Wow-that's quick. The last time I did a conversion with handbrake it took over 2 hours, but that was with a droid tab.

That's fantastic! Will certainly be doing this myself in future I think.

After playing around with the settings for HandBrake I have now upped all the settings to maximum. This is running at around 90mins for a 2hour+ movie.

Once I've uploaded it to my cloud I'll see what happens to the streaming.

The Archangel

As yet another update, I have upped the resolution and streaming is still fine, it takes around 3 to 5 seconds longer for the movie to start playing which is fine.

The Archangel

I had wondered if your initial settings were toned down to get the 30 minute conversion. Was it bearable at that initial setting out of curiosity?

On my iPad it was fine but you could tell it wouldn't transfer to my HD TV as well which is what I want it for mainly.

The Archangel

Oh, than that would be good for me to use on my iPad! Good to know-going to look at a few movies I want to convert for a trip coming up!

If it is just for the iPad then the default setting should be fine for you.

The Archangel

Gab this sounds awesome, I've been wondering what to do regarding storage of some type and this sounds perfect. I'm looking into this, you make it sound so simple.

It really is simple. When I was considering this I thought that it may be way to complex but almost everything nowadays is plug and play so just connect the leads and you are ready to go. I should have done this ages ago.

I've just got a few more things to do......

1) Set up a network switch (about £20-£30) to link everything to my router that isn't wireless.
2) Re-setup my Time Capsule to backup everything on my network.
3) Install a WD TV Live unit (£70-£80) to play all my ripped movies to my HD TV.
4) Install the apps needed to allow my iPad to write to my personal cloud (WD 2go Pro is a read only app). There is a WD photo app which enables copying of all photos to my cloud but I also discovered that there is a combination of two other apps which allows writing of other file types to my cloud.
5) Get a second Apple TV (£99) so that I can have one upstairs in the bedroom and a ATV 3 hooked up downstairs to my HD TV then I'll need to point iTunes to my ripped DVD's (which I am converting in the correct format) so they are available on my bedroom TV.

The most time consuming part is ripping my hundreds of DVD's but once done I can store the hard copies in my attic room and free up lots of space.

For those interested, rather than buying the Apple Superdive I purchased an AmazonBasics DVD rewriter for £28 to enable me to rip everything.

With the 5GB iCloud for Apps and other stuff which can't be stored on my personal cloud then I now have more than enough space for everything I need and it is always expandable.

I would always advise that a backup of everything should always be kept, in my case I got a refurb 2TB Time Capsule but and good sized external HD can be used.

The Archangel