Digital Video Storage

[Devlin]

Well, this seems to fit best in the catch-all forum, so I thought I'd post it here.

I was wondering if with the advent of terrabyte harddrives, anyone had a link to a good guide on storing and retrieving video. I read in Wired magazine a few months ago about some guy who had such a system so he could watch movies or listen to music in any room in the house, but the article (not surprisingly) was very short on details. If anyone knows about such projects or links to likely websites, please let me know.

Thanks!

[Blue_MiSfit]

You're in the right place :)

Welcome to Doom9!

The system you are describing is a Home Theater PC (or rather a complex network of Home Theater PCs).

Basically, the idea is that you copy all your media (DVDs, etc) to a main "server" computer. If you have scads of storage (multi terrabyte), then you can just make ISO images of all your DVDs. If not, you can compress them with any of several popular standards like MPEG-4 ASP (XviD / DivX) or MPEG-4 AVC/H.264(x264, Apple H.264) to save space.

Then you build any number of "client" PCs, that are specially equipped to output TV signals - be it standard or high definition. Surround sound is also possible of course. Theses PCs are networked, and using special home theater PC (HTPC) software, they can stream video / audio straight from the main server. They also have devices that allow remote control, and extensive on-screen display functions. Toss in local DVD playback, and standard cable / over-the-air TV tuning, and you have a media hub that basically does everything. Build one for every TV in the house :D

I have one, an old Pentium 3 1 GHz box with 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP, a Radeon 7500 with S-Video output, craptacular 2ch onboard sound, and an awful old 10 GB hard drive. It's not pretty, and it hides in my entertainment center, but it gets the job done and plays basically everything I throw at it. I can stream my extensive collection of movie and tv show DVDs (compressed with x264). My HTPC software of choice is MediaPortal. It's free, and very polished.

Good luck.

~MiSfit

[delacroixp]

This would forego the compression to H264... or even ripping ISO images for each DVD...
You'll probably only watch a movie (unlike music files) once... and only rarely more often. If you have a huge DVD collection... maybe a 1,000 DVD's... a DVD shuttle sounds ideal.

I have heard that you can't play DVD's from a remote network drive and typically these '1,000 DVD shuttle' Monsters cost $5,000 and more... but you would have a fully indexed cross-referenced video library 2nd to none...
Naturally, you'ld be missing out on the really fun encoding stuff and you'ld need a $million home-entertainment sytem to match... a $billion home to boot... and a $trillion lifestyle to really round everything off...

Maybe not...


:):D:eek:
Pascal

[Blue_MiSfit]

I have heard that you can't play DVD's from a remote network drive

Untrue. I've done it :)

DVD bitrate is at most, 10mbps. Standard 100mbps Ethernet is more than enough, even considering that it usually runs 50-80% of that speed. Even better if you have a switched gigabit network :)

Even if you did have 1000 DVDs, it wouldnt be THAT expensive to put them all on hard drive...

Figure an average of 7 gigs per movie (spread between single and dual layer discs of varying capacity, this should be a rough average), that means 7000 gigs. 7 1 TB drives will store them all (8 actually, and better get 10 so that you can expand). That's a lot of space, yes, but you can save a lot if you only get the main movie and audio track etc... Can't cost more than $5k for the drives...

~MiSfit

[delacroixp]

Even if you did have 1000 DVDs, it wouldnt be THAT expensive to put them all on hard drive...

Figure an average of 7 gigs per movie (spread between single and dual layer discs of varying capacity, this should be a rough average), that means 7000 gigs. 7 1 TB drives will store them all (8 actually, and better get 10 so that you can expand). That's a lot of space, yes, but you can save a lot if you only get the main movie and audio track etc... Can't cost more than $5k for the drives...
Certainly cost effective... way faster than a shuttle... easier to organise... and you wont need mirror-RAID since you've got the originals if any of the drives crash and burn...

Looking good...


:):D:eek:
Pascal

[Devlin]

Excellent advice, thanks!

Are there any special concerns when choosing a television for such a setup?

Thanks again!

[ilovejedd]

Make sure it has a compatible connection to the video card of your choosing? LoL, but usually, you would choose the video card based on the TV, not vice versa. :p

I'm planning a similar set up when we buy a house. One central file server containing media files and an HTPC in each room. But for now, I'm contenting myself with a Philips DVP5960 connected to a Western Digital My Book 500GB.

Question, is it feasible to use the PS3 as an alternative to building an HTPC? It has an ethernet port and even native support for high definition h.264 videos in MP4 container. But since it's already possible to install Linux on the device, I'm hoping that Linux utilities can convert it to versatile media center. On a similar note, I wonder how fast the PS3 is at converting videos. It's already doing well in the number-crunching that folding@home requires.

[Blue_MiSfit]

I heard that originally the PS3 Linux was only able to access one SPE, but I guess that's no longer the case, as I saw some clustered real time raytracing video on youtube, and they were using all of the SPEs.

I would imagine that the PS3 could be terrifyingly fast if there was some nice assembly optimized code for x264 :D

And yes, the PS3 could be a great HTPC, especially through Linux, since this would allow you to have VLC, and potentially even one of the media center front ends. Native HD H.264 in the PS3 firmware is nice too!

~MiSfit

[celtic_druid]

For a file server you might want to check out FreeNAS.

[Devlin]

Misfit, does Media Portal handle the playing of x264 videos easily, or does it up pop a third party player like VLC lan, etc?

[legoman666]

Misfit, does Media Portal handle the playing of x264 videos easily, or does it up pop a third party player like VLC lan, etc?

I'm not even sure how MediaPortal plays video files by default, I immediately changed it to VLC before I tried anything else.

It's really quite versatile. For multidisc movies, you can tell MediaPortal to open a .m3u playlist instead of the .avi files (or whatever) and then VLC will play all the files in a row. You can also pass VLC command line options like vlc:quit, which makes vlc close after it gets to the end of the playlist.

VLC can also be configured to automatically go to fullscreen, use subtitles or anything else you can think of.