(Beginner question) What is needed to set up media player system to play ripped BDs?

You will need a HDI Dune Smart player to play BD's with full menu support & they also have a jukebox through Zappiti. Newer players cannot use BD full menus without implementing the dreaded Cinavia DRM system which is part of Blu-ray standard now. Cinavia is an audio watermark that when detected on a Cinavia player [like the PS3] will kill the audio track and it's not something you can remove/disable.

A. You will need to use wired ethernet for BD steaming, wireless is no good. The NAS plugs into the routers ethernet ports same as the HDI Dune player.
B. You will want to hook up the PC or laptop to the ethernet to transfer BD files. If you cant then using an external HDD is the next best option to transfer between the two.
C. Does not matter where the NAS is as long as there is an ethernet port nearby that is running back to the router. NAS are also not silent so it's not a great idea to put a NAS in the living room.

D. Well if you don't run ethernet cables then using powerline adapters might work, you can see some of the fastest ones here, they send the ethernet signal over the power cables of the house, they are not as fast as a true ethernet link but are better than wireless. The quality of the electrical cabling is also a factor and the powerline adapters should be plugged into the wall socket for best performance.

I agree with Alx330 on most points.

That being said, I am a little unclear on location playback. Are you looking for playback at 1 the HDTV location from your PC in another room or are you looking to have playback capability on 2 remote PCs as well?

If you plan on having a large library of BR rips, there really is no answer short of a large NAS. 1 BR rip will take 40-50GB so 20 BR rips will nearly fill 1 TB. That's before redundancy is considered as well. You'll probably want to keep the NAS near your main router, connected via ethernet so that throughput isn't limited and for noise considerations.

To get all the menus and extras you'll need to rip your discs to ISO files. That means you also need to consider the software you are using to defeat DRM protections and rip each of the BR discs. Set aside about 30-45 minutes per disc for ripping. While most media streaming devices will support DVD ISOs, most will not support BR ISOs. Dune will, but as you probably noticed, they are a little spendy. BR ISO support should start showing up in firmware updates for many of the less expensive boxes out there like the WD Live or Boxee Box. If patience isn't an option, you may find it cheaper just to set up an HTPC in the living room.

Forget about HD over Wireless G. It won't happen. You could try Wireless N, but even then your signal will have to be really strong and your FF/Rew will be limited and annoying. Ethernet is best, but powerline is adequate. If you have existing coax connections and can afford a bit more for hardware, MoCA is a good choice, too.

If you aren't using the PCs for playback, they are really a non-issue outside of ripping and copying the rip to the NAS. Since real time playback from NAS isn't an issue, speed of connection really won't matter other than the annoying wait while 1000s of MB of info are transferred.

I know you said that you wanted to keep the menus and extras, but you might want to consider just how much they are worth to you. Dropping that requirement could save you a lot of $$$ in equipment and storage costs.
Edited by smitbret - 10/1/12 at 12:19pm

In general yes, though a player has to guess that a BDMV folder is a Blu-ray disc whereas it knows an ISO is a disc image.
The MKV format supports menus but no-one has ever built anything based on the specification.
The MKV format supports multiple video streams within a single container but very few players support this part of the specification.
MKV is just a container it does not mandate any format, MakeMKV is a tool for generating lossless rips of Blu-ray and DVD's by copying the video/audio into MKV containers.
Yes see MakeMKV.
Yes wireless would be a possibility if compressing the video with x264 via Handbrake (feed the output from MakeMKV into Handbrake so BD VC-1/MKV becomes x264/MKV). For very high image quality you will want to use the high profile preset in Handbrake and possibly set the RF value to 18 on the video tab, not all movies compress the same some are more susceptible than others but for those that aren't at RF18 they will almost be as large as the original video so it's up to you if you want to compress further, Handbrake uses a default of RF20 which is a good fall-back to in those cases. You will also want to use faster 5Ghz wireless network too, 2.4Ghz might be pushing it, the new 802.11ac standard should be even faster than 5Ghz 802.11n links.
I would definitely say yes. All is not lost though their is an open source project by the VLC guys for BD menus under-way however it will be another year or two before it's practical for use.
Wont work Cinavia will activate on those too if playing on any Cinavia device.
Edited by Alx330 - 10/2/12 at 8:40am

I would recommend MoCA. I have a very similar setup; my NAS and PC are on one end of a MoCA link, and the Dune is on the other. I've had occasional hiccups during movie playback, but I blame that on my NAS. Most of the time movies play fine with no issues.

There is a thread here about the Actiontec MI424WR, which you can find on eBay for pretty cheap ($20 or less), which can act as a MoCA router.

One thing you will need a lot of: TIME! I spend more time ripping discs, curating my library, and tweaking my setup than I do actually watching movies.

if you rip to movie only + 1 HD audio track the average is 25/30G. If you rip to full : 40GB = 40GB (incredible, isn't it ) No. Cinavia would transform any media player into a brick. that's why the latest/coming generations don't have anymore the BD license and plays BD only on lite mode. For the past generation of players, the licence is older and without Cinavia (i think someone said that Cinavia is mandatory since Q1 this year) and are perfectly able to play cinavia discs/full rips. that's why older generation can play full BD rips including menus and interactivity, and can also have a BD drive included (like the Dune MAx for example). We don't know. But the risk is high that the studios will add cinavia to all their new releases... If you mean "remove cinavia when ripping from a cinavia disc", it's not possible. Slysoft is working on it, as well as the DVDFab guys (simply because it's a huge threat to their business). but it seems to be very complicated. May be on some low end NAS, but the big guys like qnap or syno don't have any problem with 3TB (or more) HDD. even smaller NAS from Dlink were upgraded by a new firmware to make it compatible with 3TB HDD. usual suspects : Dune, Pop Corn Hour, Mede8er. All have their own way of working and pros and cons. But you won't be wrong by picking up one of their player (except Dune 101/301 !) Mede8er 1000X3D is already out and plays 3D ISO without problem. PCH is launching soon the A400 which should be soon considered as the best media player available (first preview testings are very good). Dune are a bit behind with their own new range 203/403/Base 4.0 3D set to be launched somewhere between november and Q1 next year (TBC). All have their own topic if you want to know more

bonus contents, menus and interactivity are not taking so much space. Just take as example LOTR extended BD version : just the main movie + 1 audio channel will take approx. 48GB per disc, the remaining 2GB are the audio commentary and menus...Of course this is an extreme example, but in most case (at least from my experience ripping 200/250 BD discs and counting) you will end up with the average I gave if you want to keep a 1:1 quality rip. Whether it's ISO, MKV or BDVM structure, the result is almost identical.

Anyone to confirm ?

Well... You're sorta right, but still quite off.

I've recently ripped The first part of The Fellowship of the Ring Extended blu-ray to mkv, and I also have the iso. The full iso is 31GB. The movie, with all four audio commentaries is 27GB.

But LOTR Extended Editions are pretty poor examples, as the main discs are pretty much stripped of everything but the movie.

I've also ripped Avengers both to iso and mkv. The iso is 39GB, the mkv 29GB. Iron Man disk1: iso = 44GB, mkv = 28GB

NAS4FREE and others based on the ZFS file system allow you to add more drives to an existing array.
You cannot reduce the drive count without rebuilding the array.

My initial array is four 2TB drives in ZFS.
Two for parity, two for data.
This gives me 4 TB, and 2 failed drives without data loss.
As my storage needs increase, I can add more 22TB drives to increase capacity.

As I understand ZFS, as long as the drives are the same capacity, minor differences such as cache size and firmware are irrelevant.