Question about transcoding and standards conversion

[bbear]

I have recently started using Mezzo and still trying to understand it's capabilities and it's limitations. One thing I was very interested to read about was it's ability to transcode on the fly.

I am in Canada and have a Sony BDP S570 Bluray player and I would like to be able to play DVDs which my family in the UK send to me from time to time. These are in PAL SD format.

I read somewhere on this forum that unfortunately it is not currently possible to mount a DVD on my PC and have Mezzmo stream it to my DLNA device. However, if I were to rip the DVD, would Mezzmo then be able to transcode it, do a standards conversion at the same time (PAL > NTSC) and stream it to my BDP?

I tried putting the PAL DVD into the BDP but it says that it is not able to play it,

thanks

[Paul]

Yes, if you rip the DVD out as a single file, then Mezzmo can deliver it. If you rip it out as a native format for the BDP, then Mezzmo won't even need to transcode, which will be even better. If you let us know what you plan to rip the DVDs out to, then someone can perhaps suggest a good format and I can certainly tell you what the BDP supports natively (e.g. MPEG2 and AVCHD).

[bbear]

Yes, if you rip the DVD out as a single file, then Mezzmo can deliver it. If you rip it out as a native format for the BDP, then Mezzmo won't even need to transcode, which will be even better. If you let us know what you plan to rip the DVDs out to, then someone can perhaps suggest a good format and I can certainly tell you what the BDP supports natively (e.g. MPEG2 and AVCHD).

I found that if I inserted the UK PAL DVD into the drive on my PC, I am able to add the TS_VIDEO folder in Mezzmo and assign the file type using the video files preset. I was then able to navigate to the TS_VIDEO folder on my BDP-S570 Bluray player and play the videos perfectly!

However, when I remove the DVD and insert a different one the thumbnails in Mezzmo don't update (i.e. they are the ones for the first disk which I inserted).

The workaround I found was to click on the TS_VIDEO folder in Mezzmo and select the 'Maintain Playlist' option, this removed the original thumbs and updates Mezzmo with the ones corresponding to the video files on the 2nd DVD which I inserted.

What would be really cool is if Mezzmo, knowing that my drive X: was a DVD and do the 'Maintain Playlist' operation automatically when I eject and insert a DVD

[Paul]

Thanks for the suggestion - I'll put it up for discussion here.