I have some questions about the MG-35 and using it with my Macbook. I use Handbreak, Mac The Ripper, and iSquint for my video and DVD rips. I was wondering if anyone has had any experance with them and the mg-35 along the lines of the encoded files working with it. Also just using the usb cable to format the HD and to transfer files to it. Just looking for any info to make a purchace or to pass to something else.

Thanks

Hey I've got this combo and while I don't know iSquint, I've used the other 2 with mixed results. Basically the XVID profile works great in handbreak, the MPEG4 is touch and go, depending on some settings I can't say I've actually figured out why some work and some don't, I just use xvid now.

It's a good choice, and I've been able to get the NDAS functionality to work (MG-35 partitions show up as attached volumes on my desktop, almost like USB over ethernet), but be warned the write speed is nearly unusably slow (1mbit/sec, 10mbit read speed). I've got Sharepoints going to allow even an external USB drive hanging from my MBP to be readable by the MG-35, so basically I can stream either way without issue, and I can copy from the MG-35, but copying TO it is so slow it's better to just plug in the USB. One problem I had was I could only get 32gb partitions with FAT32. So I've got 2x32gb partitions and a 300gb partition in NTSF (created and written to in Widows, I dual-boot for gaming so not a huge hassle but not the best way) - in retrospect I would have stuck it in a different enclosure or system that would allow me to make larger FAT32 partitions and THEN popped it to the MG-35 case, but now I've got 300gb that's basically read-only so that's ok.

5.1 works with the digital output, but I should also mention that the component output looks a LOT better on my projector than the composite or s-video - possibly a function of the projector scaling, but component looks great from the MG-35, the rest is so-so.

I have some questions about the MG-35 and using it with my Macbook. I use Handbreak, Mac The Ripper, and iSquint for my video and DVD rips. I was wondering if anyone has had any experance with them and the mg-35 along the lines of the encoded files working with it. Also just using the usb cable to format the HD and to transfer files to it. Just looking for any info to make a purchace or to pass to something else.

Thanks

I'm using an MG-35 in sort of a mixed environment, with an iBook, a Thinkpad, and a Windows 2000 desktop in a closet as my media server.

I've used Handbrake/Mediafork extensively for transcoding DVDs; I use the following settings with decent results:

XVID or ffmpeg video encoder (XVID is slower but seems to give better quality), 75% "quality" (ffmpeg shows up as "DivX" at the MG-35)
MP3 audio, 44.1 KHz sampling rate, 128 kbps bit rate

I usually auto-scale the picture so the width is 640 pixels for wide-screen movies, and 512 pixels wide for full-screen movies to keep the file sizes down, since the MG-35 can't play files more than 2GB in size...

Hey I've got this combo and while I don't know iSquint, I've used the other 2 with mixed results. Basically the XVID profile works great in handbreak, the MPEG4 is touch and go, depending on some settings I can't say I've actually figured out why some work and some don't, I just use xvid now.

It's a good choice, and I've been able to get the NDAS functionality to work (MG-35 partitions show up as attached volumes on my desktop, almost like USB over ethernet), but be warned the write speed is nearly unusably slow (1mbit/sec, 10mbit read speed). I've got Sharepoints going to allow even an external USB drive hanging from my MBP to be readable by the MG-35, so basically I can stream either way without issue, and I can copy from the MG-35, but copying TO it is so slow it's better to just plug in the USB. One problem I had was I could only get 32gb partitions with FAT32. So I've got 2x32gb partitions and a 300gb partition in NTSF (created and written to in Widows, I dual-boot for gaming so not a huge hassle but not the best way) - in retrospect I would have stuck it in a different enclosure or system that would allow me to make larger FAT32 partitions and THEN popped it to the MG-35 case, but now I've got 300gb that's basically read-only so that's ok.

5.1 works with the digital output, but I should also mention that the component output looks a LOT better on my projector than the composite or s-video - possibly a function of the projector scaling, but component looks great from the MG-35, the rest is so-so.

Windows can create FAT32 partitions of any size but has trouble formatting them.

There is a utility called fat32format.exe (search in google) that will format ANY FAT32 partition you wish to create.

I have a 500GB HDD in my MG-35 formatted as FAT-32.

It is a windows only program so you will need to have access to a windows box to do the original partitioning and formatting.

Hope this helps!

That's helpful info. I think FAT32 doesn't work for many guys who rip whole DVDs due to the 4gb single file size restriction. I've just run into that myself recently, annoying. EXT3 is the best I think, but MG-35 doesn't read it.