Mrs Troubleatmill has 500 DVD's....Need a media server...

Troubleatmill_2

I would like a media centre thingy to enable Mrs T to be able to choose her favourite DVD from ( Around 500 I guess ) and play it to her hearts content.
( The DVD's are now stored upstairs in the spare room as there is no room downstairs )
BTW 98% of them are region 2, the remainder region 1.

Having managed to put a couple of DVD's onto my Ipod - it looks like they take an absolute age to migrate.

Is there anything out there, that can be Mrs T's dream media centre.
(And I'm guessing I need a few Terrabytes of disk space... but the cost is coming down )

All help appreciated.

Thanks
Troutbleatmill

fwor

It's a difficult one - you'll probably need about 5TBs of storage and a lot of patience to transfer the DVDs onto it. You'll also need a media centre which can handle at least 5 hard drives, or double that if you want to use the cheapest 500GB hard drives that are around ATM.

I guess you'll spend around £500 just for the hard drives if your media centre can handle ten of them, or maybe £800 if you want only five. Seems a lot of money compared to just walking upstairs to the spare room and picking one off the shelf...

You might be better off looking to narrow down your library of favourite DVDs and putting them in a DVD jukebox - though they aren't cheap either...

Dime_Bar

What is the plan, have the media server out of the way and stream from it? or use it as a player as well?

If you go for the first option I would personally only use a wired network and preferably Gigabit Lan, whilst it is not truely necessary it would leave plenty of redudancy and not cost you much more.

As for the machine, nothing too special would be required as it would not really be doing to much, best bet too look out for a full sized tower which would give you plenty of scope for additional HDD's I would have thought any P4 would be up to the job and with the current prices 1 or 2 GB of Ram.

Troubleatmill_2

It could be the player, or the server... options are open for now.
My concern is the time taken to transfer the disks.

Looks like there are no shortcuts.

Thanks chaps.

BillScarab

I can't see any quick way of ripping 500 DVDs. It's going to cost a fair bit to do as well, 500Gb discs are £50-55 and you'll need 10 or so of those. Bigger discs are available but they pre Gb cost isn't any cheaper at the moment. So to buy a computer and fit all the discs is going tp cost anywhere between £700-1000 which is a lot of cash for abit of convenience.

As an alternative to ripping the discs you could download them, it won't be quicker as such but you can leave it going without user intervention. However it is obviously illegal.

raptorman

As for an OS for the media centre have you thought
about Linux. This would be worth a try, and best of all its free:j

http://www.linuxmce.org/

If you haven't used Linux before don't worry, you will be surprised
how easy it is.

nickcardwell

you could get away with 2tb of disk space.
if you rip the dvds to the hard drive, you can remove other languages/menus etc.. almost like ripping to a blank dvd (4gb in size)
Thats what i did.

I have been doing it slowly over the last few months , no fast and easy way round it.

Though take note if the hard drives ever die then you will have to redo it all again!
So you will have to use a nice raid setup

coolagarry

Another option would be to convert to DivX. This is similar to converting audio cd's to mp3's. You convert dvd to divx and it reduces in size to less than 1gb per movie with acceptable quality (Probably not so acceptable if you view it on a very large screen).
You would need a Divx compatable dvd player to play them but they are only slightly more expensive than regular dvd players. This is one I bought recently http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-DVP5960-Multi-region-capable-upscaling/dp/B000G2Y59E/ref=pd_sbs_ce_title_1
A downside is that it takes a long time to convert dvd's to divx.