I see people referring to media players. What are they exactly? We have 2 cabinets of DVDs & CDs and would like to be able to take them on the road without using up all of our space. We will have a TV, DVD player, laptop computer & HDMI cable. What do we need to consider or do to use a media player (and to get all of our stuff on it)? Thanks!

I guess that would be any computer.1) how many of these videos are you watching now? IOW, do you really need all of them? The GF has racks and racks of stuff - mostly watched once and some, never.2) can you actually copy them? that's not easy nowadays

I haven't really thought about how much space a movie might be but I bet it is in the 10-20GB size if the movies are full blown HD.They will be large for sure so expect most of your computer hard drive space being consumed by your movies...Definitely would require an external hard drive setup. I know my daughters TIVO DMR stores many 1 hour TV Shows. I think I remember it being around 75 hours of recorded TV shows and maybe the hard drive is a 600GB size hard drive???? These are probably standard definitions format shows...Just more things to think about getting all of your disc stored on a hard drive...Roy Ken

The first thing you need to do is convert all your dvd’s to digital mp4 or other video format, for that you need a DVD copy program that will copy any DVD, then you need a portable hard drive to store your movies on then you need a media player that converts your digital movies to play on your TV. I have over 400 movies and TV shows stored on a hard drive that we take with us when we go camping.

Roku ..Sony.. many morebasically a (hardware) media player , is a box that accepts a external hard drive or USB memory stick or network connection and plays your media files directly to the TV thru A/V or HDMI cablesmy Sony uses HDMI cable, connects to HD via USB, and will connect to internet via Wifi and plays my stored video OR my Amazon ..NetFlix accountswhen i first got it in early 2012, i used it extensively to watch movies from Amazon on my TVlast year i purchased i "HomeWorx" brand TV tuner/PVRit records OTA HiDef TV broadcasts in HiDef onto an external driveit will also play avi and mp4 files stored on the external driveso i have two ways of watching movies NOT using the DVD player or laptopstd DVD movies are 4gig to 7gig in sizecompressed and stored to MP4 they are 1gig to 2gig in sizeone hour of really good video is about 1gigsome people compress to a smaller size say 350mb..but that loses qualitya 1TB hard drive can store about 1000hrs at 1gigabyte per houror roughly 500 std DVD movies converted to MP4or 200 ripped full sized NOT compressed copied DVD movie folders

I just remove my CDs and DVDs from their plastic cases and put them all in a wallet style case like this:CD/DVD BinderTakes up a lot less room in the RV.

Media players? | Good Sam Community

MrWizard
Moderator
May 25, 2014
yes hardware is physical media

Today the word "Media" is used as the abbreviation for "Media Files" , most often video files
TechWriter
Explorer
May 26, 2014
RVcrazy wrote:
I see people referring to media players. What are they exactly? We have 2 cabinets of DVDs & CDs and would like to be able to take them on the road without using up all of our space. We will have a TV, DVD player, laptop computer & HDMI cable. What do we need to consider or do to use a media player (and to get all of our stuff on it)? Thanks!

I think I'd opt for a WD TV Live from Western Digital. Here's a review.
ReadyToGo
Explorer
May 26, 2014
The media player of choice by many software sites is
VLC or Videolan
Just select the installer download option and away you go.
Myself, I keep all my movies in the original Vob format.
austinjenna
Explorer
May 29, 2014
RVcrazy wrote:

I see people referring to media players. What are they exactly? We have 2 cabinets of DVDs & CDs and would like to be able to take them on the road without using up all of our space. We will have a TV, DVD player, laptop computer & HDMI cable. What do we need to consider or do to use a media player (and to get all of our stuff on it)? Thanks!

I think I'd opt for a WD TV Live from Western Digital. Here's a review.

I use a WD media player that I just keep in the trailer. I can plug an external HD into it and play movies from that so I bought a small 1TB external HD that is just USB powered and bring that home and add my newest movies onto that. Works great for me and have a few hundred movies on it
Tom_M1
Explorer
May 29, 2014
Most newer TV sets will play content directly from a USB drive. Once you have the video copied to the drive, just plug it into the USB port of the TV. The trickiest and time consuming part is getting a DVD ripped to the hard drive.

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