Best FLV converter resourse share

Want to find a solution to playback Blu-ray movies on your widescreen TV via WD HD Media Player? As a matter of fact, WD TV HD Media Player promises to play just about any video format you throw at it, including high definition video up to 1080p. You put the videos on any USB mass storage device, like an external hard drive or a thumb drive, and plug it into the device, WD TV HD Media Player will recognize the files on the drive and play any video, audio, or photo files it finds. However, according to the feedback provided by some users, WD TV HD Media Player does play m2ts selectively only, some are, and some are not. In purpose of solving this problem, this post will talk about how to rip Blu-ray movies to USB for playback on TV via WD TV HD Media Player.

WD TV HD Media Player supported file formats:

Video: MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264), Subtitle SRT (UTF-8)

Audio: MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF, MKA Playlist PLS, M3U, WPL

Photo: JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP, PNG

The Blu-ray ripper we will use is called Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper , which can rip and convert DVDs and Blu-Ray movies directly to any other formats, including HD video format. Now let’s have a look at its operation steps.

Step 1: Download, install and launch Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper

Step 2: Load Blu-ray movie, select output format and set destination folder

There are three ways to importing Blu-ray movie, namely by pressing “DVD Rom”, “DVD Folder”, “IFO/ISO”. As soon as Blu-ray files are loaded, now you can click the drop-down button of “Format” to select output format. In order to keep Blu-ray in high definition, here I choose “MKV HD Video” for example, so that the ripped files can be played via WD TV HD Media Player.

At the same time, you can click the folder icon at the end of “Output” to indicate save path, of course, you can skip this step, because this program offers a destination folder set by default, if you do not specify, it will export files to this folder automatically. Moreover, if you want to play your files without intervals, you can check “Merge into one file” to combine multiple chapters to be one file.

Step 3: Set advanced settings

Besides this, you can also click “Settings” to adjust video and audio parameters to ensure the output HD quality. Changing video and audio codec, adjusting aspect ratio, bit rate, frame rate, sample rate, etc. are all available here.

Step 4: Ripping

Once all the above settings are completed, you can click “Convert” button to start Blu-ray ripping, and the output HD MKV files can be found by clicking on the button “Open”. After that, you can copy these files to your USB, and plug in it to WD TV HD Media Player to enjoy via TV.

Tips:
According to some users’ feedback, the output files of Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper is the only format that they can smoothly fast forward at 16x regardless of the output format.

For some reasons, I haven’t made full use of my 40GB Apple TV in the last 2 years. Recently, I have more spare time to do so, and would like to use it in my living room with my wide screen TV to enjoy its functionality fully. It works fine to playback all the files I throw at it, but 40GB is too confining for all my photos and music, not to mention my movies and other video collection. To solve this problem, once I have to make my Mac Pro and iTunes running to stream all my data to the Apple TV. It seems a bit troublesome, I dislike it. So I look for a solution to expand the capacity of my Apple TV. Via Google, I’ve found some useful articles talking about this issue, and I followed them, and finally successfully upgrade the hard drive of the Apple TV lately. Here I’d like to document my process below, but before that, I’d like to show my gratitude to people who I’ve got useful info from their articles, even though I can not remember their exactly names now.

In summary, the process is relatively simple, a small 40GB hard drive can be freely replaced, thus becomes a DIY Apple TV.

Dismantle the Apple TV, remove the hard drive, and connect it to an Intel Mac Pro via WiebeTech Forensic DriveDock or other 2.5-inch hard drive FireWire bridge. Start the Mac, and you will see that hard drive partition of Apple TV is structured as follows:

/dev/disk5

#: type name size identifier

0: GUID_partition_scheme *37.3 GB disk5

1: EFI 34.0 MB disk5s1

2: 400.0 MB disk5s2

3: Apple_HFS OSBoot 900.0 MB disk5s3

4: Apple_HFS Media 36.0 GB disk5s4

400MB of space which could be used to store the system restore data. Extract overall image via CopyCatX, and recover them to a new hard drive which you want to change back. I found lots of people like using a Western Digital 120GB WD1200VE hard drive. Install the new hard drive to Apple TV, and in the test, you will find the system continues to recognize only 40GB of space, because the partition information is the same with the original 40GB hard drive. But in fact, there are more than 70GB of space not being used.

Remove the new hard drive to re-connect to the Mac, and allocate the unused more than 70GB space to the Media partition with the help of iPartition or other partitioning software. Be careful, not to change the EFI or the other 400MB partition.

After install it back to the Apple TV, all the 107GB space will be recognized completely, you are done!

Now I’m able to store more photos, movies, music, and television shows on the Apple TV. But when it comes to video playback, Apple TV has strict formats limitation, it caused troubles again, and I have to convert all my videos to Apple TV formats .mp4 and .mov in advance. However, this does not the most important thing I’m concerned, because I have already have a video converter on my Mac Pro, and my most intention is to watch my Blu-ray on it. Fortunately, via Google again, I get an available Blu-ray Ripper for Mac to meet my needs, which is able to run on Mac independently as long as you have an external BD drive. To keep HD quality as well as compress BD size, I usually select HD video as my output option. A great product, I like it. Besides this, it seems there are also another version developed for Windows user, attached this BD ripper here, maybe it’s your choice.

Well, by the way, Apple installed Fujitsu hard drives in original, and this could be due to their relatively small power and heat consumption, so when replacing the hard drive, you can also take this factor into account. In addition, the replacement of the hard disk will let you lost product warranty, please proceed with caution.

Surfing online, often see people asking questions like this: “Does anyone know how to convert 5.1 AAC to AC3? If so, what software do I need and encoding/conversion settings. Thanks in advance for any help.” As a matter of fact, this is a normal question, because some of our usually used multimedia devices can decode or read audio codec selectively only, we have to do format conversion to meet their requirements. For example, some theatre amplifier can only decode AC3 5.1 format, while Apple TV can only deal with AAC audio, or whatever. In this post, I’d like to document a easiest way to convert AAC 5.1 to AC3 5.1, in the near future, if I have enough spare time, I’d like to talk more about how to convert AC3 to AAC, that may be in my another post.

To convert AAC 5.1 to AC3 5.1, you just need Pavtube Video Converter only. This program is capable of reading a wide range of video and audio formats, including videos from DVs or camcorders (JVC, Panasonic, Cannon, Sony, etc.), TiVo (*.tivo), DVDs (*.vob), Blu-ray (*.m2ts,), YouTube (*.flv, *.f4v), and many other videos in common media formats, like mp4, avi, mkv, ts, tp, evo, aac,dts and so on. The detailed process is as below:

Step 1: Click “Add” button to load your video files

Step 2: Select output format and specify save path
Click the pull down menu of “Format” to select your needed format, here I choose “MKV HD Video (*.mkv) for instance. Click the folder icon at the end of “Output” to decide where to locate the output files.

Step 3: Click “Settings” icon to specify AC3 5.1.
Once click “Settings” button, a “Profile” window will pop up as above. Now you should select ac3 as audio codec, and select 5.1 as audio channel. By the way, you’d better adjust audio bit rate at 448K to match the effect of 5.1 channels to full extent. All needed settings are completely showing in the above interface, you just need follow them, and this will lead you to get an AC3 5.1 surround sound successfully.

Step 4: Click “Convert” button to start conversion

As long as conversion is finished, you can click “Open” button to find out the output files with the converted AC3 5.1 channels.

Well, hope this helps.