HD-DVD or Blu-Ray Megachanger?

how hard would it be to convert an old sony 400 dvd mega changer to a hd dvd/blu ray changer?

Probably a lot easier to just build/buy an HTPC with a couple of terrabytes of diskspace and rip the discs to hard-drive.

I guess in some countries, that isnt legal.

But yes that would be the preferable solution.

Tru 'dat

As long as you own the discs you rip I doubt you'll have much of a problem.

Amen to that. You own it do what you want with it. I would always back up my DVD's to keep the hands off the disks....

Correct. The movie studios just lost a court case against a manufacturer, I forget who, of a system that is little more than that described above. You'd pop in a disk and it would just rip it to an internal array. It falls under the terms of Fair Use.

The best thing with sever storage is that you can remove the 51 Disney trailers that exist before every one of their movies.

I took my 875 dvd magachanger (took the top off)apart and yes It would take alot of know how and time to make that hair brain idea work.

Larry

They won because they argued (succesfully) that they were not "decrypting" the content, just making an iso of it containing the original encryption key so in effect they were just puting the physical dvd that you own on another medium.

The illegality lies in breaking the encryption, at least in the USA since that would be against the DMCA rules.

BR on the other hand can't be copied without breaking the security encryption by design. This is especially true for the java based disk.

This is what drives me crazy about Blu-ray and various forms of DRM. We have the technology today for people to make great home media servers, but it is against the law to do it.

The PS3 makes a great media client. It can play video, photos and music from most media servers. There are other affordable HD clients too. The all time best client was a modified xbox runing xbmc. All you had to do was put your DVDs on a PC shared drive and it did the rest. It would look up movie descriptions, actors, cover art, etc from various sources like IMDB. Basically, you would have your own movie database. If a friend came over and said he likes Tom Cruise, you could bring up all the movies with him and pick the one you want to watch. You might notice that he is in Tropic Thunder even though he is not listed on the box or disc! Cool!

Now the best part is that once you have a server set up, you can have multiple clients. One in the HT room, one in the kids play room, maybe the bedroom, or any room you might go to watch movies. You can access any movie at any time from any location with out having to search for discs and run up and down steps!

While I agree that this is the future solution, I still think some running up and down the stairs is a good thing.