Blu-ray burning

[Numbers]

I've noticed that the price of Blu-ray burners and media have dropped dramatically over the past few months. Burners are in the $100-$200 range, media in the $2 per disc range.

Has anyone gone this route yet? Is it feasible in terms of software available and torrents available?

[Celephais]

There was a good slickdeal today and a few days previous for a 10x burner in the $130 range (maybe $140, I forget). The media is a bit expensive still for me to jump on board, $2 coasters would suck.

I've been leaning towards a more media server based solution personally, storage prices are way down, and stand alone media player settops are way down in price too. Not having to swap out discs is awesome.

Either way I don't think it's bottomed out enough for me to jump in.

[Buckwheet]

I looked at it, but having discs is a pain in the ass when I can stream 1080p mkv files to my TV.

I have gone the media storage server route, and recommend that for all my clients who mention doing bluray archival. Sure burning a disc is great for thing like pictures where you want to send someone something, but I have yet to find a client(other than my wedding photographer friend) who would mail you 20gb of pictures or a home movie that you want high enough quality to actually fill the bluray in that format.

I just got done building a media storage center for a friend of mine. He went with dual xeons, 8GB of RAM, a 100gb solid state drive for the OS, and 20 1.5TB hard drives at $99 each with 12% bing cashback on the drive order.

With my build fees and such I built it for him for 5 grand. Yes its a far cry from a couple hundred bucks for the drive, but after he wired his house with 1Gbit networking his wife watches her stuff in one room, he is free to watch sports in the other and his kids can watch whatever they want anytime they want and it allows each person to watch the same movie and pause/resume it in different places.

Over all though, it really depends on your application. But I love my 40TB file servers at home.

Oh yea, one feature I loved with my friends new system is that if he is watching a movie on their big screen and decides he is tired and wants to head to bed but yet finish the movie, he gets up, takes the remote with him, and when he leaves the room it turns off his lights, the TV, and surround sound and then when he enters his bedroom it turns on the TV set the input to the media player, and can start the movie right from where he left off.

[Celephais]

That sounds like a pretty badass setup... and all of that is coming way down in price too, can't wait till it gets in my range.

[Numbers]

I'm not quite ready to invest in a full-on media center just yet. What got me thinking about the Blu-ray route is when I was on Pirate Bay the other night looking for a few movies. I noticed that nobody uploads full DVD rips anymore -- they compress them or encode them down to 700-800 MB. The problem with that is when you burn them to a DVD to play on a big screen, the quality doesn't transfer well, and you'll be lucky if the encoded audio actually carries over.

But there didn't seem to be any shortage of people seeding straight Blu-ray rips. And I've got a beautiful HDTV, and am still watching regular DVDs on it.

[Buckwheet]

That sounds like a pretty badass setup... and all of that is coming way down in price too, can't wait till it gets in my range.

Check out LinuxMCE so you can start getting up to speed. Its pretty amazing when you can get the new Atoms with Nvidia Ion 2 in them streaming 1080p movies like Avatar to your kids rooms along with having all their music, pictures and stuff stored on the family server.

My friend thought I was bullshitting him when I recommend this setup and he was going to do this Xbox 360 route and all this other stuff and try and get by super super cheap.

The other day he called me and said it was worth every damn penny. On his way home from work he heard about one of the perfect baseball games going on and wanted to watch it end as soon as he got home. They have a 73" TV he wanted to watch the game on, but when he got home his wife was doing one of her Yoga tapes. He expressed his desire to watch the game on the big screen and all she did was pause the tape, grab her mat, move into their rec room and it was a flawless transfer so she picked up right where she left off. Lights, the climate control turned on, TV, stereo etc.

So now he downloads all his kids cartoons and everything goes on the media storage. When he gets home the kids scatter to another room and never miss a second so he can tune into whatever game he wants to watch on the big screen.

He said if it wasn't for his sports packages, he would have canceled live TV and he only has had the unit for three weeks.

[BigWorm]

I'm not quite ready to invest in a full-on media center just yet. What got me thinking about the Blu-ray route is when I was on Pirate Bay the other night looking for a few movies. I noticed that nobody uploads full DVD rips anymore -- they compress them or encode them down to 700-800 MB. The problem with that is when you burn them to a DVD to play on a big screen, the quality doesn't transfer well, and you'll be lucky if the encoded audio actually carries over.

But there didn't seem to be any shortage of people seeding straight Blu-ray rips. And I've got a beautiful HDTV, and am still watching regular DVDs on it.

Why wouldn't you burn those Blu-Ray rips to a DVD since they are usually sized to fit on a standard DVD5 or occasionally (usually 1080p rips) on a DVD9? The Blu-Ray player doesn't care about the format; as long as it is structured like a Blu-Ray disc, it will play it. Re-authoring a Blu-Ray rip onto a blu-ray disc seems like a huge waste of media and time to me.

I definitely agree that the much better suggestion is a media server though. Install something like xbmc or Boxee on a frontend. Optical media is for sneaker net, not for sharing video between machines on the same network.

[Celephais]

Erm... Bigworm, the rips he's talking about are 700MB, not the 4.5GB or 9GB rips. They're compressed to be able to be burned as SVCDs.

So he's seeing a choice between 700MB files or ~20GB files.

[Bobmuhthol]

Right, but he could be downloading DVD5 Bluray rips instead of CD DVD rips. But as has been stated, I much prefer playing the files directly on the TV, either using the media boxes or connecting the TV as a second (or even primary) monitor.

[BigWorm]

Erm... Bigworm, the rips he's talking about are 700MB, not the 4.5GB or 9GB rips. They're compressed to be able to be burned as SVCDs.

So he's seeing a choice between 700MB files or ~20GB files.

He isn't talking about bit-for-bit Blu-Ray ISOs, he was talking about rips, where the video is re-encoded with a bitrate that usually set to something low enough to fit on a DVD.

For example see: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5163765/District_9_2009_1080p_Blu-Ray_DTS_x264-WiKi(No_Rars)

Also MPEG4 on CD != SVCD. SCVD quality sucks; its basically the same MPEG2 codec as a DVD, but a way lower bit rate to fit on a CD.

[Asrial]

I noticed that nobody uploads full DVD rips anymore -- they compress them or encode them down to 700-800 MB.

But there didn't seem to be any shortage of people seeding straight Blu-ray rips.Another option is to learn the encoding process. You can either go the easy route and use an all-in-one program or learn each step.

Breaking it out step by step gives you a lot more control over the quality of the encode.

http://forum.doom9.org (and apparently now there's a http:://doom10.org) is a good place to get info.

Be prepared though.. this isn't for the faint of heart. It will however save you money.

[EDIT: Actually, looking at BigWorm's link.. if that's what you're downloading Numbers.. just burn that to a DVD and either get an x264 compliant DVD player or output your computer display to the TV.]