First I just wanted to say that whenever I search for a problem related to movies/dvds/electronics, it seems I always end up finding the answer in an afterdawn forum thread, so I'm glad I finally had a reason to register here :)
The purpose of this thread is to ask for some advice for a christmas gift for my brother: we have a large dvd collection, and are looking for kind of digital solution that hopefully won't break the bank. What we are looking for is some type of media player that can play dvd images, either by streaming them or through a usb port. That way we can just buy a giant portable hard drive and load our movies onto that instead of having hundreds of dvds taking up space and getting scratched up. Is there anything currently on the market that can play dvd VOBs, or dvd ISOs? I guess VOBs would be preferred, to keep conversion to minimum. Also I would prefer something with a usb port -- if it was some kind of streaming multimedia device, I'd still have to hook a hard drive up to a computer via usb in order to stream it anyway.
I hope this is clear -- I'm not all that tech savvy when it comes to hardware. A few months ago my brother bought a new philips dvd player (for about 50 bucks too -- I didn't realize they were that cheap), and I was amazed that it had a usb port and could play avi files off of my portable hard drive. So that's the kind of thing I'm imagining, only it would be a 1TB portable drive, and it would play ISOs or VOBs -- I really wouldn't want to have to convert all of our movies to AVIs, and then you would lose menus/extras/video quality to boot... So, is this a pipe dream, or is there some kind of product out on the market that can do this?
I just bought the Western DigitalHD TV Media Player. I'm hoping that it will do exactly what you described. I've read reviews on it and they seem very favorable. The only thing it won't do is stream media. So, you need to unhook the harddrive from the player and hook it to your computer to add content. But that is not a big deal to me.
One question for both of you -- when the products you mention play .isos, do the menus still work? I mean, can you navigate the menus like a normal DVD player to access the extra content? I also saw the WD HD TV Media Player, but was under the impression that it couldn't do this...
I know the Tvix does. The iso files acts just like the real DVD. But Blu-ray is a different story, some menus work and some just play the movie. Mostly (concerning Blu-ray) I just encode to m2ts file and keep the movie only anyway.
