Ripping Blu-ray discs has always been painful, despite the RipBot264 program doing its best to simplify things. It’s therefore excellent news to hear that version 0.9.5 of Handbrake has now been released -and that one of it’s key new features is that it finally understands what a Blu-ray disc is and how one is layed out. Being able to interpret the source disc correctly, it’s now able to encode a rip from one directly, too.
Handbrake itself is not the simplest software in the world to master, but it comes with a variety of “presets” that have long made it possible to rip good ol’ DVDs in as simple a manner as I can imagine. And once you did ‘master’ the thing, you had enormous control over the quality and speeds of your DVD rips. To have the same capabilities finally extended to Blu-ray discs has therefore made me very happy!
Hi,
Apologies for using this post of yours to ask an unrelated question, but I couldn’t find another means of contacting you.
I was curious to know if connecting your Drobo to the WDTV Live via USB actually worked? Everything else I’ve read in regards to the WDTV Live and external units configured in RAID is that it simply doesn’t work, I’ve even tried it myself (non Drobo unit).
If you could perhaps elaborate via email it would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
We do have the Drobo connected directly to the WDTV Live via USB, and it works perfectly well.
There is one slight glitch: the Drobo is fitted with 4 2TB drives, so that’s 6GB of usable space.
When you initialise the Drobo, however, with its native administration utility, you get to choose the ‘volume size’ to use, and I chose to use 4TB volumes. So, because I’ve got 6TB usable, that means I’ve got two different 4TB volumes on the device (obviously, the second one can only actually be 2TB in size, but that’s irrelevant as far as the Drobo utility is concerned, where you specify the *maximum* volume size).
But here’s the kicker: the WDTV Live only sees the first of these two volumes (the one which really is 4TB in size, thankfully!) So all my movies and music and stuff I want to play via the WDTV Live have to fit in that 4TB. The other volume (2TB usable) is effectively accessible only if I connect the Drobo directly to my PC (or a laptop/netbook).
Effectively, it means I’m wasting 2TB of storage …though, looked at another way, it also means I’ve got a 2TB “hidden” volume that I can use to store stuff on, knowing it’s going to be nigh-on impossible to accidentally delete it (or be tempted to “update” it) later on.
Anyway, the long story short is that the 4TB volume works fine and movies, music and pictures display and sound just fine via the WDTV and the USB connection.
The obvious trick to try next is to re-format the Drobo to use 16TB volumes, so the 6TB-usable will be seen as one single volume. But that will mean copying 6TB off onto traditional USB disks, and then copying it all back again. Not only does that take ages, but I don’t actually have enough standard external USB devices to do that!
What’s more, we used to have the original WDTV which worked with 2TB volumes on the Drobo, but which failed to recognise a 4TB volume entirely. So there’s no guarantee that the newer WDTV Live will work with 16TB volumes, even though it’s fine with 4TB ones. I’d hate to do all that copying only to discover the darn’d thing has a 4TB max volume size limit!
Hi, I had the WDTV with the Drobo with 2TB volumes (4.5 Tb of available space). Past week I changed to the WDTV live, I re-formated the Drobo to 16TB HFS+ (a lot of work) and the WDTV works perfectly with the 16TB volume. Hope this help.
That helps a lot, Felix… I still don’t have enough external drives/spare hard disks to copy everything off first, but knowing that I could reformat the whole thing to 16TB means it’s certainly something I’ll consider doing sometime in the next few months. Not that I’ll be using HFS+, however… which might make all the difference! Thanks for getting in touch, though.