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Niveus Media’ Big Honking DVD JukeBox
Niveus Media, one of the companies I have written in the past has just released what I call a big honking DVD jukebox. Niveus Disc Changer – Ice Vault 200 takes Windows XP Media Center Platform, strips and polishes the OS with Niveus proprietary add-ons and then uses virtualization technology to allow single, or multiple, Niveus Disc Changers to serve up an entire collection of DVD Movies to any zone on the home network powered by a Niveus Media Center. In other words, if you got some serious dollars to drop, this uber expensive solution is worth see.
The new virtualization software developed by Niveus allows the Niveus Disc Changer to appear as a network storage device to every media center on the home network. Contents of the DVD movie are transferred, CSS intact, to the particular zone media center where the movie is decoded using the “My DVDs” feature. No copying, or duplication of the DVD takes place; the movie is played from the actual DVD disc. Since no recompression, transcoding, or additional DRM is applied, Niveus virtualization technology maintains the full quality and integrity of the original DVD movie for playback on any ISF-certified Niveus Media Center.
Of course this expensive solution wouldn’t be necessary if DVDs allowed ripping like CDs do. The reason why portable video devices are still immature is because you cannot legally transfer the content from DVDs to their hard drives. Apple wouldn’t have been as popular as it has if you couldn’t rip your CD collection to the iPod and could only transfer music bought from iTunes.
i agree wholeheartedly. by the way some cool programs that can help you rip your dvds on a mac are available now.
best
Even more interesting is that HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs can be legally ripped (“managed copy”), yet the DVD Forum can’t/won’t amemd the CSS rules to allow managed copy of regular DVDs.