BDP-CX960 ordered any thoughts???

[Grador]

You can also get those blurays down to ~10 GB with little to no loss in video quality (I honesty cannot tell the difference between my reencodes and the source) and keeping the HD audio tracks completely intact. This takes a little more doing though, and about 5 hours for each movie on a very fast computer.

[AUDIOCRAZE]

You can also get those blurays down to ~10 GB with little to no loss in video quality (I honesty cannot tell the difference between my reencodes and the source) and keeping the HD audio tracks completely intact. This takes a little more doing though, and about 5 hours for each movie on a very fast computer.

I wish i knew how to do it. I consider my self tech savy but when it comes to ripping and burning HD content im an idiot, where to begin educating myself for a particular software ?

[Grador]

I wish i knew how to do it. I consider my self tech savy but when it comes to ripping and burning HD content im an idiot, where to begin educating myself for a particular software ?

I've mostly done things by the try try try and try again method interspersed with random googling to solve problems along the way.

Ripping HD content is very similar to ripping anything else, but requiring some more specialized software. I personally use DVDFab to rip blurays and DVDs. It has a nice option to rip "main movie" which automatically detects which of the video tracks is the film, I have never had it grab the wrong thing (if i really want the special features I'll go grab the disk). DVDFab has a free version, it will rip all the films, but does not include any of their encoding features, which I had no intention of using anyway.

In this manner DVDFab gives you the folder structure of the disk, not the greatest format to work with, but that is where I leave it for DVDs. For blurays I encode the films using handbrake. It is free, and the most up to date X.264 encoder (X.264 is an open source H.264 compatible codec). It will allow you to set the video encoding to whatever quality level you desire, and gives you the option to keep the audio track as is or reencode it in several different manners. Settings for video encoding will take you a little research and guess and check.

For playback I use XBMC. With a little time and effort to set up, it has a very nice built in library that keeps tract of were you left off in films/tv shows, what you've watched, and gives you a plot summary with thumbnail. It will happily play my bluray reencodes as well as the DVDs left in simple folder structure. Theoretically it has pretty decent overall bluray menu support, allowing you to leave the blurays ripped as whole disks as is, but I've never tried this myself.

Feel free to PM me for help if you decide you may want to go this rout!

[BMXTRIX]

Probably the biggest headache is that out of the gate all the media players really suck. They typically don't come with decent documentation, any documentation they do have is usually written for the computer geek, not an average user, and they often have quirks or bugs.

XBMC, for example, doesn't support native playback of Blu-ray Discs. I'm sure at some point it will, but it just doesn't at this time.

The Dune players support a ton of different files, including BD native rips, but have a lousy interface until you figure out how to use the YADIS plugin for it. Not very difficult, but also not 'included' out of the box. (it is free)

I think there is a market to make these products work far nicer than they currently do, but even for Apple, and the AppleTV, they have found that it isn't a huge market. So, it does take some dedication and time from someone who wants a completely digital collection.

I may play with DVDFab later this year to see how well it handles pulling the main movie from my titles and see if it can retain the full HD audio with it. The biggest headache from what I've read with BD main movie extraction is that it isn't at all like DVD file structure and can be broken up in many ways that make it nearly impossible to reliably grab just the core movie. So, for quality and reliability, I've stuck with full disc ripping... It's easy and extremely reliable.

[Grador]

XBMC, for example, doesn't support native playback of Blu-ray Discs. I'm sure at some point it will, but it just doesn't at this time...

I may play with DVDFab later this year to see how well it handles pulling the main movie from my titles and see if it can retain the full HD audio with it. The biggest headache from what I've read with BD main movie extraction is that it isn't at all like DVD file structure and can be broken up in many ways that make it nearly impossible to reliably grab just the core movie. So, for quality and reliability, I've stuck with full disc ripping... It's easy and extremely reliable.

With the latest version XBMC will play a full disk BD rip but if you meant a disk you are correct. They probably will not at any point in the future as they have always tried to maintain legality and BD decrypting is pretty....eh, especially after the most recent kaleidescape ruling.

From every disk I have seen it is far simplier to do main movie ripping from a BD rather than a DVD, and dead simple to grab the main movie from a full disk rip. Each title is a single file in the streams folder, largest one is most likely the film. If the issues you've heard of pertain to keeping the menu working, I wouldn't know, I actively do not want the menu.