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hewitts

Newbie
Getting ready for a road trip, and the new car has no video player (how did we 30-40 somethings ever survive childhood.) Rather than portable DVD I'm thinking there must be a way to use my Nook (rooted 2.1 to internal) instead. That brings up 2 questions for this noob...

1) Anyone have suggestions on what ap to use to play video.

2) any suggestions on getting the old favorite DVD's onto the nook (or SD) for viewing, or will I need to buy "digital formats" of what they want to watch?

Thanks in advance
 
I am not the video expert here, so I will look forward to the replies here also.

You can use a DVD ripping program to rip DVDs to your PC into MPG, AVI, format and then drag that file onto your SC card. I used this process for my old phone, keeping them under 1GB will keep a lot of quality, under 500MB if you care less and need more room.

If you have ripped DVDs already and want them smaller, you can use Handbrake to compress/convert them for your Nook.

Edit: also Rockplayer seems to be a favorite choice for playing movies on the nook.
 
How did we survive those car trips? We weren't the problem. Better question is how did our parents survive? My kids would drive me crazy if they didn't have DVD players in the cars. :D

But to answer your question, movies play fantastically on the NC!!!

We have over 300 childrens DVD's backed up onto the home server. I have a program that backs up the DVD, plus runs a routine to convert the movie into .MP4 format, which is compatible with our devices.

FWIW, I take the SD card out of the Nook and put it into a reader and transfer movies that way. You can hook up the standard USB cable, but it takes me 100x longer (no joke).

The program to play movies is built into Android and the NC. It's called "Movies". To be quite honest, I don't see it in my App tray. I downloaded another app from the market that's also called "Movies", so don't know if it overwrote it or not. I don't think so, just something I'm curious about.

I put the files in the Videos directory already on the NC (on the uSD card). To access them, chose the Nook app menu at the bottom, pick Library, go to Videos on SD card, and pick the file you want to watch. Done.

I've also installed Rockplayer, just to see if I like it much better than the stock player. My main issue was finding a player that can catagorize the movies (like with MP3 ID tags), rather than just showing filenames. I didn't see that in Rockplayer.

Realplayer (oh the horror of the PC version) actually is pretty decent, but shows the movie window too small. Didn't keep either.

To be honest, I like the simple interface of the stock app over some that I've downloaded from the market.

Another way of accessing the "Movies" app is to go to "Gallery". Both pictures and movies will both show up and selecting them will launch the appropriate application.

As for ripping movies, I use a program called Magic DVD Ripper. Hasn't seen a DVD yet that's given it any problems, even Disney DVDs rip fine. Technically, that's breaking the DCMA by bypassing the encription on the disc, but I believe that law infringes on the Supreme Court's ruling that allows for personal backup of purchased content. So I don't feel bad about doing it. I don't torrent or copy anyone else's movies. I bought and own everything that we have. No one is going to tell me I can't legally make a backup.
 
I had the day off today so I spent a few hours experimenting. Here's what I came up with so far.

I found several good "rippers," but none of them could resize, or at least not effectively/efficently.

I found several good formatter/compressors but none of them ripped particularly well.

The solution I found that seemed to be the best of both worlds and easiest one stop shop (at least in the free category) was Format Factory. Does it all, and the interface was pretty easy to pick up. So far it's chewed through the few comercial DVD's I threw at with no trouble. It even has some rudimentary editing tools, though I haven;t played with them.

As for players ( again sticking to free for now) I liked mVideoPlayer the best of the stuff I found on market. What I liked best is that it seemed to have no trouble finding mp4s no mater where they were stored- card, internal, gallery... didn't seem to make a difference to the player. They all showed up in the menu automatically. I love easy!

Thanks for the advice, that was the starting point that made today go pretty smoothly.
 
I actually bought a software suite from Cucusoft to rip DVDs to my iPod long before I owned my nook. I can change the size to work with the nook's screen before converting, but I've pretty much just stuck with what I have already done for the iPod.
Mostly the nook just blows it up to match the screen size, so it's a little granular, but the files are smaller and I can keep more on the nook if I keep them that way.
It works very well!!!
 
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