Yeah, it could be that.  But it could also be that since there is such a small market for them, they can't really push them out at $500+.  $200 is really the key price point for these things in this market.  It could also be that they want to ship a Blu-ray unit.

I have never bought one because of the lack of Extender support, but IIRC these are just sourced PowerFile DVD Changers.  PowerFile pushes them out for nearly $1,000 each (last I looked).

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

What's the attraction to dvd changers?

for the price, you can get more hard drive space and rip everything to HDD and never have to worry about disks getting scratched/lost/etc

Tikker:

What's the attraction to dvd changers?

for the price, you can get more hard drive space and rip everything to HDD and never have to worry about disks getting scratched/lost/etc

Yeah, those 1.7 Terabyte hard drives for $200 are commonplace now

Time!  It takes less than 15 minutes to fill a 200-disc DVD Changer.  That's less time than it takes to rip a single DVD-9!  Plus, when a disc is in the changer you also don't really have to worry about it getting scratched/lost/etc.

If you figure a DVD is 5GB on average, 200 of them would be 1TB.  A 500GB hard drive is about $150 now, which means it's $300 plus hunderds of hours to do ripping.

If they Microsoft would enable DVD Streaming, I'd buy at least two changers this second.  Without that, yes I think hard drives are a better option for my usage.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

Chris - Moderator:

If you figure a DVD is 5GB on average, 200 of them would be 1TB.  A 500GB hard drive is about $150 now, which means it's $300 plus hunderds of hours to do ripping.

Time I'll give you. it takes ~1 hour to go from DVD to a finished DivX movie

taking the fat mpeg2 DVD's and converting them to the much slimmer MPEG4 (flavour of your choice) reduces file size (for me) to around 1.5gb per movie(no visible loss of quality, unless you're one of those folks that claims to tell the difference in games between 75 and 90 fps)

and like you said, ripped movies are available to every with access to the file server(ie can stream 7 copies of the same movie with different start times)

my tune may completely change once the next gen DVD wars are over tho ;)

There sure is visable loss when you go to an lossy format from an already lossy format.  MPEG-4 in the form of DivX or XviD, is very lossy, and while you might not be able to tell a difference, do a quick side-by-side test at 2x and you will even be able to see for yourself.

That said, it really just depends on your eyes and your monitor.  I rip to DivX on a ton of things, but if I'm mainly not watching on a 50" display.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

sjulty, if it's something you would use pick it up, I've got 2 of them and if I had room where they're located I'd buy a 3rd for the price they're going for now.  I paid 6 or 700 for my first one and even at that price it's worth it to me.

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My Media Center Blog

I picked one up for the $200 price and love it. I use a combination of ripping and the changer. I mainly use the changer for my daughter's Disney collection. At this rate, I'll need another one! And, it's cool to have my 8 year old able to pick whatever she wants to watch from the menu! (Parental controlled, of course!)

I love the entire concept of the Sony DVD changer.  Does anyone here know if the DVD players are region locked?  I am interested in purchasing the XL1B2/3 but will be playing Region 4 (Australia) DVD's with it.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Alby

Bringing an old thread to life, but could not find a better place for it.  Does anyone know how the disks are presented to Vista?  Are they presented as subdirectories on the main drive?  Or is everything handled by the native driver?

They are presented in Vista's DVD Library function.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

But any idea how it "discovers" them?  Is there functionality built in to build the library, or does it just see them as a set of directories under one disk?  The reason that I ask is that looking at the other post for testers needed, I was thinking if this was presented as a set of subdirectories, the utility could be modified to create a bunch of links in a seperate folder virtually renaming the files and allowing them to be seen by the extenders.  Maybe a better question is, how does My Movies cope with the changers!

I search their site... I can't find it. Could you post the link please?

Yes.. never mind. I just saw that this was an older thread.

sjulty:

I see that Chris posted that Tiger Direct has this machine

at an incredible discount.

 

It has been my experience more times than not, that if something

looks too good to be true, then it probably is.

 

This is not meant as a slam of Tiger Direct in any way as I

have been satisfied with the all of purchases I have made from them

in the past.

 

I'm more suspicious of Sony attempting to dump a problematic or

non-working product on unsuspecting consumers.

 

That being said, does anyone in TGB community have any experience

with this unit?

 

-Steve

tboyce:

But any idea how it "discovers" them?  Is there functionality built in to build the library, or does it just see them as a set of directories under one disk?  The reason that I ask is that looking at the other post for testers needed, I was thinking if this was presented as a set of subdirectories, the utility could be modified to create a bunch of links in a seperate folder virtually renaming the files and allowing them to be seen by the extenders.  Maybe a better question is, how does My Movies cope with the changers!

Might be a better question for the My Movies forum since it does interact with them, but if Extenders are the goal it still doesn't matter.  Extender's don't support playback of VIDEO_TS folders, much less CSS encrypted VIDEO_TS folders.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator