Maximum PC

This is a hypothetical situation...

if I ripped my blu-ray discs to a hard drive, can you still play them to a TV, for example, on a PC even if it doesn't have HDCP, since the video would supposedly have been stripped of copy protection (thus decrypted to the hard drive)?

My thought was to rip my blu-ray DVDs (which I only have maybe 10 at the moment) to a computer to play to my TV without having to insert a disc each time I want to watch a movie. The computer that the files would reside on has just an integrated video card with 128MB of RAM.

Do you still need HDCP even with ripped videos? Do you still need a digital video signal (not analog like VGA) to display blu-ray ripped movies on a TV?

(This isn't meant to be illegal, but I more or less want to know if I need to build a newer multimedia PC for this task, or if I can reuse an old P4 2.8 GHz with 2GB of RAM to do the task.)

If you use a program such as Any DVD HD to rip the discs you don't need HDCP on both ends.

You will still need a compatible video if you wish to decode the video on the GPU.

I use a program called MediaBrowser to traverse my blu-ray rips.

It integrates into Windows Media Center and works with third party playback software such as Arcsoft Total MediaTheatre 5 or VLC.

If you want to play back over your network you will need gigabit for wired or a good 802.11n setup for wireless.

n0b0dykn0ws

OK, but if I just use a ripper, like AnyDVD, then I really don't need the video card? (I'm not completely up-to-date on the latest multimedia/video tech). I pretty much know you need HDCP for on-the-fly decryption (like playing a disc directly from a blu-ray drive) but I'm not always sure on the "what if I do..." strategies, like I"m presenting here.

Thanks for the info, though. Now I just need to make sure that the computer is fast enough to play them once they are ripped.

There are two ways to play back the video: a really fast multi-core CPU or a compatible video card.

Does the old system you're wanting to re-purpose have PCIe or AGP?

The 2.8 P4 isn't fast enough by itself for blu-ray playback.

n0b0dykn0ws

I think (the more I think about it) I may just sell the Pentium 4 computer (complete with a monitor) and use that money to build a smaller computer (even one of the AMD Fusion boards with the E350 should be fine enough to play Blu-Ray content even with its onboard video).

I think I may go that route.

The e350 will work just fine for multimedia playback.

n0b0dykn0ws

Now if only I could sell my gaming computer which I don't use anymore (use my laptop now for about 90% of my computing). I actually only use the desktop for storage, which could be accomplished by a NAS or an external hard drive (or a small server, all of which I'm debating what I want to do there).