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Blu Ray drive for Mac Pro (1 Viewer)

Citizen87645

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I've ripped a couple non-Region A / Region 1 titles in my collection, and it has been a nice way to watch them without having to set up my cheapie universal player each time. One was the Eureka Blu-ray of Two for the Road. I also have a standalone DVD of the Buffy musical episode that is anamorphic (the episode is 4:3 letterboxed in the DVD series) that I think came from the UK. I may have had to temporarily change the region on the drive to do that one though.
 
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jcroy

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IIRC, region coding on bluray discs is primarily at the software level. This is how anydvd and dvdfab appear to handle it (ie. very easy to bypass) when ripping.

In contrast, dvd had the region coding done at the hardware level. (Initially it was harder to bypass with rpc phase 2, but brute force cracking of css made this completely moot).
 

Nelson Au

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Hey Cameron, I ordered Two for the Road from Twilight Time a month Or two ago. I wanted to grab one before they were all gone. I didn’t know there is a Region B version from Eureka.

I watched about 40 minutes of The Flight of the Phoenix rip and it’s indistinguishable from a Region A disc. It’s great!

jr, that’s what I understood as to why it’s possible to be able to rip a non Region A disc. It’s a great work around if there is no Region A disc available.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I've not tried buying or ripping non-Region A discs. My player is Region A locked, I think, so haven't ever tested whether the ripper apps ignore that.

It should, I’ve ripped plenty without having to do anything special. If I get an international disc with region coding now it doesn’t even make it into my modified Oppo, it just goes straight to ripping - easier than doing the region code switching dance.
 

Citizen87645

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Yeah, shortly after I bought the Eureka, TT announced their release. I had a bit of "D'oh!" moment, but then I wound up buying the TT release anyway as a collector piece. :biggrin:
Hey Cameron, I ordered Two for the Road from Twilight Time a month Or two ago. I wanted to grab one before they were all gone. I didn’t know there is a Region B version from Eureka.

I watched about 40 minutes of The Flight of the Phoenix rip and it’s indistinguishable from a Region A disc. It’s great!

jr, that’s what I understood as to why it’s possible to be able to rip a non Region A disc. It’s a great work around if there is no Region A disc available.
 

Citizen87645

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So this is a bit of topic diversion, but as I'm accumulating external drives, it's starting to bother my aesthetic sensibilities to have these non-uniform enclosures lining up side-by-side (one is from OWC, and then two different case designs from WD).

I was thinking of just pulling the hard drives and putting them in a 5-bay tower rack just to get them all in one enclosure. I don't want to RAID them or whatever, they would just be separate drives but all in one case. I saw this on Amazon, but not sure if it will do what I describe. Mainly wondering about how power would go to each drive, and then USB connections to each drive.

Suggestions?



EDIT: I think one of the Amazon comments explains one way of doing it, but I'm unclear what type of power supply is needed. I guess maybe I also would want something with an actual case. :biggrin:

So something more like this:



EDIT2: Learning as I go. I guess the official term is "JBOD" - Just a Bunch of Disks. :rolling-smiley:

EDIT3: I guess the other consideration is the warranty on my newer WD drives. I'd probably be voiding them if I cracked them out of their enclosures, so I'll have to keep the JBOD enclosure as a consideration when I'm looking to replace the drives in a couple years.
 
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Nelson Au

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Cameron, that’s an interesting solution you found. My Mac Pro can accommodate 4 hard drives, so I’m going that route for now. But if I change to another Mac or computer, those external enclosures are something I might have to look at, including going the full NAS route.
 

Citizen87645

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At the moment I have settled on this particular one:

Some of the complaints about the others were that the disks go to sleep and can't be waked without power cycling the enclosure. The price of the Media Sonic one also is about where I'd like it, but there's a slightly more expensive unit that has hardware RAID. This one is just intended for JBOD, with RAIDing required via software if I change my mind later.

The earliest my WD HD goes off warranty is November, so I have some time to watch prices.
 

Nelson Au

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After seeing the CD ripping thread by Mike Frezon and seeing DaveF asked if I tried streaming music from Plex, I thought I’d post here rather then distract Mike’s thread about best way to rip CDs.

I did read up on how Plex can stream music and I found that it has DLNA capability. I want to be able to stream the music from my Mac to the Oppo 205. I learned it can be done via DLNA. Something new to me and I’m glad that Plex has that feature. So I enabled DLNA and I read that the Oppo should then be able to see the Plex server. At first when I tried it, the Oppo did not see the Plex server. After fiddling around to no success, I used my iPad with the Oppo app on it and it didn’t see the Plex server either. So I went back to the Plex settings to see if there was anything there to do. I left it since it said not to mess with the advanced settings. Then when I went back to the Oppo, I tried again and this time it could see the Plex server. It worked and I was able to access folders I had some WAV files in and some FLAC files, it could see the iTunes folders too. The WAV files played fine and I was able to use the Oppo‘s DAC. However the iTunes files were not available. Could be I need to reorganize a folder to have the ALAC files placed there. After fiddling around awhile, I lost the connection to the Plex server and I have not been able to reacquire it.

Of course while in the Plex app on the Apple TV, the iTunes files are available and plays. But it’s not how I want to access the music As the music passes through the HDML port from the Apple TV to the pre-amp. And that works, but my pre-amp has an audio lock delay. So as soon as the music starts, there is a delay until my pre-amp’s processor kicks in. So I miss the first few seconds of a song.

Right now, the best way it’s been working is to use a hard drive plugged into the rear of the Oppo. It would be cool to stream from the Plex. For now I’ll be playing around with it.
 

Nelson Au

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Hey guys, I discovered something this weekend that surprised me. I started to make MKV files of The Streets of San Francisco. I was using the MovieDB (TMDB) to number the episodes as I’ve been doing since I started this effort. So for this series, the pilot film is considered part of the Specials section. On the DVD itself, the pilot film is the first episode on the DVD. But I numbered the pilot s00e01 then the first episode production episode is numbered s01e01.

The trouble is when I scanned the content in Plex, I did not realize why Plex is calling the pilot episode as the first episode and not following the TMDB. So the Pilot would show up as the first episode and the Special was an Army Archerd interview with Karl Malden and Michael Douglas on the set of the show. After I was messing around with the numbering, I took a wild guess and tried the Fix Match. That did not work, but looking there, I realized that Plex will use any database you select. So I found there is a TVDB as a reference source. So I had Plex use that database and then the episodes lined up right. So maybe it’s best to use the TVDB database and in this case, the content of the DVD set matches episode order of the TVDB. But Plex was not using TVDB.

But a show like Star Trek, I like the poster art better that’s from the TMDB database. They have posters that are the DVD cover art for each season. And I also realized why the Special section on the Star Trek series like TNG, DS9 and Voyager, the extras content never matched up. But I figured the TVDB probably has the information line up with the DVD content. But I don’t like the poster artwork. I could try to copy the posters and use them of course.

So which database do you guys use? Maybe one could use the TVDB for TV shows and TMDB for movies? Perhaps as I discovered I should have used the TVDB because it follows the DVD content order.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I use Plex’s automatic setting which I believe looks through multiple databases for the best match - TheMDB, TVDB and Plex’s own database. I’ve also changed some cover art manually for the fun of it, both for TV shows and movies. When possible, I switched most of my movies to display the original theatrical poster with credits rather than home video key art.
 

Nelson Au

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Hey Josh, wow, fast response! Thanks for that!

I wasn’t aware of an automatic setting that looks for multiple databases. Maybe I saw that and didn’t realize it. I’ll see if I can find it and try it. I’m thinking about that though, one would need to know which database to base the episode numbering on, right?

As far as poster art, I try to find the original theatrical posters too! :)
 

DaveF

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I use the defaults in Emby. Unless something doesn’t work, then I manually fix it and assign whatever database gives the right info, as best possible.
 

Josh Steinberg

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Yes, I should also note that it was the default setting on Plex to look through those different databases when I signed up.
 

Rodney

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I've been having a ball ripping my collection to Plex. I was wondering about PAL discs. If I purchase a PAL DVD, is there anything special I need to do to rip it so it shows properly? Do I need to demux it to slow it down to compensate for the 4% speedup during playback? I haven't purchased any yet, don't want to waste money if it won't play properly.
 

Citizen87645

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I have one PAL disc, and it seemed to rip fine without any of the usual speed up issues. Not sure the reason. I was expecting to have the audio speed up like I was used to when playing on a standalone DVD player.
 

jcroy

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I've been having a ball ripping my collection to Plex. I was wondering about PAL discs. If I purchase a PAL DVD, is there anything special I need to do to rip it so it shows properly? Do I need to demux it to slow it down to compensate for the 4% speedup during playback? I haven't purchased any yet, don't want to waste money if it won't play properly.

Sometimes PAL "labeled" dvd discs are not actually really PAL.

If the video data is stored as progressive frames, the dvd player will just use a different pulldown pattern to play it on a PAL tv screen.
 

Josh Steinberg

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I've been having a ball ripping my collection to Plex. I was wondering about PAL discs. If I purchase a PAL DVD, is there anything special I need to do to rip it so it shows properly? Do I need to demux it to slow it down to compensate for the 4% speedup during playback? I haven't purchased any yet, don't want to waste money if it won't play properly.

You shouldn’t have to do a thing. Rip it as it is on the disc. Let Plex handle any necessary conversion during playback rather than altering the base file. Many TVs nowadays can play native PAL even if not advertised as such. If your TV can’t handle the signal, Plex should recognize that and convert it on the fly.
 

Rodney

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Thanks for the PAL info.

In other news, my ASUS U9M External DVD drive has developed an extremely loud spinning noise while ripping, and no longer ejects the disc as quickly as it used to. It now makes clicking noises before finally ejecting the disc, and the tray doesn't come out very far anymore. I purchased it in June of last year, but I think I wore it out with all the ripping I've done.
 

jcroy

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There's ways of converting a standard internal cd/dvd drive, into an "external drive". Basically boxes which have a sata -> usb2 (or usb3) converter.

In practice when it comes to a lot of disc ripping, I have found that standard internal cd/dvd drives are somewhat more reliable than external-only drives.
 

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