With the current generation of consoles, Microsoft and Sony have both touted their machines as being the center of your entertainment center. Microsoft banked on their userbase using Windows Media Player to share their media over your home network. Sony went more open with their platform by allowing any DLNA or UPNP device to share to it. Neither supports every format yet, but with the right software, you can rip and share your media to whatever device you may have at home. Since I first purchased my Xbox 360, I was trying to utilize the media capabilities. It wasn't easy, but it worked. When my wife and I purchased our first home, I wanted to continue to share media, but it obviously wasn't first on the list. Soon after, we purchased a PS3, and quickly it became our media playback device of choice. DVD upscaling over HDMI (I have an HDMI-less 360) as well as Blu-Ray playback, and we were set!





When I upgraded my computer this spring, I ended up choosing a Core 2 Quad and 8GB of RAM. This put me over the 32-bit limit on RAM for XP, so I "tried out" Vista 64-bit. Once you throw some good hardware at it, it runs pretty well. But I was sick and tired of trying to work around activation, so I decided to move to Linux. My distribution of choice now is Arch, but I started with Ubuntu. The software I use is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, so these instructions should work for anyone who wants to try them. I'm going to cover both ripping DVDs and sharing them to your PS3/Xbox 360 with this article. And since I'm so cheap, both of these programs are free!

Ripping with Handbrake

Handbrake can be found at: http://handbrake.fr

This guide is meant as a basic how-to. Any settings I use may not fit your needs, will be too large, or will take too long to encode on your computer. Please feel free to play around until you are happy with the look and sound of your files as well as the subtitle and multiple audio track settings.

To begin insert your DVD and click the Source button in the upper left hand corner.
[img width=700 height=442]http://i471.photobucket.com/albums/rr77/bickman2k/handbrake1.jpg[/img]
Select your disc drive and also make sure "Open VIDEO_TS folder" is checked. Select the VIDEO_TS folder on your DVD and click Open.
[img width=700 height=610]http://i471.photobucket.com/albums/rr77/bickman2k/handbrake2.jpg[/img]
Handbrake will automatically select the longest title on the disc. This is your full length movie. For TV episodes, it selects the longest episode (possibly a special feature).

Next is your video format selection. I personally use Xvid with an AVI container. You can feel free to experiment with h.264, mkv, mp4, or others. I am watching my videos on a 46" 1080p LCD, so I put the bitrate at 2500kb/s and have been happy with the quality.
[img width=700 height=448]http://i471.photobucket.com/albums/rr77/bickman2k/handbrake3.jpg[/img]
For the audio, I like to keep the original audio, so I use AC3 (pass-thru). This just puts the original file in with no compression, recoding, etc.
[img width=700 height=448]http://i471.photobucket.com/albums/rr77/bickman2k/handbrake4.jpg[/img]
If you are doing TV seasons, you can click Add to Queue and queue up multiple episodes to encode sequentially. If you are doing a single movie title and no special features, you can click Start to begin the encode. Your encode speeds may vary depending on your DVD drive, processor, and RAM. Once it finishes, open your file in your favorite media player (I like VLC http://www.videolan.org/vlc) and check the video to make sure the audio is synced up and the picture quality is to your liking.

Sharing your media

PS3 Media Server can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver
[img width=700 height=525]http://i471.photobucket.com/albums/rr77/bickman2k/ps3mediaserver.jpg[/img]
Xbox fans, don't fret, it has basic Xbox 360 support. This Java-based UPNP server is platform independent, so it will run on your Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS X, or Linux machine. It's as easy as downloading, installing, and running it. It will automatically share your entire system. I would recommend changing your shared folders to the ones containing your media, but it can handle many file formats via streaming or transcoding. The Linux version has a daemon that you can set up to automatically begin sharing when you boot up your desktop. It works pretty well out of the box, but you can also change a lot of settings on it with a quick button to restart the server after changing something.

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