Playing "raw" BD rips on a 2009 mini (2.0GHz)

[AVR2]

I've been given the Blu-ray set of season 1 of the classic 70s sci-fi series Space:1999, but I don't have a BD player. What I am thinking about doing is buying an external BD drive for my Mac mini HTPC, ripping the episodes with MakeMKV and playing them in Plex.

I want to maximise the quality so I don't want to recompress the video in any way. At the risk of asking a really dumb question, will I get reliable playback from a truly "raw" 1080p24 BD rip played off a Firewire 400 drive, or will the data rate be too high?

 

[codymac]

That worked fine for me with a 2009 2.0 mini. I used a USB drive but had 4gb in my mini (now I'm running a 2010 mini with 8gb and the same USB drive).

 

[dolphin842]

You can get some specifics by digging in the Plex forums, but if I recall correctly, 2.0 GHz will work for most blu-rays. There are a few exceptions (Planet Earth I think is one) where playback can suffer due to the bitrate being too high or if the video uses Microsoft's VC-1 codec instead of h264 (the latter being pretty rare, but they're out there).

 

[rtrt]

You can get some specifics by digging in the Plex forums, but if I recall correctly, 2.0 GHz will work for most blu-rays. There are a few exceptions (Planet Earth I think is one) where playback can suffer due to the bitrate being too high or if the video uses Microsoft's VC-1 codec instead of h264 (the latter being pretty rare, but they're out there).

hadn't heard about the VC-1 issue. Ive noticed a few blu rays not work on VLC in the past - is that because VLC doesn't support VC-1?

 

[AVR2]

Thanks all. I'm pretty sure the mini's CPU is up to it (I can play other 1080p24 material on it without problem), I was mainly concerned that the necessary sustained transfer speed for a completely raw BD rip would have been too high for a FW400 drive to handle.

 

[Cave Man]

The bottleneck won't be Firewire, that's for sure. It's much faster than USB2 and that's what I have for Blu-ray disc playback on my hackintosh.

 

[FireWire2]

Cave Man is correct BD bitrate max out at 5Mbps+Audio, so FW400 is plenty fast
actually USB2.0 BD-ROM is more than enough to rip and play BD

Use Media-Info to find out the audio track format, it it's DTS-HD or TrueHD
then convert this to DTS-core or AC3 then remux it back using TsMuxER

Then you will not have problem of BD files

VLC will play VC-1, but not WVC-1. You need to installed this codec

Alternate solution:
Get a HD media player likes DUNE, TVIX Slim S1 (amazon) then you don have to worry about codecs or container...

 

[rtrt]

.........You need to installed this codec

which codec is it that needs to be installed?