thanks Alan, Actually this is pretty much my plan. The reason for thinking of using the Apple TV to stream is that I have two in two different rooms and they are accessible. Other than that, I am perfectly willing to look for a player application on the PC. As far as storage goes, the reason for going with a NAS though is because of the size of my media collection. I have my Audible books, my music collection, which only includes music I bought in digital format plus about 40 percent of my CDs with the rest still needing to be ripped, and about half of my iTunes movies on a 3 Tb USB 3.0 drive and I have 85 megabytes free. I need quite a few more terabytes even if I only rip my favorite DVDs, since my total collection contains several thousand discs, and that is not counting extra feature discs and such. Blu-ray, I have over a thousand discs there as well, but I am not sure I can get an accessible software player that will allow me to keep the Dolby TruHD, DTS Master HD and the uncompressed multic hannel PCM audio of most of those discs. I would rather have to just keep watching them on disc if moving them to software only will force me to convert the audio to a lossy format or to transcode to another lossless format. If I can actually find a player that is compatible with Window Eyes that can either decode all of the lossless formats or that can stream the undecoded audio over Wifi or even through wire to my home theater reciever for decoding and processing, I would happily do so. On top of the space issues, getting a NAS will allow me, at the cost of a portion of the total storage space, to have better data preservation security. If a drive in the unit fails, I just have to buy a replacement and swap them out and the NAS will automatically reconstruct the contents of the old drive using backup information stored across the other drives. This approach costs a bit more, but it has all of those advantages and setup via wire or Wifi is a breeze on any good NAS.
The conversion of my DVDs and perhaps Blu-rays if I can figure out how to manage the audio, is exactly why I want to be able to use handbrake. It is one of the best, if not the best video converters out there. It can rip movie discs from about any format into about any format or even multiple format. If one can access the controls, one can control almost every aspect of the conversion to get the results one wants. It is open source and free and once one sets things up with a custom prest or presets for those that want to do multiple format conversions, it is pretty mucha one or two button solution. The trick is figuring out if a Window Eyes user can access all of the controls or if an app for Window eyes or a skin for Handbrake or even both would allow full accessibility. I really like the idea of having, at the very least, the portion of my media collection I want to keep the most handy on mynetwork. As you pointed out, this would not limit me to watching at home. I could watch on my portable devices as long as I have a connection and I could allow trusted friends and family access to the library for shared viewing and listening, something I would love as I am the member of my family who is always having to explain obscure movie quotes and references and then telling everyone that they really should watch whatever movie mentioned if they ever get the chance. If I can figure things out on the lossless HD audio issue, it might even be possible to set things up so that, when streaming the converted Blu-rays to a portable device the audio will be converted to a format the device is capable of handling. It would be nice, Blu-rays are much harder to scratch and otherwise damage than DVDs, thanks to a coating they use that DVD does not have, but after all o f the time I have spent building this collection, being able to store away more discs somewhere safer from damage would be nice. I hate having to spend money replacing something I already bought just because of some random mishap. Anyway, I agree with your advice. If I can work things that way with enough storage, I will probably do things that way. I just am hoping I can use Handbrake with Window Eyes, because I really like all of what it can do and I always find it frustrating when a really good application is inaccessible or so hard to use with a screen reader that it might as well be completely inaccessible. I still try reinstalling dvpoweramp from time to time to check if it has grown more accessible and still find it frustrating that this great audio tool is so hard to access. Thanks, Chris From: Alan Paganelli Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2014 9:49 AM To: Chris Subject: Re: Handbrake with Window Eyes Hi Chris, Why not just get a new wireless router that has the media server built in. That way, you can use a regular external hard drive to store your movies etc and then just give the media pass word to those who need to have it and you can still let friends connect to your WI-FI network with out having access to your media server. Asus makes a nice wireless router with a media server and a print server for around $130 USD. The software is accessible. I rip my DVDs to avi format. Much smaller size and if you use free download manager to do the conversion, you can select a higher quality audio or even just ditch the video and save the movie to .mp3 or some other audio format. Your valuable DVDs are safe and you'll still be able to listen to your movies or even audio books say from all your computers. The nice thing about the media server is, let's say I start watching a movie and I'm about half way through it. If you want to watch the same movie, no problem. The media server lets you start the movie at the beginning even wile I'm watching the same movie and am half way through with it and there only needs to be the 1 copy of the movie not 50! LOL! Just an idea for you but today's modern routers can do amazing things and you can use any old external hard drive you have laying about. I'm using a Western Digital Elements 1 TB hard drive as my media hard drive. It's a 3.5 inch hard drive but I also have the same thing in a 2.5 inch drive. The hard drive doesn't matter because the built in media server is doing all the work. The built-in print server works the same way. Plug in a printer into the second USB port on the wireless router and now your printer is wireless and if it's air printer friendly, just send the print command from your iPhone. You get quite a bit for that $130. You still get the ubiquitous 4 LAN ports too. HTH Regards, Alan Please click on: HTTP://WWW.home.earthlink.net/~alanandsuzanne/ There, you'll find free files of my arrangements and performances played on the Yamaha Tyros 1 keyboard. The albums in Technics format formerly on my website are still available upon request. Thanks for listening! ----- Original Message ----- From: Chris To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, April 11, 2014 12:22 PM Subject: Handbrake with Window Eyes Has anyone used the video conversion application Handbrake with Window Eyes? My youngest brother is currently using it with Window Eyes 8.4, which is what I have, but he also has a lot more vision than I do and seems after I’ve talked to him on the phone while he is using it, to be mostly using his eyes, so I am not sure how well it would work for me since I am entirely dependent on speech. I am planning on getting a NAS and am hoping to set up a home media streaming scheme with the most common movies and TV shows I watch converted to files for streaming, thus allowing me to put my favoriteDVDs in my collection away as backups. I would love to do the same with my Blu-rays as well, but they would take up too much space and I am not sure if one can stream the superior lossless audio of Blu-ray movies, which is the main reason I collect and watch these discs. Anyway, any info on using this application with Window Eyes would be greatly appreciated. I am using WE 8.4 on a Windows 7 64 bit PC. Thanks, Chris If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo. 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