recently.

Been doing a little reading and alot are marketed as playing "DVD" or "Vob" files. This would save me alot of time, converting my movies to AVI which takes ages, instead I can just decrypt and play them, without quality loss.

Does anyone have any experience or can recommend such a player, really I want to be able just to play a full DVD from the HDD. When I say a full DVD what I mean is, I would like menus and subtitles, languages etc. Is this the type of thing associated with VOB files? Or does a VOB just have the video and no menu etc?

Thanks in advance.

[EvilBoris]

A VOB file is just an MPEG2 video.

You can actually get a VOB file and rename the extension to mpg and a fair few things will play it.
It would literally just be the video and sound

[Gruce]

So no real easy way to get an iso-style image of a full DVD onto a Media Player? Guess i'll stick with the real thing.

[EvilBoris]

Maybe there are programs that can run an actual image of a DVD as a full DVD, I don't know of any myself though.

[huxley]

A friend has one of these http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/
does pretty much what you want.
Ripped dvds need a lot of storage, I`ve ripped my collection to a home made server and 409 dvds take up almost 2.5tb.

Why not buy/build an mce machine. You can pick up 2005 edition cheap enough. It also comes with vista, but I`d hold on the vista at the moment as................. you need to pm me for the rest of that sentance (nda)

[charlesr]

Probably not what you are thinking of, but Xbox360? Rip your DVDs to h.264 mp4 using handbrake. Takes about 5 hours per disc and is around 1.5GB for a file with fantastic picture quality. Then stream them to the 360 from the PC using Zune software. Will take up a lot less space than isos of your DVDs. Limited to stereo though.....
Otherwise a £50 xbox with XBMC will play lower quality avi versions with ease and in surround. Bigger HDD is a possibility or stream straight from PC (which is what I do).

[wakka]

If you have a Mac running Leopard, connect a high capacity external hard drive to that then connect the computer to your TV. Or buy a Mac mini expressly for this purpose. OR buy an Apple TV and hack it (easy) so it can run OS X like a normal Mac and then plug in a hard drive and do it.

Apple's media front end 'Front Row' can play VIDEO_TS folders you see. Plus you can tag them with artwork, it's very awesome. VIDEO_TS folders contain literally the entire DVD: when you choose to open one in Front Row, it says 'Loading DVD...' for about 1 second then the DVD starts playing as if you had just inserted it. Menus, extras and all.

I use it a lot, it's chill.

[smouty]

Another vote for XBMC. Will play anything except HiDef. Lovely interface, internet metadata lookup for lryics, IMDB info and covers etc.
There is a limit to the size of HD you can fit internally though with 320Gb being about it. A chip will be the easiest way to fit an upgraded disk so factor in the cost of this as well.

[Salsa Party Animal]

So what would you use if you have 550 DVDs (or thereabout) and HD DVDs and Blu rays with no compression and keep subtitles, (delete commentary stuff) as I got suitable PC but not sure about storage. How expensive is say 10TB for example.