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Still not sure about this.
With the support of the next door neighbour (the first one in my personal history I've actually got to know will enough to use for tech support AND we're having a BBQ tomorrow... that's a whole other post) we've played a lot with the Popcorn Hour...
Well, basics - it plays all the standard .avi rips excellently, much better than my Media Center. It does not and nor have I been able t persuade it to play .vob DVD rips in a sensible way. The Video_TS rips all stutter horribly and eventually crap out. An experiment to rip a .VOB structure to .ISO is underway and that seems to work. The only problem there is the shear length of time it takes to convert the existing rips and do a new Rip to ISO.
It might be faster to rip straight to a DivX format straight away. The only issue there is what happens to the image quality. A test is underway. The only issue there is I lose all the DVD extras and I do like the feeling of fiddling with a DVD.
With regard to HD content. 1080p stuff just will not play fast enough, although I have discovered that certain 1080p files are encoded incorrectly in their MKV wrapper and need to be re-MUX'd, an experiment on that will need to wait until tomorrow because it involves getting a spare USB HDD to move the file into test position.
In short this is a stunning idea, but so far no worth the hassle. If things improve with the current tests I'll consider keeping it. Otherwise, for my extreme Media Needs, I might consider that I have to do the Media Center route on Vista.
With the support of the next door neighbour (the first one in my personal history I've actually got to know will enough to use for tech support AND we're having a BBQ tomorrow... that's a whole other post) we've played a lot with the Popcorn Hour...
Well, basics - it plays all the standard .avi rips excellently, much better than my Media Center. It does not and nor have I been able t persuade it to play .vob DVD rips in a sensible way. The Video_TS rips all stutter horribly and eventually crap out. An experiment to rip a .VOB structure to .ISO is underway and that seems to work. The only problem there is the shear length of time it takes to convert the existing rips and do a new Rip to ISO.
It might be faster to rip straight to a DivX format straight away. The only issue there is what happens to the image quality. A test is underway. The only issue there is I lose all the DVD extras and I do like the feeling of fiddling with a DVD.
With regard to HD content. 1080p stuff just will not play fast enough, although I have discovered that certain 1080p files are encoded incorrectly in their MKV wrapper and need to be re-MUX'd, an experiment on that will need to wait until tomorrow because it involves getting a spare USB HDD to move the file into test position.
In short this is a stunning idea, but so far no worth the hassle. If things improve with the current tests I'll consider keeping it. Otherwise, for my extreme Media Needs, I might consider that I have to do the Media Center route on Vista.
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