08-01-2017, 02:58 PM
I meant for this to be a technical discussion, not a legal one. I suppose I didn't explicitly say that I was not going to be distributing the files, but your first response should not be to assume I am going to do something illegal. It's scaremongering on the internet like this that hinders progress and allows stupid laws like the DMCA and excessive copyright terms to propagate. I understand the copyright laws well enough to know that I can do what I want to do. The website linked to explicitly mentions that what I want to do is allowed. I am not going to be distributing these movies beyond my living room TV. There is precedent that allows me to do "place shifting" for my own personal use like this legally in the United States. Like pfeerick mentioned, the FBI is not going to come knocking unless I start distributing my video files, which I have no intention of doing (nor the upload bandwidth, for that matter). If I was really worried of what I want to do being illegal, I might as well go whole-hog and just download other peoples' rips from the internet which is definitely illegal, skipping all the hassle of using my legally acquired discs. Mark, since you like to assume things, if it satiates your legal-beagle, feel free to assume that when I said ripping my DVDs, I meant ripping home movies saved on DVD, not copyrighted material. If you have anything technical to contribute to this conversation feel free to stick around, otherwise, please go away.
So back to the technical discussion. I'm not really worried about how long it takes when ripping. I imagine I will just put one disc in before I head to work and as long as the video file was created by the end of the day, that'd be sufficient. I was mostly just worried about whether the USB bus would be oversaturated and cause issues. I have seen it happen on older Raspberry Pis where using too much USB bandwidth caused the system to reboot unexpectedly, even with an externally powered hub. Hopefully the Pine can actually provide close to the full USB 2.0 spec bandwidth without having a bad day. I guess I will find out when I try the first one.
You did bring up another good point though, and that's hardware encoding. Does the Pine have a hardware encoder that tools like avconv/ffmpeg can use to create quality rips without stressing the CPU as much? If so, has anyone already tinkered with this to find good settings to pass into the tools to make this work?
So back to the technical discussion. I'm not really worried about how long it takes when ripping. I imagine I will just put one disc in before I head to work and as long as the video file was created by the end of the day, that'd be sufficient. I was mostly just worried about whether the USB bus would be oversaturated and cause issues. I have seen it happen on older Raspberry Pis where using too much USB bandwidth caused the system to reboot unexpectedly, even with an externally powered hub. Hopefully the Pine can actually provide close to the full USB 2.0 spec bandwidth without having a bad day. I guess I will find out when I try the first one.
You did bring up another good point though, and that's hardware encoding. Does the Pine have a hardware encoder that tools like avconv/ffmpeg can use to create quality rips without stressing the CPU as much? If so, has anyone already tinkered with this to find good settings to pass into the tools to make this work?
But in all seriousness, I think it should be fine. I've had throughput of over 30MB/s when doing GbE throughput tests from USB2 connected storage, so it should cope. Plus you don't have the issue of the NIC/USB knocking each other off like you do on the rPis