Streaming Video with USB Flash Drive

I want to stream video (ie mpegs) from a USB flash drive through my laptop (either my Toshiba U405 or my Acer Aspire One).

Any suggestions on a flash drive fast enough (and with enough capacity) to stream video without stuttering?

 

Most should be fine. I would think that you would only have problems with HD videos, but Standard Def should be fine.

 

Thanks, Patrick! So, if I go with a SanDisk Cruzer 8gb, I should be fine.

 

Yup. I used to watch movies off my 4Gb SD card, which is noticibly slower than my flash drive, and have no stutter. Watching videos over USB1.1, however, leads to problems.

 

I actually want to put videos on both a flash drive and also my Toshiba Portable Hard Drive (320gb). The Toshiba is USB 2.0 so should be OK.

Now if I could only get Handbrake to cooperate with me LOL

Thanks again for the insight, Patrick!

 

Yeah I agree..most would be fine.

 

I have that 8gb sandisk I can test it for you if you want to wait. It has a kinda slow write speed acording to John but the read speed is plenty fast. I can already say I know for a fact it will play 720p and I would think even 1080p no problems but I should test it to back it up first.

 

Thanks, Vicious! I have two awaiting pickup at Circuit City, but was going to cancel that and order through Radio Shack which is about 5 bucks cheaper each.

Any suggestions on best program to rip DVD to hard drive? I have DVDFabDecrypter and Handbrake, but I know there must be something better. I want to move some of my DVDs to hard drive, portable drive and USB flash.

 

Depends on your goal and what you want. Some people like to keep the dvd menus and all that jazz intact and opt for lager file sizes. I use the method that "axxo" uses to rip just the movie and compress it to 700mb, the quality is still dvd like and you only have a 700mb file so you can hold a ton of movies, the method uses auto resolution selection so you get a file with a slightly lower resolution, thats good too since its easier to play (and my new fav movie machine is my EEE with a little atom cpu & a low res/size screen anyways) the other bonus is your ready to burn it to a cheap CD if you want to back it up on disk.

edit: was about to test the flash drive for you, I always keep it in my G50V bag but its actually in my EEE bag right now because I just transferred some gps programs and movies over to it and did not bother to put it back in the right place so its at home too and cant test it till I get off work in 6.5 more hours.

edit2: here is a guide - http://dailyapps.net/2008/08/hack-attack-how-to-create-axxo-quality-dvd-rips/

Not the exact same guide I used but it looks to be the same programs & steps, it works very very well and autogk does pretty much all the hard work for you.
AutoGK says it can take hours to do this whole process, my desktop with a q6600 @ 3.7ghz gets a move done in like 50min from start to end, and I think I actually have a hard drive bottleneck in there at some points, with a faster drive or a raid setup it may get it down to like 40min.

 

Ok Home, Tested.

I used a 720P *cough* file I had on my computer first and it ran from the flash drive no problems.

I then hoped over to microsofts site and downloaded the 1080p file magic of flight and it also ran 100% perfect directly from the flash drive.

So looks like its fast enough for 1080p so your good to go. Some files vary greatly tho depending on how they are encoded and what is going on in the movie, so you can easily download the same file: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/musicandvideo/hdvideo/contentshowcase.aspx

And scan the bitrate and stuff and compare it to your files.

 

Thanks so much, USMC. I definitely owe you one. You really helped me out there.

As far as moving DVDs to my HD, I really want to keep the menus so I think I am going to have to continue to tinker with it. I was able to rip one, but ended up with the movie in a ton of different, discrete files.

 

Just the straight rip will give you like 6 or so files for a normal movie, the vob files are the movie, the other files are a directory and menus things like that. You can just open it up with a dvd player software and its just like having the dvd. There really is no way that I know of to have a single file other than an ISO that contains all those files inside of it to make it act like the orignal dvd.

For what its worth tho, I give up the menus to save TONS of space, a straight rip is like ~4gb vs the 700mb within 90% of the same quality.

 

Thanks, USMC. That makes me feel a lot better. I thought I had done something wrong.

I hear you about getting rid of the menus, especially on an 8gb drive. I think I will follow your advice. Thanks again.