I’ve still go a ton of dvds and blu-rays around as well as several players. Is there any device that can covert a wired output signal from one of these into a wireless signal that can be picked up by an ipad?
There is support for using your iPad as a secondary display for a Mac, so you could plausibly do this by playing the video on your Mac and mirroring it to your iPad. I have never tried this but I expect that the experience would be poor.
The reasonable way to do this is to get the video off the DVDs and play it separately, rather than trying to stream it. Use a computer to rip the video from the DVDs or Blurays to a file and then upload the video file to the ipad. Specifics of how to do so generally fall afoul of the board’s guidelines.
Really? I’m pretty sure that this has been discussed on SDMB in the recent past.
You can use MakeMKV and HandBrake to rip, convert and compress the Blu-Ray or DVD to MP4 and then watch it on your iPad. You’ll need a good bit of storage to hold more than a few titles, though.
Mods, please don’t hit me if you really don’t want this discussed.
I could be mistaken. Certainly at times the powers that be have been skittish about things that are plausibly copyright violations. Exactly which side of the line various tools fall on is not something I’m sure of.
If any of those players happens to be connected to a PC or Mac, there are apps which allow the iPad to play discs directly from the computer. Here’s one:
VLC will run on an ipad:
Note the feature “Support for network streams”; you could stream the video from your player to the ipad, among other methods of accessing it.
I store movies in 720p (height actually varies with aspect ratio, of course) using h.265 at compression level 30 (variable bit rate) and stereo AAC audio. (Not ideal for an 80-inch TV in a home theater, but fine for a tablet). Those are in the 300-400 MB range for a full movie. 480p DVD rips can clock in at less than 200 MB. He could store hundreds of DVDs without much trouble.
Yeah, I didn’t know what was available for iPad storage. I only do Android, and I would never watch a movie on any screen smaller than my 80".
My Handbrake compression for Blu-rays is minimal…5 to 10 GB or so.
I rip my media (whether DVDs or CDs), put them on a network drive, and then use the Plex server to stream to anywhere my iPad or iPhone is. I’ve been using this app for about a decade now, and it’s fantastic. I can be on vacation in another part of the world, and as long as my computer back home is hooked up and connected to the network, I can stream all my media to my device.
MP4 doesnt really workj for me on HandBrake so I make MKV files.
I rip them to MKV, then compress them using Handbrake and keep them as MKV.
This is what I do, but I only stream to Rokus or Nvidia Shield inside my house. I don’t stream outside of my network, mostly because I haven’t spent the time to figure out how. I’ve been told it’s easy. I don’t think so.
Honestly, I don’t remember doing anything complicated to set it up. It’s been so long, though.