We're looking for a new portable video solution for our teen kids for road trips. We've been using a two screen dvd set on the headrests (and we have a ton of dvds that they enjoy rewatching). I want to keep it relatively cheap, too.

I'm considering a couple of the $50 Kindle Fires with an SD card for space. Has anyone watched a movie on one of these? Can anyone offer tips on how to go about ripping DVDs to decent quality MP4s?

thanks!

-jk

I just use an old laptop with a 1tb ssd. The kids have no problem with that, and it fits lots of movies.

For DVD ripping, I've found Handbrake does the job nicely. The couple times I've tried Bluray ripping, I've failed to get something usable. (One time I ended up with the director's commentary track...)

For playback, any Android tablet will do the job. The downside of the Kindle tablets is that you have to do a bunch of annoying stuff to install the Google Play Store, Google Play Services, and all that. Also, they're less responsive in terms of rolling out the latest Android features, bug fixes, security fixes, etc.

I got my daughter a Dell Venue 8 7840. It's got a microSD slot, so you can expand it out for lots of videos. It's got three cameras, for some weird stereoscopic stuff. It's got Intel Inside so... it's reasonably fast. It's got the most amazingly bright screen you've ever seen. It's currently running Android 5.1. Unclear if/when they'll bring over Android 6, but it's still Dell's current top-end tablet, so there's at least some hope of it staying current.

I second Handbrake. Results work great with many devices and software including Roku, Plex, Kindle and pretty much everything else.

I simply plug the Roku into the my minivan's entertainment system and then the kids can use the built-in media browser to pick from hundreds of movies on a 1 TB drive that plugs directly into the Roku. No more swapping DVD's and worrying about scratched disks or skipping in cheap DVD players. RF remote works anywhere in the car.

Last Christmas I got each of my kids a Kindle Fire. My thoughts: The bad: software is klunky and ungainly, especially compared to iPad. They take forever to charge. Getting your own movies off and on is a pain. By the time you create a second profile for your kid, like half of the storage is used by system software, so you can only put 2-3 movies on it, which is nowhere near sufficient for a long road trip. The good: Amazon Freetime Unlimited. If you have an internet connection, there's a ton of content there that's age appropriate and the kids love it. Mine are age 6 and 5 and there's lots of content for kids their age. (books, games and video). My girls share an account because they are close enough in age that they are interested in the same content and it saved me a few bucks every month. Be aware that the video available in Freetime is streaming only though, however games and books are downloaded and are playable offline. I'm just glad that they don't harrass me every 2 minutes for in-app purchases and new games like they do when they borrow the iPad. As long as you subscribe, all content is otherwise free, unlimited, and no in-app purchases. Hardware seems to be decent enough quality and battery life is decent.

Also recommending Handbrake. However out of the box, it only reads from media sources without DRM.

You will need to perform a few extra steps to enable conversion of copy protected discs. Specific up to date instructions for both Windows and OS X platforms is here:

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-rip-a-dvd-to-your-computer-5809765

Currently running through this process for my entire DVD collection, including all the TV shows from the start of my cord cutting days. Hoping to complete that process in a few months. I'm batching it up a bit where I'll image the discs onto my NAS. Then from there let Handbrake chew through the DVD images overnight.

Long term goal is to have all my media sitting in Plex. With 100mbit upload at home, I can stream to any place I'm visiting with decent connectivity. Or if I know connectivity is going to be an issue, I can have Plex pull the media locally. All without rummaging through file folders, instead seeing my collection with full cover art and descriptions. Makes it easier to grab a few episodes from an old TV show for an upcoming flight.

Thanks for the thoughts, everyone! I'll certainly look into handbrake.

-jk

Tom, what kind of file sizes are you getting for your final rips? What quality settings to you generally use in Handbrake, and what format are you saving as?

A while back, I thought about doing the same thing you are, but in my initial tests I could never really get the quality where I wanted it versus the file sizes. I would end up with a 2GB file that looked just as poor as a 4GB file, but that might have been on my computer monitor where for some reason most of these DVD rips look much worse than they do on my TV...

Looks like an average DVD movie is ending up between 1-2GB. I'm usually using the AppleTV 2 presets for them in Handbrake. The extended release of the first Lord of the Rings movie on DVD turned into 3.2GB.

I don't personally have a home theater setup, and haven't for years at this point. Preserving 5.1 audio or other parts of the movie on disc hasn't been a focus of this conversion. Most everything I've transcoded has wound up with stereo audio only.

Long term if I do end up with a home theater setup again, I'll likely go with a different approach. One reason I resisted Plex for so long was their lack of supporting full disc images, which is how I was handling my DVD movies. My last home theater setup had a Mac Mini running the older Front Row, and it would play the disc images as if the physical DVD was in the system. Thus preserving the 5.1 sound that I had the setup for at the time.

Overall my goal with this is to ensure media I have paid for in the past is still playable nearly as easily as Netflix. Their rotating library results in some shows/movies I like disappearing from streaming at times.

Those sizes would be fine with me! I'll have to give it another shot.


Have you compared results of the same conversion just with stereo in one file and 5.1 in the other? I'd have to imagine that the file sizes wouldn't be too dissimilar, and if I were you I'd rather just rip once. Wouldn't it just me a matter of a couple hundred MBs?


Yeah, that was an annoyance with Plex for me too. In the end, I think I'm going to have to decide whether I actually care about the special features on these discs. I haven't watched one in years. I think the last time I watched a commentary track was 2011.


Agreed. This was a motivating factor for me too. Netflix already has a terrible movie selection, but you can't even expect the good stuff to stay there.

Here's an alternate suggestion: Walmart.

I realize that this will definitely not appeal to most people, but Walmart, who owns vudu, has a program where you can take your DVDs and blurays into the store. One at a time, they'll scan your movie to make sure it's the right one in their system, and then they'll give you access to the Ultraviolet copy of that movie, where you'll "own" it as part of your digital movie library.

Back when they first started this (something like 4-5 years ago now) I tried it out by taking them three of my most-watched movies. It was a slightly slow process, but the results were pretty good. I can watch those movies any time, and don't have to go to my DVD shelves and pop the disc in a player.

The downside is that if you're doing this with a lot of movies, it'll get expensive. They charge $2 a movie to go from DVD to SD stream or from bluray to HD stream. Or, you can pay $5 to go from DVD to HD stream. However, if you're planning on getting a NAS just for this purpose or buy gear to put a Plex server together, the costs might work out. A rough count of my DVDs tells me that I have about 180 movies, so that would cost me about $400, assuming I wanted to get the HD versions of some of those. I'd estimate that my NAS cost a total of about $950, though I use that for more than movies.

Fortunately, vudu has gotten much better about getting their app into more devices. It's on Roku, it has Chromecast support, it's even on Tivos (and I'm pretty sure there's an Apple TV app).

Again, I realize that this isn't for everyone, but it can be a nice alternative. You don't have to manage your library, you don't have to go through the ripping process, and you can still watch your content wherever you have internet access (no offline viewing, unfortunately). I just thought I'd mention it as a potential alternative.

Wait, didn't one of the MP3 services try that (well, something essentially the same) in the early 2000's and get sued out of business by the RIAA?

I guess the MPAA is more forward thinking than that. Or have learned from the lesson of the RIAA being demonized from their actions.

UltraViolet is created and run by a mix of 85 companies that have something to do with the movie or tech industry. Many of them are part of the MPAA. The service is very locked down using DRM.

MPAA learned from the RIAA, mostly in what to do differently when trying to protect their position. When the RIAA's only focus was trying to sue users of Napster and other sharing services, they didn't look ahead to see the digital storefronts. Their legal efforts were also aimed at the services that offered the CD->MP3 conversion services they could stop under laws back then. Thus "some computer company" was able to push the iTunes store along with a transcoding application, and eventually led to DRM free digital music.

MPAA on the legal front lobbies for more laws criminalizing DRM cracking, while adding DRM to the physical media to avoid the iTunes transcoding issue. RIAA has joined them, but the cat is out of the bag as far as DRM music ownership. Hence the push towards music streaming services where DRM can return.

MPAA seems to be trying to hold onto some of the digital pieces to avoid the industry losing control of the medium. They figure UltraViolet is a way to give consumers the digital benefits, while still pocketing money from the format change/transcoding, just as they did VHS->DVD. And while retaining some control with the DRM.