I have a PC too but trying to get my Media Player to play ball with my 360 was a headache. Too temperamental. The Media Player only wanted to play Microsoft-friendly files and spazzed out at the .mkv, .m4v and even the .avi files.

The Little App Factory is awesome! Can’t wait for Evom to encode Ripit rips though. Have never been able to figure that one out.

Primarily what I want is Rip a DVD, get it to a single M4V, then use Metax on it, and it becomes good to go with Itunes.

I liked Handbrake a lot, but lately a lot of DVDs are not getting ripped. using the 0.9.3 or 0.9.4., and thats when I read that Handbrake cannot Rip DVDs.

So ive been using RipIt ,, and its awesome, 15 mins for a DVD is really cool.

But now the problem is that, I still want them in the M4V, so I put them in Handbrake 0.9.3 and it rips them, but in some wrong way or something, and I cannot play the file. The 0.9.4 doesnt even take the RipIt rips ..

So im in a quandary and am looking for fix to convert my RipIt rips to M4V.

I used a Mac Mini for a media center with a Sony Bravia and it couldn’t have been any easier to set up. I haven’t yet needed to use either Boxee or Plex for browsing content, but access Netflix and Hulu via the Web browser.

Why Boxee (XMBC/Plex)? Living in Europe we ‘have to rely’ on grey import to stay updated with the latest US TV series and with built-in streaming for many platforms these ‘HTPC’ platforms feel like Apple TV or Front Row on crack. Not entirely perfect when it comes to cover art and iTunes library import but great when you keep all your media on a shared network drive.

And TOSLink should be a main component of every media setup, just don’t forget to set your Mac sound output to surround if your amplifier supports surround output.

The Toslink cable is something new to me, but after reading about it, I think that may be a cool option. I’ll try that out.

I still use Handbrake for re-encoding movies/TV to be put on my iPhone, but I rip them with RipIT! first. It puts much less wear-and-tear on my DVD drive (far less spinning up/down) and it allows me to use the 64-bit version of Handbrake for even FASTER transcodes. (Handbrake uses VLC for it’s ripping engine and the 64-bit VLC isn’t out yet.)

But, the good thing is that unlike Ripit, you can have the file only include the movie and not all the disk space eating extras. Most importantly, that once you have the movie as an .mkv file, you can view your movies with software called Plex/XBMC to have a beautiful interface to your movie library. You can control the interface on your couch. There in no need to double-click on a file from the Finder. Granted, you have to have your folder naming scheme that adheres to IMDB.com standards (e.g. movie name–>The Dark Night—–folder name—->The Dark Knight (2008)—–v
The Dark Knight.mkv
Here is what the Plex software looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ner5Z2WlAuI

P.S. I also use Ripit when on occassion makemkv fails to rip a disc. Once I rip the disc with Ripit, I use makemkv to turn the video_ts folder into a .mkv file.

It’s a great setup; and will be hard to improve upon anytime soon. Any questions?

Although using itunes as your media manager can be limiting, it does allow a single app (front row) to view movies and tv, a familiar app (itunes) for management and also allows really easy sharing between other computers or apple tvs that are on the same network. Its not super high-end, its not very customized, but it works really well, and we haven’t had any problems since it was set up.