Media-fu, yet again
Our cheap DivX-capable DVD player is starting to misbehave so I’ve been looking around at suitable replacements. The “obvious” direct replacements to my mind are the Pioneer DV600AV-S (~AU$200) and the Denon DVD1730 (~AU$350). Neither of these are as cheap as one could go, but we use our DVD player a lot so a little extra for something better than the minimum is worth our while.
But it’s left me thinking about bigger and better options. We get a lot of rental DVDs, and they’re often scratched in ways that make them unsuitable for a regular player but just fine (if a bit slow) to rip. At the moment I’m ripping everything we get and converting to DVD5 written to DVD-RW. When we’re done I erase the disc and re-use it.
Skipping the physical media bit is appealing, and thus something like a Mac Mini (AU$850) is an interesting idea. Unfortunately our TV only does component/svideo/composite inputs so we’d be reduced to svideo in that instance, and my experience trying to get OS X to display properly to a widescreen over svideo has not been great so I’m extremely hesitant to pay so much money.
That leaves other homebrew HTPC options, and I’m not sure I have the time or energy to do that justice yet again, even if I do have pretty much all the parts.
Standalone network players don’t look great. There are some from Netgear and D-Link, but they don’t have optical drives or a local hard disk. There’s the latest incarnation of the old Zensonic Z500 (”Zevia”, rebranding for no apparent reason) but I’m dubious about their software quality. The Beyonwiz unit looks pretty nifty, until you get to the fine print (you can’t use the DVD player if it’s recording to the internal disk, WTF?).
Then I read that the next XBox 360 update will include DivX support. Hm. ~AU$750 for the “elite” model with the 120GB disk. There have been a few games released lately that have made us give a new console some thought (Rock Band and Mass Effect, basically). If, and it’s a big “if”, the DivX support turns out to be pretty solid then it’s going to be a very tempting option. The one big gotcha I see right now is that they are explicitly saying they will not support subtitle streams or files, but we could probably live with that and just burn the subs into the video — most DivX files we play are ones we’ve made ourselves anyway.
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Hmm, a subject I’ve considered a few times myself. I’ve got an advanage, though - my display hardware talks VGA/Component/Svideo/everything so almost anything is an option.
A few cow-orkers at SRO bought a little device which combined a PVR with a DivX player that would mount SMB shares. It talked component and DVI. I’ll see if I can chase up the model number, but the vendor had a couple of different models with differing featuresets (want Wifi? pay more) but the baseline was around $120 (add your own spindle).
I’m still using my PowerBook for the job - it’s all its good for, so I might as well keep it doing something rather than setting it on fire.
You’ve got a spare g5 iMac, so it isn’t like you need more hardware to go down that route. Perhaps just a longer cable run.
If you’re going to spend $750+ on new hardware for the project, you might as well look at getting new display hardware that will talk VGA or DVI back to your existing machines. $750 will buy you a projector in this day and age, and $1200 will buy an LCD with a similar amount of screen real estate to your current telly.
I’d avoid the Mac Mini because they’re overpriced and a bit crap, but ebay probably has G4 vintage models for peanuts by now; it isn’t like you need a CPU powerhouse for playing viddy.
The critical things are ability to play from optical and network, preferably that includes DVD images or VIDEO_TS folders from the network.
PVR we don’t want, most of them are absolute crap anyway — we’re going to wait and see how badly Seven hobble TiVo next year before doing anything there.
The iMac isn’t much of an option, it doesn’t really play nice with S-video and widescreen. Hence being fairly unsure about a mini being any better.
I’m leaning more toward the Zevia units, they do at least seem to be updating the firmware and fixing bugs. About $500 or so, does pretty much everything we want (if it works).
I’ve been discovering this stuff while going through Liz’s backed-up DVDs to watch. She’s using my new work laptop, which plays DVDs fine in VLC … except when it doesn’t. I can usually rip these on the Mac G4 and she can watch the resulting AVI or MPEG. Dunno if it’s drive or OS issues. (It’s not player issues, I tried several Leengux players.)