fschaeffer Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 Hi,I've seen and watched many Contro4 advertisements on people being able to browse through a whole DVD library using their C4 remote or touchpanel.If I wanted to store all my 100+ DVD movies/shows, so that I could browse whenever I wanted, let’s say, a specific 007 movie, without having to actually place the physical DVD media into a player, what do I need to purchase? Does Control4 HC-300 and/or HC-500 have this capability? I believe I need a media center and some reasonable storage space (around 4Gb per movie), but wasn’t able to figure out whether C4 has the full solution or only part of it.Regards Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lippavisual Posted February 26, 2008 Share Posted February 26, 2008 C4 does not stream any video. The library you talk about is from using the Sony 400 disc changer, which basically acts like a DVD jukebox. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fschaeffer Posted February 26, 2008 Author Share Posted February 26, 2008 Is the Sony DVD changer the only "integratable" piece of equipment that C4 currently supports? What if I used one of these desktop media center solutions (a big hard-drive with some sort of SW that would encode these DVD into it)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 You would still need a computer or similar device to play the video back. What I did was build a Windows Media Center PC and installed MyMovies http://www.mymovies.dk/ into it which allows me to rip the DVD into the hard drive via the onscreen menu. It also allows me to chose a movie for playback from the PC menu. In order to be able to select and movie and have it play, using the C4 navigator, then you would need the 777. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shaneoneill Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 You would still need a computer or similar device to play the video back. What I did was build a Windows Media Center PC and installed MyMovies http://www.mymovies.dk/ into it which allows me to rip the DVD into the hard drive via the onscreen menu. It also allows me to chose a movie for playback from the PC menu. In order to be able to select and movie and have it play, using the C4 navigator, then you would need the 777.Hey zip, do you have to select your movies from the PC then? I'm reading you cannot use it currently through the navigator? Do you think youll have that capability someday? I'm guessing that would come only with streaming video ability from C4 then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Yes, you have to select your movies from the PC. It is possible to be able to select movies from via navigator, but it would require a custom 2-way serial driver between the HC-300 and PC. The 777 sends its DVD information to C4 via serial and allows control4 to know what DVDs are in the changer. I'm sure someone with the control4 SDK and developer knowledge of Windows XP MCE or Vista Ultimate could develop a driver that would allow DVD selection via navigator. Basically the PC would need to send data to control4 about its movies, and c4 would need a serial command that told the PC to load up the correct movie. In fact, the second half of that is possible. You could potentially make a one-way serial driver (or something IR via girder) that tells the PC to load up a video player and play a certin movie. But you would need to manually add each movie into control4 and edit the driver with the new Serial/IR command to send to the PC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
str1der Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 What we need is some 777 emulator software for a PC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterM1 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 What we need is some 777 emulator software for a PCMCE with the MyMovies2 plugin as mentioned above works great. I'm guessing one could create a C4 IR driver (if one is not there already) and fully control that setup via the integrated Microsoft IR receiver. The difference is that the video database is on the PC instead of C4 and the movie selections display on TVs instead of C4 screens.and...hint hint from another current discussion...MyMovies2 knows how to sort movies that start with "The" properly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fschaeffer Posted February 27, 2008 Author Share Posted February 27, 2008 couple of questions ob both solutions:- when using the 777, how fast is the browsing? Does the C4 actually have to read all the information via the serial connection for every browsing operation or does it store is in its memory?- in MyMovies, does it make a genuine copy/rip of the DVD, including menus, dolby digital/DTS audio, etc.?- how long does it take to rip a 2h movie- is the quality the same compared to playing it with the dvd media itself.thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rsmout Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Browsing through the navigator is quick when using a 777. (We have two of them and the system sees them as one big movie collection.) The 777s are a little slow rotating to the correct disc but it's not a big deal. What I like is most movies start by themselves. No ads, navigating through a DVD menu, ect... This works for most movies, but not all. If Blu-Ray hadn't come on the scene, I would purchase a third 777. Now I'm waiting for a Blu-Ray 777 before I buy a third. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tumult Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 until there's a good (inexpensive:)) blu ray changer, you could use a ms extender. its virtually the same as using a pc except that you can browse movies (dvd, blu ray, hd dvd) on the tv with the movies stored on the pc(vista or mce2005). You can use c4 to turn on/off the xbox360 (one extender that I know works) and use my movies to browse, which looks a lot like the 777 setup. tum Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
panamagixxer Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 Browsing through the navigator is quick when using a 777. (We have two of them and the system sees them as one big movie collection.) The 777s are a little slow rotating to the correct disc but it's not a big deal. What I like is most movies start by themselves. No ads, navigating through a DVD menu, ect... This works for most movies, but not all. If Blu-Ray hadn't come on the scene, I would purchase a third 777. Now I'm waiting for a Blu-Ray 777 before I buy a third.Same comments as rsmout - I have two as well and works well. Blue-Ray option is my next hope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterM1 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 - in MyMovies, does it make a genuine copy/rip of the DVD, including menus, dolby digital/DTS audio, etc.?- how long does it take to rip a 2h movie- is the quality the same compared to playing it with the dvd media itself.thanks- MyMovies is a DVD management and playback system, it doesn't rip DVDs. You can rip DVDs with other (free) programs. MyMovies can also scan folders and auto-add new DVDs to the database although obviously it's not 100% perfect. Thus if you rip a DVD and drop it off in your DVDs folder, MyMovies will go out to IMDB or Amazon get the cover etc and populate the fields.- Quality again has nothing to do with MyMovies itself, it launches a DVD player program for playback. The default player is MCE's built-in DVD player but the best part is that it integrates with TheaterTek, if you wish. Thus quality can be equal or better to a standalone player depending on how much time you're willing to spend calibrating the output from within TheaterTek. (I wish they supported ZoomPlayer, even more tweaks possible there). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 MyMovies will rip the DVD. It stores the entire DVD uncompressed though, including subtitles, menus, audio tracks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fschaeffer Posted February 27, 2008 Author Share Posted February 27, 2008 zipperman19 , Does that mean a single layer DVD will take aprox. 4.7Gb in your hard-drive? And if you play this uncompressed version, quality will be exactly the same as the physical disc, correct? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 All of that is correct. The quality is exactly the same as the physical disk. In fact, if you have a good video card, it may even upconvert the movie. If you want to cut down on size, you can rip it with another program and cut out some of the extra audio tracks and features or even compress it a little. I don't mind them taking up that much disk space though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 All of that is correct. The quality is exactly the same as the physical disk. In fact, if you have a good video card, it may even upconvert the movie. If you want to cut down on size, you can rip it with another program and cut out some of the extra audio tracks and features or even compress it a little. I don't mind them taking up that much disk space though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterM1 Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 MyMovies will rip the DVD. It stores the entire DVD uncompressed though, including subtitles, menus, audio tracks!good to know! I've always ripped outside of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
str1der Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 What we need is some 777 emulator software for a PCMCE with the MyMovies2 plugin as mentioned above works great. I'm guessing one could create a C4 IR driver (if one is not there already) and fully control that setup via the integrated Microsoft IR receiver. The difference is that the video database is on the PC instead of C4 and the movie selections display on TVs instead of C4 screens.and...hint hint from another current discussion...MyMovies2 knows how to sort movies that start with "The" properly The difference is when using MCE or Xbox or any number of streamers it's not integrated into C4. So no coverart on touch screens and you have to jump out of the C4 interface for control. If someone could write a Sony 777 emulator that would talk through a serial port and simply assign a rippped DVD folder to a vritual slot then C4 would think it was just talking to an actual 777. Don't even know if it would be possible but it sure would be cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tumult Posted February 27, 2008 Share Posted February 27, 2008 str1der - If you use my movies along with xbox360, you get all the cover art and more. check my movies website for the pics. once you have the movies added to my movies collection management, it pulls in the cover art and more. Note that this is more laborious than using a 777 and just scanning what's in the 777. I've noticed that within my movies, navigating is slower than if you just used media center, but the my movies interface is currently better than media center. Also, the new features in the next release of my movies 3.0 is supposed to have a bunch of great new features. Yes, I'm definitely a fan of this free software:)tum Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Just so you know....If you rip the DVD into my movies through the MCE interface, you can't watch the movie using an xbox 360. The Xbox360 doesn't support playing VOB files stored on a hard-drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
str1der Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Oh I know what an extender is. I personally use Xboxes running XBMC instead. Try running multiple extenders off of a single PC. Good Luck. I think you were missing my point though. Yes when you have C4 switch to your extenders on screen display you can use it's interface to select coverart. I do this with XBMC but if you want to use a TS to look through your collection and select a DVD you can't. Using a TS this way allows someone to look through the collection without affecting what others might be watching at the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zipperman19 Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 No I understand that. You can't use the C4 navigator to select a movie, and have it play automatically! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
str1der Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 Sorry Zipperman. I was replying to Tumult Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeterM1 Posted February 28, 2008 Share Posted February 28, 2008 I don't see the point of browsing through movies on a small TS (3-10'), I'd rather browse through a 300+ disc collection on a 50'+ plasma or projector screen instead and enjoy large cover art as well as the opportunity for everyone in the room to participate (as opposed to only the person holding the TS). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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