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Originally Posted by tomsem
In terms of storage, obviously, if you are one of those strange people who have the time and determination to rip DVDs and maintain a library of digital content that is locally accessible, Nook Tablet is the way to go. But I would point out that the vast majority of people, including myself, don't fall into that category. It requires additional capital investment and most expensive of all, time.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
What additional capital investment?
Ripping DVDs is no different than ripping CDs. At one time I carried CDs around on vacation, then MP3 players appeared and that ended. Then I carried DVDs on vacation and that ended with my tablet.
I converted my CD collection and will soon have my DVD collection converted. DVDs will soon go the way of CDs, VHS, cassette, 8-track, reel-to-reel, and vinyl. It's a dying format.
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Additional capital investment? Storage (unless you only have a small library of DVDs). Granted, that's gone down a big deal from before but with the flood in Thailand, hard drive prices appear to have doubled or even tripled. Ripping DVDs is also more time-consuming than ripping CDs particularly if you're encoding at the same time. You're pretty much only limited by drive speed when ripping CDs. A 2-pass H.264 encode takes quite a bit longer especially if you have a relatively old computer. Granted there's been major strides in hardware accelerated encoding in recent times (most notably QuickSync from Intel which provides fairly good quality encodes unlike earlier efforts from NVIDIA CUDA and ATI Stream).
This is speaking as one of "those strange people who have the time and determination to rip DVDs and maintain a library of digital content that is locally accessible". I had a local file server serving ripped audio and video content to HTPC's even before Netflix rolled out their instant streaming service.
Amazon Unbox videos can actually be transferred to Plays for Sure certified portable devices. In fact, when you buy a video from Amazon Unbox, you're given two downloads - one for your PC and another smaller file for portable devices. Plays for Sure is a misnomer, though. You'd have much better luck finding a unicorn than getting that to work.