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JimHansonDC

Well-known Member
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Jun 8, 2019
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137
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I feel like I have every type of surround music disc or file on Earth, and a lot of them. I've gone through the gymnastics of ripping them to surround FLACS and for the Blurays and DVDs into MKVs. I'm just wondering if there is anything better than this. I have a couple OPPOs that will take care of any file format I throw at them. I'd just like to have fully functional virtual discs rather than guessing which parts of a disc represent the format I want and then losing navigation and other functions. I've Rooned and Plexed and all the rest but what I really want is a full copy of the disc that acts like one. Any ideas or good things coming down the pipe line?
 
Oppos aren’t a great user experience (file navigation is slow, searching/filtering by artist, genre etc is non existent, the user interface is horrible).

I‘m using a dedicated media players (Intel NUCs and Odroid N2 with Kodi) to play all my MCH FLAC files and Music Videos including concerts. For concerts discs I’ve split my MKV rips into individual MKV files by chapter (each chapter is a song) and named the files after the song name. These can be displayed in the Kodi UI and I can easily find any audio or music video file to play, create playlists from any files. I can run my entire system from an iPad (or smart phone)

See the MCH Media Player sub forum here on QQ for more info.
 
You could always use makeMKV to rip the source and pull the streams that you don't want; making each mkv file a single stream; with or without video depending on the source. Heck, you could make one file per stream (takes a lot of space) and play the one you want depending on the system you are using and the supported content.
 
Oppos aren’t a great user experience (file navigation is slow, searching/filtering by artist, genre etc is non existent, the user interface is horrible).

I‘m using a dedicated media players (Intel NUCs and Odroid N2 with Kodi) to play all my MCH FLAC files and Music Videos including concerts. For concerts discs I’ve split my MKV rips into individual MKV files by chapter (each chapter is a song) and named the files after the song name. These can be displayed in the Kodi UI and I can easily find any audio or music video file to play, create playlists from any files. I can run my entire system from an iPad (or smart phone)

See the MCH Media Player sub forum here on QQ for more info.
+1
I also believe the oppos can only handle the lower sample rate DSD files.
 
I feel like I have every type of surround music disc or file on Earth, and a lot of them. I've gone through the gymnastics of ripping them to surround FLACS and for the Blurays and DVDs into MKVs. I'm just wondering if there is anything better than this. I have a couple OPPOs that will take care of any file format I throw at them. I'd just like to have fully functional virtual discs rather than guessing which parts of a disc represent the format I want and then losing navigation and other functions. I've Rooned and Plexed and all the rest but what I really want is a full copy of the disc that acts like one. Any ideas or good things coming down the pipe line?

If I understand your question, the only way you'd get "fully functional virtual discs" is by ripping them to ISO files, at least if we're talking about bits taken from DVDs or Blu-rays. That would give you all the menus, navigation, soundtracks, alternate angles, etc...but you're then up against a limit on which players will work for you. Modern Oppos with up to date firmware are explicitly forbidden to play ISOs, for example. I think Kodi will play DVD ISOs, but Blu-ray ISOs may be another story (it's also possible that Blu-rays work fine and I'm not up to date).

If you're trying to get a bit-perfect copy of a CD, you need to rip the entire disc to a single file and accompany it with a cue sheet that will provide your player the metadata and timing information.

If you're already comfortable with the process of getting the bits off the discs--and it sounds like you are--probably the easiest way to not have to guess what's what is to have a well-organized directory and file naming scheme. That's absolutely essential if you're using something like an Oppo for playback but also generally helpful. If you're using Kodi or something similar, you may find that simply tagging your files carefully will give you what you want, though it still helps down the road to have rational and predictable file organization.
 
If you're trying to get a bit-perfect copy of a CD, you need to rip the entire disc to a single file and accompany it with a cue sheet that will provide your player the metadata and timing information.

Partial retraction: You can get a "bit-perfect" copy of the music that's on a CD by any of several methods, including the above and/or ripping to individual tracks. What's preserved with the cue sheet method is pregaps, which frankly don't really matter much. They have nothing to do with the reproduction of the actual music, but can sometimes have meaning to your CD player's time display and what the player views as track boundaries. The concept of a pregap really has no meaning that I can think of in the streaming world.
 
If I understand your question, the only way you'd get "fully functional virtual discs" is by ripping them to ISO files, at least if we're talking about bits taken from DVDs or Blu-rays. That would give you all the menus, navigation, soundtracks, alternate angles, etc...but you're then up against a limit on which players will work for you. Modern Oppos with up to date firmware are explicitly forbidden to play ISOs, for example. I think Kodi will play DVD ISOs, but Blu-ray ISOs may be another story (it's also possible that Blu-rays work fine and I'm not up to date).

If you're trying to get a bit-perfect copy of a CD, you need to rip the entire disc to a single file and accompany it with a cue sheet that will provide your player the metadata and timing information.

If you're already comfortable with the process of getting the bits off the discs--and it sounds like you are--probably the easiest way to not have to guess what's what is to have a well-organized directory and file naming scheme. That's absolutely essential if you're using something like an Oppo for playback but also generally helpful. If you're using Kodi or something similar, you may find that simply tagging your files carefully will give you what you want, though it still helps down the road to have rational and predictable file organization.

You could also rip the bluray/4k directory to disc ( using Makemkv software) and play back using many of the Android based players ( Nvidia Shield etc.) with Kodi or other native players. They retain full functionality, just like the original BD. This approach works with the Oppo as well, except for the annoyance of having to bury the BD directories in another directory called AVCHD. This is the approach I have to take to get my 4K BDs with Dolby Vision to play correctly, since Oppo is the only media player I know that can playback the Dolby Vision encoding.
 
You could also rip the bluray/4k directory to disc ( using Makemkv software) and play back using many of the Android based players ( Nvidia Shield etc.) with Kodi or other native players. They retain full functionality, just like the original BD. This approach works with the Oppo as well, except for the annoyance of having to bury the BD directories in another directory called AVCHD. This is the approach I have to take to get my 4K BDs with Dolby Vision to play correctly, since Oppo is the only media player I know that can playback the Dolby Vision encoding.

I'm very happy to stand corrected, thank you!
 
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