Playback Workflow Ideas For International Film Programs

[harrumph]

Hi All,

I'm a technical manager at a cultural center in a major US city. Our theater has a program of international films that we project year-round. As such we have been trafficking in all-region DVD players, connecting these directly to our projector.

Unfortunately, these players have been less than bulletproof for playback. We get discs from all over the world, some factory-made, some burned, some Blu-Ray some not. I'd like to play back rips off of a computer instead of depending on our menagerie of various janky all-region players to play nice with whatever media we throw at them this week.

What we want to do is institute a workflow that puts ripping in a central position. In other words, I'd like to play back and archive rips. Our goals are:

1) To ultimately ignore region and to play back the contents of any readable disc, Blu-Ray or not, from any region
2) Build an archive of copies of the films (such as on a NAS)
3) If/when HDMI playback is called for, to avoid DRM that crops up in HDMI devices.

Any thoughts about these goals would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

[st4evr]

1. Decrypt/rip your media.

2. Play it back with an unofficial player like JRiver.