How do the various front ends find a specific DVD on the hard drive?

[hifiaudio2]

I am just getting interested in setting up a central DVD jukebox server. I understand how to rip the dvd's to the hard drive (and by that, I mean the entire disc - I am not interested in stripping content or compressing). I want an exact copy of the original disc with all menus and extras.

How do the various players know where to look for a specific dvd that you want to play back? When I rip the discs, it just puts a whole bunch of files (video_ts *.*.*) in a folder. I am trying to figure out how the front end software, whether it be Microsoft medie edition 2005, or some of these others that I see on here like dvdlobby, understand where to look for a disc on your drive? How do you end up with either a list or icons of the covers that point to the appropriate files and play the whole disc with menu access?

And what is considered the best player to use that requires minimal setup?

[hifiaudio2]

Also, FYI - the only player on my computer right now is PowerDVD, which I dont see many people here using.

Is theatertek or Zoomplayer considered standard for entry into "dvd from computer"?

[hifiaudio2]

Ok - after reading and reading, I am now experimenting with zoomplayer, dscaler, and ffdshow - phenominal picture quality!

BUT, I still dont understand how to link a shortcut so that clicking on it gives me access to the full dvd WITH menus that is residing on my hard disk. Is that possible?

[Steve Schauer]

The root file is VIDEO_TS.IFO. Find that file, right click, choose "open with" and choose zplayer.exe. Then doubleclicking that file (or a shortcut to it) should bring up the main menu of the DVD if you've ripped the whole disk.

[hifiaudio2]

Thanks! I'll try that tonight.

Since DVD43free will let me see the file contents of a dvd - can I just drag and drop them from the dvd to my hard drive folder quickly without any software?

[hifiaudio2]

I treid this.. Telling zp to play video_ts.ifo just brings up zp and a black screen flashes quickly and nothing else.....

[fatmanstan]

I was having the same problem. Look into guides on using Ifoedit to re-write the ifo file for it's new location. Doesn't seem too tough, but I've been a little too busy to dedicate much time to it.

[araghava]

rather than drag and drop you should use a ripper like dvdshrink or dvddecrypter to copy the files to the HD. it should work after that.

[waruwaru]

I was playing with Meedio awhile back and in the configuration menu, you can specify some search string (with regular expressions if necessary), and it will use the pattern to determine where the DVD is. I had it working with
- Ripping each DVDs using DVDDecrypter to a single *.iso file
- Tell Meedio to play the DVD by
- mount the .iso file as a DVD drive
- Meedio plays the DVD off the virtual drive

It works well. It's just like having the original DVD in the drive. And each DVD is self-contained in a single file.

[hifiaudio2]

Waru - that sound like a nice way to do it - but I dont know Meedio - can this also be accomplished using ZP? What do I have to use to mount the ISO?

[fatmanstan]

use daemon tools to mount. I tried to install daemon tools once, but the virtual aspi driver kept on crashing the computer on reboot, over and over agin, so I went into safe mode and uninstalled it. haven't tried it again, but by the support of daemon tools around, I would say that it was an isolated problem.

[jkaiser]

In XLobby, the path to the IFO is stored in a database. In the movies section, it simply uses that path in combination with command line properties in the file types section to start the DVD player and set the path.

I was unable to get either PowerDVD or WinDVD to work since I could not find any command line parameters that worked. I finally settled on VLC Media Player. It was far smoother over the 100 M network than any of the other players that I own. PQ quality may not be as good, since the codecs are internal to the player.