Home Made Video-On-Demand

It’s funny how one thing can lead to something completely different…

Tonight Robyn and I were watching Robots as it came in my Netflix queue, and as we were watching the special features up came a quick interview with Ewan McGregor much to Robyn’s delight, as it was, in her words, the first time she heard him in his Scottish accent… She diggs the accent I guess, I dunno. But I tell her she has had a copy of the Trainspotting DVD for at least 18 months… Put it on then, she says.

But as it was a copy on a DVD-R, it decided not to work, so then came an idea… A golden idea.

Find a way of ripping a DVD for TiVo to use…

Ahh TiVo, god bless TiVo… Is there nothing it can’t do?

So a quick search came up with this tutorial which basically says rip a DVD onto the hard drive, cut and paste the .vob file into the My TiVo Recordings Folder and rename it to *whatever*.mpg…

So using the tried and trusted guinea pig Serenity DVD I gave it a shot, and an hour later it was being transferred to TiVo by way of the TiVo desktop, sweet… So this got me thinking, if we really wanted to, we could buy a big enough hard drive, rip Netflix movies to it as and when they arrive and *boom* we got ourselves a little home made video-on-demand service.

I figure Serenity is an average length movie (1 hour 59 minutes) so it came out with a 4.3GB mpeg file, that would be like having around 100 movies, ready to go… All we’d need to do is start the transfer and wait 10 to 15 minutes so it can playback without pausing, can’t argue with that.