Watch and learn

Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 15:42

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

 1 of 9

Gallery

Using your hard disk as a music jukebox might make you wonder if you can do the same thing with video, and rip all your DVD movies onto your hard disk. Sadly, that's not quite so easy. First of all, if you want to retain full DVD quality, each movie will take up at least 4GB of disk space. Today's PCs typically come with 500GB drives, but laptops may have as little as 80GB, and older machines had smaller capacities. You're likely to have room for dozens of movies at best, compared to the thousands of music tracks that users commonly store. Some programs claim to shrink movies to 10% of their original size with no visible loss of quality, but in reality you may have to squint to not see the loss of quality, and that's still a lot of data.

Second, commercial DVDs are copy protected, and although there's software out there on the Internet that can circumvent this protection, doing so is against the law. In practice there's a negligible risk of legal action unless you distribute the copied movies to other users, which, given the current frenzy of anti-counterfeiting activity, would be about as sensible as wandering onto your local high street and asking if anyone wanted to buy some crack cocaine.

But while DVD ripping for purely personal use is relatively uncontroversial, it's also rather impractical. Re-coding a copy protected movie is a fiddly and long-winded job, and the result is a video file that you probably won't even use more than a couple of times.

The thing is, when you're playing your favourite music tracks while you work, it's a major boon not having to remove the CD, put it away, find another one and insert it every half hour or so. But digging out a DVD takes hardly any time compared to the two hours you'll spend watching it, so you might as well not bother ripping your movies. Even so, playing DVDs on your PC rather than the TV is a useful option to bear in mind, especially with larger monitors becoming the norm.

In the house

It's getting more common to have a PC in the living room, whether it's your main system or an extra one. Rather than using its own speakers and monitor, you could route its video and audio outputs to your TV and/or hi-fi, giving you a bigger picture and better audio quality. The exact details will depend on your kit, including any other equipment such as set-top boxes and DVD players that you may already have set up, but there are a few basic issues to consider.

Audio is still most often routed as an analogue signal, so it's just a matter of plugging a cable from the output of your sound card into the input of your hi-fi system, home cinema amplifier or indeed your TV, if it has decent built-in speakers. It shouldn't be hard to to pick up a patch cable with the appropriate connectors on each end from stores such as Maplin. The digital option is theS/PDIF interface, which is supported by more recent sound cards and audio kit. Of course, the signal is still ultimately converted to analogue, since you can't hear bits and bytes, but saving this process until the end of the chain maintains optimum sound quality.

On the video side, again there's the option of analogue or digital connection. Analogue is OK for DVD quality video, but if you're going to be playing HD movies you'll need a digital interface. Besides the VGA monitor output, there are two other options for analogue connection to a TV: composite video and S-video. If your PC has an S-video output and your TV has a similar input then go for this as it offers the best quality or, failing that, go for composite video. If your PC only has a VGA output you'll need to buy a VGA to S-video or composite video converter. Digital video is much more straightforward - your HD ready TV must have either a DVI or HDMI input (with HDCP) and your PC's graphics card must support the same standard. Also, if you're going to be using your PC in the lounge for media playback you really need a wireless mouse or similar remote control so you're not constantly getting up from your armchair. Finally if your PC is in your home office but you want to use it for watching movies or listening to music in the lounge all is not lost but you do need some extra kit.