use a computer to store and play DVD movies on TV

[AND1]

Hi, I have a few questions I was hoping you guys can help me with.

Is it possible to play movies from your computer to your TV with DVD player quality? I basically want to save my movies on a hard drive and play them on my TV with the same quality as if I was using my DVD player.

What hardware do I need and how would I do it? Thanks.

[redwudz]

Sure, DVD is a digital media. You can play it from your computer just the same as you can play it from a DVD player. But.. It takes up quite a bit of room. The size is about 7GB average for a lot of the popular DVDs. You can use DVD Shrink to reduce the size down to about 4.4GB. Still, 10 DVDs will more than fill up a 40GB hard drive. That's one limitation. The other is your video display card. If your card has a output equal to your TV resolution, it will look OK. If you have a video card with component or other higher definition output, it will look better. For playing from a computer I use Power DVD. But freeware programs like VLC do a good job also.


What I use is a compromise. I convert some DVDs to Xvids with a program like FairUse Wizard. The quality is fair for watching on TV, but the video takes up about 700-800MB on the hard drive. You can get a lot more on the HD. That's one option, there are others.

EDIT: If you just want to play a DVD and not store it, just the part about the video card and the software player applies. I use a ATI 9550 video card out through a DVI port and through a ATI DVI to Component adapter, then out to my video projector. You can use S-Video out with a lower quality or composite out for low quality.

But if you just want to play DVDs, you are better off with a cheap standalone DVD player. It's a lot simpler and generally cheaper.

[AND1]

I won't save the entire disc. I'll just rip the movie with DVD Shrink (no compression) which is usually 4-5 GB.

As for the video cards, which video card will give me the highest definition (best connection)?

[redwudz]

It depends on what you are displaying the video on. If it's just a composite input to a TV, just a video card with composite out. Better is S-video and next is component. If you have a HDTV, then DVI, HDMI are the best. For component, the one I mentioned above is about $70US and the adapter another $25 or so.

[wwjd]

I recently purchased and started using a Linkplayer2 from I-O Data. It is networked to my computer and I play everything from mpeg2 to DivX to WMV on my TV from my HDD. I have several DVD movies on my HDD but I mostly record TV stuff to my HDD using a PVR250 capture card. The key is having plently of HDD space. I started out thinking I would convert to DivX or WMV but I soon tired of the quality loss and the time it took to do the conversion. My P4 2.53GHz is just too slow.

I have also thought about transferring my DVD movies to HDD but that also became time consuming and unrealistic in terms of HDD space. Ideally, you would need several terabytes of storage to make the DVD movie thing work. It is very doable but could be pretty expensive. One final thought that I could not get around was that once you have spent many many hours transferring DVD movies to a HDD, what do you do if that HDD goes bad??? Lots of work down the drain!

BTW I really do enjoy my Linkplayer2, lots of flexability with recording TV stuff to HDD for later viewing. Fast forward through commercials or when I feel like it I use something like Videoredo to cut the commercials out. A lot like a DVR but with more options. It is also great for quickly being able to preview stuff I have encoded, no more burning to DVD+RW to see what the final cut will look like.