playing iso files on windows 7

mckillwashere said:

I personally use bit-ripper with xvid codec.
Yes it takes about 2-2.5 hours. but like what was mentioned before.Would you rather a movie take up 4+Gbs of space or less than 1Gb at almost the same quality?
You can set daemon tools (Which does not have issues in win7) to when a file is clicked it auto mounts the file. That would make it easier on your family. If you use a MCE (media center extender) you cannot watch your iso files over it, were the .avi files you can.
It all comes down to personal preference, space, usability,time, and of course the user.

McKillWasHere

The problem is the almost same quality, as you mentioned.

With a DVD versus a RIP, I get true quality (not talking HD or BD, either, just plain old DVD). I can pick up about 6 different Video formats, all of which I have used to watch, say, my disc 3 of Battlestar Galactica Season 3 series - and every single one of them showed discoloration or else pixelation when watched at full screen on my 1680 x 1050 wide screen monitors. If I were to watch it on a large digital TV, the discrepancies would be even more readily obvious.

I have a very high quality Dark Knight in the MKV container - an it still shows problems every once in a blue moon, (or in very specific scene transitions) that I never saw watching it 3 different times in the movie theater. As I don't have a BD player yet, I cannot compare what my original BD looks like on this monitor, but I had a friend of mine rip it for me - it is large, at 14 GB, but still not up to quality of the original as seen on his BD player and monstrous 36" monitor.

Just as there are audiophiles (of which I am one) that cannot stand anything below a 320 bitrate for MP3s an prefer lossless codecs to lossy, there are those of us who prefer as near perfect visual entertainment as well (Visuophiles?). And, seeing as I have 1.25 TB of space, I can afford to keep movies on my system, deleting them an recreating the ISOs on the fly - I almost always abhor ripping, b/c I am very critical of the cinematography as it is, and imperfections from ripping only server to raise my gorge.

masterB said:

greener said:

so I've backed my purchased dvd's to disk saving to an ISO but WMP cannot play. What do I need to do? I can always use VLC but it seems messy.

Curious what Microsoft suggests as far as workflow as the need to play your dvd's that you have purchased and copied to hard drive is fundamental to a media center.

I can do it with Boxee and the interface is fantastic.

please help!

Just rip the dvd to a folder not ISO and any player can play the DVD content from there, WMP also.

You're suggesting something that is out of scope and has been suggest more than once already in this thread - please keep the discussion topical - the OP wants to mount and play the ISO and is not interested in ripping.

johngalt said:

-the OP wants to mount and play the ISO and is not interested in ripping.

Copy DVD to ISO is also ripping!

In the purest sense, yes - but when used colloquially the differentiation between ripping to ISO (making a !:! copy of the original DVD) and ripping to a different format (MKV, AVI, etc) are two entirely different things.

Plus, the OP specifically mentions ISOs -

greener said:

so I've backed my purchased dvd's to disk saving to an ISO but WMP cannot play. What do I need to do? I can always use VLC but it seems messy.

Curious what Microsoft suggests as far as workflow as the need to play your dvd's that you have purchased and copied to hard drive is fundamental to a media center.

I can do it with Boxee and the interface is fantastic.

please help!

Bite the bullet and install MediaBrowser for playing image files, you will never EVER look back!

Dean.

Wait, what? Media browser allows you to play .ISOs directly?

Not directly but it will mount in the background and auto play.

The plugin I wrote will also do this in the native Movie Library.

But it still requires a 3rd party mounting software, right?

Heh - for some odd reason I still haven't installed MB on my desktop yet. I think with me getting back into watching Claymore and other series, I probably should, eh?

Correct, it requires either VirtualDriveClone or DaemonTools.

I found a third one that seems to be really good in terms of mounting ISOs - and doesn't seem to interfere with HP's protection suite for Business laptops - Arainia Solutions -- Contemporary software for the next generation.

I haven't explored it enough to know if it can support auto mounting or not (but from what I have seen of the program, it sure better, with every thing else that it can do).

Daemon tools will not mount in my Vista Business 32bit upgraded to Windows 7 ultimate 32bit with the HP Protect tools. I really need to figure out why this is ... or hope that HP will get their butts into gear and fix their remaining issues with W7 regarding the Protect Tools suite....

sorry to hijack/resurrect this thread..but i am looking for a solution that will allow me to stream a mounted .iso to my linksys dma 2100 for watching on my tv, on the face of it MB claims to do this but it only actually plays on the computer (not streamed out) and MM3 claims to play isos directly but for some reason is not allowing me to run the collections manager so i cant even test if it works on my rig or streaming to the extender.