Playing VOB dvds...can menu be easier? Options

[ericinboston]

Hi all! I just bought the WD TV the other day...I am literally only using it to play ripped dvds which are in the VOB format and the correct directory structure. I also typically rip just the movie...no menus or chapters or anything. But not always...sometimes the entire dvd is ripped.

My question is that when I navigate to them via the Video Folders, when I get to the movie, I've got, for example, 5 VOB files in each. Now, I'm a techie so I know what they are for and realize the _01.vob is where the movie starts (and that WD will just move on to _02 when _01 is done), but it seems kinda dumb for WD to display all 5. Why not just display the first _01.vob file? For non techies at my house, they're going to wonder why after clicking a few times to navigate dumps them into a folder full of VOBs.

I've looked in the Options and I do not see any kind of way to disguise this.

I don't want to make Playlists because that's just going to make more work for me. I'd rather just have a few folders (Comedy, Drama, Action for example) and then movie titles in those folders (Caddyshack, for example) and finally when I get to Caddyshack, there is just 1 "file" I need to click with the remote.

Any ideas? Or is this a feature request?

On a less imporant note, if instead of choosing Video Folders I choose All Videos, I get thousands of crazy files listed like .DAT files. I have no idea what they are and they typically start with CAT. Anyone know what these are and why WD is listing them?

-Eric

[WDUser]

Are you sure you have a Gen. 2? See the first link in my sig below to confirm.

As for your DVDs, I guess you'd be better of simply ripping them as a single lossless MKV using MakeMKV. That way, you'll have only 1 file per movie, which is simpler to handle, plus no quality loss as well.

Try it and let me know.

[ericinboston]

Hi. I definitely have a Ver 2...I checked before posting.

As far as the file conversion, I politely argue that I will never do any kind of conversion...for 2 reasons:

1)I basically backup all my dvds in the first place...so I can burn them to a dvd for backup...having them on the hard drive is very nice now so I can play them via the WD TV.

2)I consider myself extremely extremely computer technical...however, I have tried every video conversion utility under the sun for about 5 years and none are 100% accurate...lip sync is off, CODECs from hell, incompatibility with flavors of WMP, video compression issues, chapter problems, etc. Besides, I'm kind of a bit freak anyway...I only use MP3s on my iPod...everything else has been WAV since 1992. I'll keep my dvds in VOB format...a 2TB drive is barely over $100 these days anyway so frankly I don't see the point in all the crazy conversions these days (10 years ago when 50GB external drives were considered huge and would barely hold 10 uncompressed dvds?...sure...but not nowadays when I can store 400 dvds per 2TB of space for ~$100).

I'd be happy to take a picture of the menu if you are unsure of what I am talking about. Everything works...it's that it looks confusing for novices on what VOB file to play the movie...they shouldn't have to choose...just play the bleeping movie. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif) I'm not going to make ISOs because a)that will take me time and (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) I've read a lot here that ISOs have their performance issues on WD TV.

I will, however, investigate MakeMKV...but I've heard the praises/claims for years about conversion utilities promising perfection. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

-Eric