Movies
Even if you never use the TVisto 3500 for anything but a video jukebox, I think you'll find that it is worth the money. It supports multiple video formats, but I chose to go with the simplest and easiest format. I used the banned program DVD Decrypter and told it to rip my DVD to an ISO image. (By the way, if you want a good answer to the question "Is this legal" you might want to see what the Electronic Freedom Foundation has to say about it. I then simply copied those ISO images to my TVisto in the Movies folder, and was then able to browse them as in Figure 5.
As you can see, selecting a movie is done simply by browsing file names, so you will want to be careful about naming your ISO files before installing them on the hard drive. There is no horizontal scrolling, either, so if your names are too long you will be in real trouble--the end of a title will simply be unreadable.
You can also see at the bottom fo the list of files that I have put these six DVDs into a separate folder. I'm using a hierarchical storagesystem to make the navigation process a little easier to follow.
While all this may be a little crude, once you hit the play button on the remote to start a movie, you will begin enjoing exactly the same playback experience you get from your DVD player--the full set of menus and features you expect:
Figure 6 shows you a playback in progress, looking just as you would expect at the given resolution, with the English subtitles being overlaid on the screen. (Looks like Sydney is in the middle of a big operation!)
I couldn't be happier with this DVD emulation mode of the TVisto 3500. It does exactly what I want, the way I'm used to doing it. The ripping process is one-button-click simple, and I don't have to give up anything in terms of features or performance.
