Thread: What do you play on?

Originally Posted by DancingCorpse

Got a Blu-Ray drive finally! Got it when it was on sale last week. Sale for $64, got it for $58 with a 20% discount I had from NewEgg. First Optical drive I have bought in a looooong time.

I just built a box and figured I had plenty of SATA optical drives around. Apparently not, I have about 50 IDE drives around and not one SATA. Just my luck. I had to load the OS using a damn IDE to USB converter.

Originally Posted by DancingCorpse

Got a Blu-Ray drive finally! Got it when it was on sale last week. Sale for $64, got it for $58 with a 20% discount I had from NewEgg. First Optical drive I have bought in a looooong time.

Very cool, sir! I have two of them...



Not only do they look sweet with the mirror door, but they can rip a BluRay movie to your hard disk in less than 30 minutes.

what do you guys use to play blueray? I had a disk that came with my blueray drive but, it refused to install.

I use Power DVD 9 to play the BluRay, but I typically rip all of my BluRay movies to my hard disk and convert to .mkv store on my HTPC so I never use the disks. Every now and then when I am too lazy to rip a new movie and want to watch it ASAP, I just use Power DVD 9. It works fine.

Originally Posted by ab1tar

Heavy, what do you use to rip your blue-ray? Been thinking it would be nice to not have to walk into my living room to watch my movies that aren't on netflix...

I use AnyDVD HD. I paid for the 2 year license... it was like $110 or something. I got tired of looking for freeware options. AnyDVD HD works... and it works well. I then use Handbrake to convert to .MKV files. The ripping takes between 20-30 min and the converting takes an hour or more, even with a Core i7 CPU.

AnyDVD HD also lets you rip regular DVDs as well. I did a big project recently ripping my 200+ collection of DVD movies and TV series to my HTPC and I used both AnyDVD HD and Handbrake and they did a good job and didn't take too long.

MakeMKV is an awesome free tool to make mkv's. That's what I use for my DVD collection. I haven't tried Blu-Ray's yet so I can't comment.

How big (average) are the Blu-Ray mkv's?

Typically anywhere between 4-8 GB, depending on the length and features you include in the conversion.

What would the comparable uncompressed ISO size be? I didn't know mkv's compressed that much. When I rip my DVD's they are 4-8GB, uncompressed of course. Have you ever noticed quality issues?

When I rip to my hard disk, they are anywhere between 30-50GB each. No quality issues. Handbrake does a great job... always 100% in sync and great image quality with AC3 out for surround sound.