So I am narrowing down my options for the new house Im building. I am getting a Control4 system and have a small 50-60 SD DVD collection. I will go with the Samsung 3600 BlueRay player that will give me the Netflix option, since I will keep my Netflix subscription, so that part is set and easy. I am not worried about my itunes since Control4 has Rhapsody and I can access 4 million songs rather than 8000 on my computer, so I will use Rhapsody for that. I am also going with a Vudu for the coolness factor. I dont really buy many DVD's. And I dont foresee myself buying too many off of Vudu, but renting them will happen. I have about 50 titles, most are classics and I dont watch them very often, but it would be nice to have them, as well as stand up comedy and TV shows available to me from my remote.

My question is, for a non-videophile and a non-technical person who doesnt even know how to rip a DVD to a hard drive (but Im sure my installers do), would you guys recommend a Sony 400 disc changer for my 50 or so movies since Control4 isset up to access it and has a pretty cool interface or would you recommend a WDTV and I would just have to figure out howto rip my DVD's to a hard drive or have the installers do it?

Lastly, if I went with the WDTV route, could I also buy Blueray movies and rip them to the same HD and have the WDTV access them thru Contorl4?

Rememebr I am not a tech savvy guy and just want a cool interface and access to my limited collection.

135 people on here right now and nobody can help me with this question?

wdtv doesnt play dvd menus....

and dvds with series. prob. wont work.



-Buy an ION-PC or MAC MINI with BOXEE or something and a small server/ external HDD.

I have a 301 sony changer and it has problems. The design of those things just isnt good, its hard to make somthing simple and mechanicly work good.

THe problem i have with mine is loading the disk, it doesnt work half the time because some of the disks have smooth edges so the load mechanisim has problems grabbing the disk. Mine still works smooth but the DVDs just arnt consistant.

Another problem i found is the unit is designed to be full. The carosel all the disks sits on needs to be balanced by the disks, if you have 50 disks on one side that puts all the weight on one side and then it doesnt work smooth.

I even tried scattering them around to keep the balance good but then it takes a while to search the disk and its just more trouble then its worth.

I still see a problem with the WDtv because it is still a mechanical spinning mechanisim but its a little bit better design wise how it reads and acceses the files.

Till they get memory to the tera bites at an affordable price we will just have to deal with mechanical things to store the data.

IMO the ultimate will be no moving parts a chip you plug in with thousands or gigs of storage for what ever and there is nearly no seek time you click it and its there.

The benifit of the WD tv or any media player for that matter is that its not just a media player, its a storage unit. Pictures, movies, music, what ever files you want to put on the thing you can.

Ripping your dvds to the drive will just take time to learn its like everything else. Read, ask questions, try this try that and you will get it.

Ill tell you right now those DVD changers are not easy to use. Yeah you can just load a disk in it and play it but to do any neat organizing with icons and text you have to learn the machine and mine wasnt easy.

I dont have my WD tv unit yet but i can already tell im going to like it. IMO its the best way to go right now. The unit and a drive to hold all your DVDs will probobly run you under $200. its ALOT smaller also.

Sorry this is so long and full of spelling errors and stuff, im poor at spelling and i babble lol

Thanks for your help. The Changer seems archaic inthese times of digitalmedia so I wont go that route, but apparently the WDTV cannot retrieve menus, thus TV episodes, say 5 episodes on one disc cannot be played, you just have to play the beginning and go that route. Is that correct. If thats the case, that sucks for me lol.

Is the Popcorn Hour novice user friendly or do you need to be a tech geek to operate it correctly?

I'm new here and new to the WD TV. I've only had it a week but I am really loving it the more I learn about it. As far as TV episodes you can definitely do those. They just have to be ripped so that each episode is a separate video file. Then you have your video organized in folders. First folder is the Series, within that are folders for each season, within those are the multiple video files for each episode. It's probably not the prettiest option but it gets the job done.

From what I've read the Popcorn Hour is anything but novice-friendly and just to set it up to do the most basic things with it you have to have some kind of inner "tech geek."

From what I've read the Popcorn Hour is anything but novice-friendly and just to set it up to do the most basic things with it you have to have some kind of inner "tech geek."

THAT was what I was after, thanks for your help.

Is the Popcorn Hour novice user friendly or do you need to be a tech geek to operate it correctly?

PCH works out-of-the box for non-geeks! But I got WDTV for all my intents and purposes because I found PCH's advanced features not useful to me, at more than double the price!

The 777ES is nice. It gives integration into Control4's on screen display for coverart browsing. It's very user-friendly.

The 777 is a easy to use piece especially with Control4, there may be some better options though. I would suggest checking out c4forums.com being that is a forum full of users and dealers of Control4.
Jesse