RE: Re: Basic questions about "video streaming"

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> As the resident 'video streaming' guru, can I ask a few questions
?

God! There's a mantle I want to get rid of ASAP!

> Firstly - Lil Movies looks good, I shall also be giving this a go -
also
its
> written by one of the gods of the Pinball world, so cant be bad :)

YAMJ is a lot easier to use and it's free but I think that MLMJB has the
potential to be the better UI...

> Second - how do you rip your Blu-Rays ? - I currently convert the main
> feature to .ts which creates a single 25-40gig file.

AnyDVD -> Rip Video DVD to Harddisc... :-D

> Third - Do you suffer from any slow downs/stuttering when playing
hi-def
> stuff - or is it a problem just with me - I cant work out if it due to
my
> Drobo being connected by USB to my old HTPC, or maybe my network
switch.
> Saturday I watched a rip of Ghost Town HD on A100 and it was great,
then
> watched Mummy 3 HD rip on A-100 which was perfect, yesterday I tried
to
> watch another HD rip and it was jumping/slowing generally looking crap
on
> the A-100, tried it in Plex and was marginally better, though still
had a
> couple of pauses and then a few seconds to catch itself up. This is
totally
> at odds with previous experience on A-100 as I've never had issues,
though

Actually yes - I also get the same sometimes when I try to play Blu-Ray
rips
on my nice meaty Quad Core Q6600 / 4Gb / Geforce 8800GTS / Gigabit desktop
machine using Arcsofts Total Media Theater ... although I can get speeds of
up to 70Mbytes/sec across the network when doing straight file copies it
seems that there are inherent problems in streaming Blu-Ray files across
from my Windows Home Server machine - don't ask me why as I have yet to
work
that out. At the end of the day though - yes - I see the same issues
occasionally both on the A110 *AND* my desktop machine.

> I've yet to watch a HD film perfectly with Plex on a Mac Mini.

Yup - that was one of my problems I had with it too ... even with stuff
copied to the local drive. HiDef stuff played locally on drives connected
to
the A110 or the desktop PC seem to play absolutely fine.

> Fourth - Do you rip straight to the NAS or to a local drive first -
wasn't
> sure if its possible to do it that way.

I rip to a local drive - I find that if you get too much in the way of file
activity going on across a network then connections have a habit of
disappearing (and I'm often copying a crapload of data around here) ...
It's
not just a Windows issue as I had a Thecus N5200 here last week that did
exactly the same when you got three or four big copies going on at the same
time...

> Fifth - Thanks for the consultancy the cheque is in the post :)

No worries ... where did you get my rates as they've changed recently. ;-)

> Oh and I've now tried Boxee which seems a much better 'XMBC' solution
for
> the Mac - It's stripped away all the stuff I don't want in Plex and
made
it
> far more intuative :)

Haven't tried that yet - trying to get hold of an Apple TV to try it on
first.

Phil



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