Dunno why I post the ‘geekery’ warning, I mean, it’s on here. It’s going to be house, car, computing or NHS. Music is relegated to DBJ, on the rare occasions I get enough time to do that. Well, honestly, if I did better with my time management there’d be plenty of time, I suppose. But anyhow.
So, a few days back, the post arrived containing the very, very cheap drive I picked up to commence moving stuff to the media server. See, the pain of the number of CD-Roms and CD-R/Ws and DVD drives I’ve killed ripping media to the media server means that ripping media stays happily away from my laptop’s superdrive. No, this ‘Sony’ (Blu-Ray) external drive is as close as the disks are coming.
And I set to, ripping. First up was a few Blu-Rays. Only teensy problem? They’re 32Gigs… which may tax the network, although I’ve not tested that yet. Going to, though. Did try and downconvert them using Handbrake to smaller files (say, 5 or 6 gig). Not so much of the happening, there. The laptop reported it was going to take 28 hours. So I ditched that idea and transferred the file to the media server, thinking, it can take as long as it likes, I’ll just queue the buggers up. Nope, because after reserving a bit over a gig of memory (the machine only has half a gig) and using….errr…all of it…and asking for more, Linux says ‘No way asshole’ and [Killed] it.
Still, it was only managing 0.4fps by that stage, which might take a while.
Anyhow, ignoring that problem I ripped one of the newer DVDs… and then discovered a little bugget. The VMP74 says it’s playing the subtitles, but there’s a distinct lack of subtitley goodness kicking around. I’ve checked – the file plays fine on VLC, so the subtitles are there. I’ve tried ripping the subtitles to a separate (VobSub) file, which isn’t working either. I’m just trying converting the subtitles to .srt format, which I know has worked before (but is somewhat untidy, solution wise), but should actually be working (which is what I’m going to do now) so won’t know until later if that’s worked.
One day I shall have a beautiful technological solution to these many little problems that shall not consist of sticking more duct tape over a number of other kludges. But not, it would seem, today.
