DVD/BD Drive on Headless Server

[COLO_PVR_GUY]

I just bought a new TV for the basement and an HD-300 to connect it. I decided that rather than buying a Blu-Ray player, I would just install a Blu-Ray drive in my Sage server (headless), which sits in another room in the basement. I assumed I could just pop a disc in the server and then sit down in front of the TV and watch. I arbitrarilly grabbed the movie Entrapment and then I went to Videos->DVD/BD and the movie didn't show up. So I thought that I maybe needed to specify the drive as a media import directory. I added the DVD/BD drive "D:" as an import directory. Now a disc icon shows up without a name. If I select it, the screen goes black. I can hit the Back button and get back to the Sage menu, but that's all.

I have searched the forums, but everything I found relates to video cards. The card I have in is a cheap PCI one since I'm using my PCIex16 slot for a tuner card. Does the video card matter when using HD extenders? Is what I'm trying to do even possible?

Thanks in advance.

[joematt]

The only way to play Blue Ray through Sage is to rip it to disk and break the encryption. Move the BlueRay drive to a Windows machine, install AnyDVD-HD and ImgBurn and away you go!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by joematt

The only way to play Blue Ray through Sage is to rip it to disk and break the encryption. AnyDVD!

Yeah, this is it. The BluRay disc is encrypted, and you need to remove that encryption for sage to be able to play it back. AnyDVDHD will remove teh encryption transparently, on the fly. In stall it on your server, and it should work as you ahve it curerntly set up (choosing the rive form the Videos -> DVD/BD)

[COLO_PVR_GUY]

OK, so it sounds like it should work, I just need t buy AnyDVDHD. I took the Entrapment DVD out and put the Italian Job DVD in. That disk seems to work fine. Is it possible that the entrapment DVD is protected as well and that's why it won't play?

I really appreciate the responses and help.

[joematt]

DVDs will play fine in Sage it's BlueRay Disks that need AnyDVD-HD. I'm not at all sure that you can play them directly from a blueray drive using Sage. You can download a trial version of AnyDVD-HD from slysoft.com and see for yourself. You also need Sage V7!

[Fuzzy]

Yes, Sage will playback from BluRay's in the drive just fine (as long as there's no copy protection), if it's in an import directory. You'll have to make sure sage does a media refresh after inserting the drive though, for it to pick up the differences.

[joematt]

I only put a disk in my drive just once to rip it, after witch I place it back into it's case and store them in a cool, dark and dry place along with thousands of others. They are just to expensive to trust using them again.

[COLO_PVR_GUY]

That's what I was doing woth DVD's. I would rip, then compress with AutoGK. They looked fine on my 42-inch plasma (not perfect mind you, but good enough for me). Now I play them on my new 58-inch plasma and can't stand it. I can't somach the though of using 4 or 5GB to store each one on my server, let alone ~9GB for each BluRay!

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by COLO_PVR_GUY

That's what I was doing woth DVD's. I would rip, then compress with AutoGK. They looked fine on my 42-inch plasma (not perfect mind you, but good enough for me). Now I play them on my new 58-inch plasma and can't stand it. I can't somach the though of using 4 or 5GB to store each one on my server, let alone ~9GB for each BluRay!

Actually, DVD's are about 9GB - BluRay's are up to 45GB... With 2TB drives costing $70, that's only $0.31/DVD, and $1.60/BluRay... That 'extra cost' on the purchase of a DDV/BluRay is worth my time/space it would require to keep the discs available.

[joematt]

You are talking about 30 - 50 GB for a BlueRay ISO. I gave up along time ago worrying about online storage costs (which are going down every day). I have about 12 TB of online storage (converting to 2TB drives now) and close to 24 TB of offline storage. I only use 1 and 1.5 TB drives for offline storage (don't trust 2TB drives yet) for archiving.

I am slowly moving all of my CD/DVD disk archives to hard drives now (some from 2000 when I started this) I have lost at least 30% of these to time.

[joematt]

If you are going to buy AnyDVD-HD you better do it today as this is the last day to buy a lifetime upgrade license.

[OneOfMany]

Thx Joe.. been meaning to finally buy this, and glad I was able to get the lifetime upgrades

Grant