BDP-CX960 ordered any thoughts???

[AUDIOCRAZE]

Hey guys! I just ordered a Sony BDP-CX960 400 bluray disc changer. I was curious if anyone owns this unit and could give me some thoughts on their experience with it. I have a older pioneer 301 giga cd changer that's full and about 100 dvd's & blurays.... so I figured id get this unit to make my life easier, thanks for any comments.

 

[j_garcia]

If you read reviews of those things they tend to fail in high percentages. That's why most companies don't make changers anymore.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I've had good luck with the two that I've installed. They have worked reliably for my clients and they are mostly happy. Where Sony has really failed on the product is that it doesn't offer any sort of web interface and has extremely limited, and mostly lousy, control.

You can edit a disc name if it doesn't find it, but because it has no web interface, you can't change cover art. You can't get a list of the discs you currently have loaded into the player. You can't control it with your iDevice.

As far as holding a lot of discs and playing them back? It does a solid job at that. Not ONE bit faster than their older 400 Disc DVD changers, so it's really slow. But, it does the job of keeping hands off of discs and providing a playback mechanism for hundreds of BD/DVD/CD discs.

I personally was looking at them, but then changed my mind in favor of a all digital solution and ripped my BD collection to hard drives and my DVD collection to hard drives. About 500 movies or so all stored away digitally for convenient access throughout my home. For DVDs this is really nice and not crazy expensive, but for BDs the storage costs are a bit high.

 

[AUDIOCRAZE]

Thanks for your comment (BMXTRIX) very helpful. I have about 200 cd's, 100 dvd, and 35 BR. I primarily just wanted to use it to store all of the content and have the playback capability. I figured it was going to have limited access to web and cover art, which im ok with.. Im Android all the way so it limits my accessibility in terms of connectivity. Lets see how it works out, i was going to sell my pioneer Cd changer but i think im going to keep it so i can continue to expand my movie collection : )

 

[BMXTRIX]

I will say that a current generation media player like a Popcorn Hour or a DuneHD with a networked 3TB hard drive will likely store almost everything you have at lossless quality if you ever want to go that route.

100% of my collection is stored lossless on my hard drives - but I have about 20TB of networked storage at this point for everything. The 400 disc BD changer isn't a bad way to go for a lot of BDs, but doing the math...
100 DVDs - 8GB per = 800 GB
200 CDs - 600MB per = 120 GB
35 BDs - 35GB per = 1,225 GB

So, a single 3TB hard drive can store it all... right now. But, the BDs are obviously the storage killer.

I use a networked RAID which was super easy to setup, but was about $700 or so to put 5TB on my network. I am up to four of them.

 

[AUDIOCRAZE]

Im glad you posted that last comment because what really held me back storing on Hard drives was ripping the content. I figured I could do a decent set up for 800 to a thousand only thing is that I wanted to ensure that I got uncompressed Lossless audio as you have accomplished. Im not very experienced at ripping media and utilizing current ripping software since their are so many options in storing content on HD. I guess i let it intimidate me into just going with the Changer and i know thats a crappy excuse but thats really why i went with the changer. Maybe when next generation content rolls along I will educate myself into going with your suggested route which is really the best way to go. Most likely by then D.C will be the only option.

 

[j_garcia]

I have over 600 movies on disc and I still don't use those big changers. If you aren't watching them frequently, then there is really no benefit to having them in there. There are maybe 20-30 movies that I watch regularly (maybe once a year). The others maybe once in a great while, to the point where I have almost completely stopped buying movies.

The fact is, a lot of the less viewed ones are already available via one or more streaming services, so I no longer need to physically own them. After this most recent move and having to move all that media, I am going to slim the collection down.

 

[BMXTRIX]

What's funny is that I have a lot of movies I didn't and still don't watch regularly... But, when I went to an all digital solution, I found that movies which I hadn't watched in a while suddenly started getting more airplay.

Just because I would be flipping through channels on TV, come across a movie that was good, then realize I already owned it. A few button presses later, without getting out of my chair, I have it playing back. It's really nice. Moreso, because when friends or family come to visit, they can kind of browse through the collection and just pick what they want to watch. Not as complex as browsing through a collection then figuring out out to start up the player (in most homes).

I did NOT use my 400 disc changer much. I, or someone in my family, uses the Dune players almost every single day. The kids have The Clone Wars on there and will repeat playback over and over again on some titles.

 

[lsiberian]

What's funny is that I have a lot of movies I didn't and still don't watch regularly... But, when I went to an all digital solution, I found that movies which I hadn't watched in a while suddenly started getting more airplay.

Just because I would be flipping through channels on TV, come across a movie that was good, then realize I already owned it. A few button presses later, without getting out of my chair, I have it playing back. It's really nice. Moreso, because when friends or family come to visit, they can kind of browse through the collection and just pick what they want to watch. Not as complex as browsing through a collection then figuring out out to start up the player (in most homes).

I did NOT use my 400 disc changer much. I, or someone in my family, uses the Dune players almost every single day. The kids have The Clone Wars on there and will repeat playback over and over again on some titles.

I am fascinated by this setup and kind of interested in knowing more. I'm a very computer savvy person. How do you get HD quality with ripped movies?

 

[BMXTRIX]

I am fascinated by this setup and kind of interested in knowing more. I'm a very computer savvy person. How do you get HD quality with ripped movies?

Just like you do with CDs.

Most people used to think that to rip a CD you HAD to make it into an MP3. But, now people know that you can just rip it as a WAV file and you get a 1:1 copy of the original, or you can do FLAC (lossless) and get a slightly compressed version which is bit-for-bit identical to the original...

But, the .WAV file is the one that is truly a one-for-one copy of the disc.

Now, when people think of movies on their PCs, they think 'web' content. Forget that! You are on a home network which can pretty easily run at gigabit speeds. A Blu-ray often runs around 30 megabit/second. So, you have the ability to run your original movies over your home network pretty easily.

Instead of copying the movie by recompressing it into some iDevice friendly format which takes a 40GB movie and turns it into a 1GB movie - and destorys the quality, you just copy the movie to your hard drive. It's a feature of AnyDVD - you put a BD into your BD player on your computer, wait for it to scan, then right click on the Slysoft icon, and choose 'Copy To Hard Drive'. You get the entire movie... all the adverts, trailers, etc. are there, but you also get HD audio, and full professionally encoded 1080p Blu-ray movie quality.

The same program will do the same thing with DVDs.

There are other options which will create 'lossless' copies of the video, but they are not easy to use for BDs. They work pretty well for DVDs, but when you can now buy a 4TB hard drive (!!!) and a DVD is about 7GB, you can store over 500 DVDs on a single 4TB drive. Pretty nifty.

Still, BDs run about 35GB a movie, so you only get 100 BDs on that same 4 TB drive.

 

[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.