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stefuel
Joined: 07 Mar 2006
Posts: 3353
Location: Green Harbor MA USA
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| Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 2:44 pm Post subject: Re: Help building a giant HD media server |
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| kal wrote: | | stefuel wrote: | I have to do something about my collection and situation. My equipment rack is out in the garage so I have to go outside to put in a DVD or BD to watch. If Sony does not come through in a reasonable amount of time, I will build a giant server. Not being PC savy (especially not HTPC savy) I will need some help to pull this off.
So, I'm looking for any and all suggestions. Anyone care to take a stab at it. The mega changer's initial expected MSRP is about $2,350.00 for 400 disc storage. |
I don't get it. I'm not frugal by any stretch of the imagination, but you're considering spending $2000+ just to save about 60 seconds when you want to watch a movie? Movies run about 2 hours on average? What's the big deal about having to walk for 60 seconds to put a movie in? Assuming you watch each of the 400 movies twice in the next few years, that's 800 minutes of time of walking. You'll spend considerably more time building and ripping your discs to the HTPC drives.
The fact of the matter is, most people do not watch a movie more than once or twice at most so why rip it to a hard drive in the first place? It'll take LONGER to rip it than to just walk up and take it off the shelf and put it in the player. The idea of ripping to the HD to save time is completely nonsense. Nobody switches movies every 5 minutes. You put the movie in and watch for 2 hours. Ok yes, sometimes you'll demo stuff for people and switch around a lot but for the amount of time that happens I just don't get it. I someone tends to demo stuff more than actually watching I don't understand why they'd have an HT in the first place. 
The only people I know that rip to hard drives are people who rent movies so they rip because they basically just want to steal the movies. But if you own them all as you say, the best way to save time (and money to boot) is to simply put a movie in when you want to watch it. Odds are most movies will only get watched once. I have 1000's myself and that's the fact. Ripping a 300-400 Blu-ray movie collection would take you days and days!
Another option: If you want to save that 60 seconds of walking why not put a $200 Blu-ray player in the room where the projector is?
More questions:
Why is the equipment in your garage? Is it a temp/humidity controlled garage (I hope!).
Where do you store the 400 movies today? Is that an issue?
Kal |
It would take to long to answer all your questions in detail. It's in the garage because of space and noise considerations. Yes it is climate controlled. The garage is not connected to the house. You have to walk outside in all sorts of weather conditions to access the equipment. It is all controlled by Crestron with feedback to touch panels so you never have to touch or see it other than to put in a DVD. Biggest reason and Heywood knows, is my youngest boy is autistic and a big time button pressor and is very hard on phyisical media. He destroys DVD on a regular basis. I do not want him messing with any of the configuration of my system. I have gone to great lengths to provide and protect a great system that is very user friendly.
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A Barco is only a AmPro with training wheels
Card carrying member of the AVS chain gang.
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kal
Forum Administrator
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 18114
Location: Ottawa, Canada
TV/Projector: JVC DLA-NZ7
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| Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Mark_A_W wrote: | "Ripping a 300-400 Blu-ray movie collection would take you days and days!"
Weeks and weeks actually.
Kal, why do you buy a movie if you only watch it once? That's what renting is for. |
I probably watch most of my movies once. Some more but if I calculated it's probably pretty rare. I buy because I never know what I'm going to be in the mood for and we entertain a lot and like to have a choice. I have a pile of about 40 Blu-rays at any given time that are still new and wrapped up in the "waiting to be watched" pile.
Have a few movie buff friends who drop by from time to time to watch classics as well so it's nice to have a pile to choose from. Watched part of 'The Longest Day' (1962) last night, and 'The 400 Blows" (1959) a week before that.
Renting just wouldn't work for the viewing habits of the people using my theater.
Kal
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kal
Forum Administrator
Joined: 06 Mar 2006
Posts: 18114
Location: Ottawa, Canada
TV/Projector: JVC DLA-NZ7
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| Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 7:21 pm Post subject: Re: Help building a giant HD media server |
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| stefuel wrote: | | It would take to long to answer all your questions in detail. It's in the garage because of space and noise considerations. Yes it is climate controlled. The garage is not connected to the house. You have to walk outside in all sorts of weather conditions to access the equipment. It is all controlled by Crestron with feedback to touch panels so you never have to touch or see it other than to put in a DVD. Biggest reason and Heywood knows, is my youngest boy is autistic and a big time button pressor and is very hard on phyisical media. He destroys DVD on a regular basis. I do not want him messing with any of the configuration of my system. I have gone to great lengths to provide and protect a great system that is very user friendly. |
Well that certainly is an special setup. Sounds like you've thought it all through.
Kal
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stefuel
Joined: 07 Mar 2006
Posts: 3353
Location: Green Harbor MA USA
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| Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 8:38 pm Post subject: Re: Help building a giant HD media server |
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| kal wrote: | | stefuel wrote: | | It would take to long to answer all your questions in detail. It's in the garage because of space and noise considerations. Yes it is climate controlled. The garage is not connected to the house. You have to walk outside in all sorts of weather conditions to access the equipment. It is all controlled by Crestron with feedback to touch panels so you never have to touch or see it other than to put in a DVD. Biggest reason and Heywood knows, is my youngest boy is autistic and a big time button pressor and is very hard on phyisical media. He destroys DVD on a regular basis. I do not want him messing with any of the configuration of my system. I have gone to great lengths to provide and protect a great system that is very user friendly. |
Well that certainly is an special setup. Sounds like you've thought it all through.
Kal |
This subject of this thread or the Sony solution represents the missing piece of the system that I need to finish it up.
I've done my best to make it bullit proof to the extent that you could be watching a movie in the theater have a power outtage and never know it happened. There is a giant rack mount UPS in the rack that powers the whole theater, including the projector and can do so for over a hour if needed. It is tied into the Crestron system to activate a safe shut-down of the theater if a power outtage goes past ten minutes so no surge damage can happen to any of the equipment. I take my $hit seriously. 
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A Barco is only a AmPro with training wheels
Card carrying member of the AVS chain gang.
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Mark_A_W
Joined: 15 Mar 2006
Posts: 3068
Location: Sunny Melbourne Australia
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:37 am Post subject: |
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| kal wrote: | | Mark_A_W wrote: | "Ripping a 300-400 Blu-ray movie collection would take you days and days!"
Weeks and weeks actually.
Kal, why do you buy a movie if you only watch it once? That's what renting is for. |
I probably watch most of my movies once. Some more but if I calculated it's probably pretty rare. I buy because I never know what I'm going to be in the mood for and we entertain a lot and like to have a choice. I have a pile of about 40 Blu-rays at any given time that are still new and wrapped up in the "waiting to be watched" pile.
Have a few movie buff friends who drop by from time to time to watch classics as well so it's nice to have a pile to choose from. Watched part of 'The Longest Day' (1962) last night, and 'The 400 Blows" (1959) a week before that.
Renting just wouldn't work for the viewing habits of the people using my theater.
Kal |
Well, Blurays are A$50 here.
40 Blurays are TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS worth. 
Umm...I think I'll stick with my 8 Blurays for $20 per month rental plan..
I usually have 4 or so movies on hand that I haven't watched.
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Zebu Fellenz
Joined: 21 Dec 2006
Posts: 2567
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:44 am Post subject: |
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| Mark_A_W wrote: |
Well, Blurays are A$50 here.
40 Blurays are TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS worth.
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Wow that much
I usually buy mine used and rarely spend more than $15USD per movie.
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dturco
Joined: 06 Feb 2009
Posts: 3778
Location: Eastern Shore Maryland
TV/Projector: Runco DLP VX-3000i Marquee 9500 parts doner
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Zebu Fellenz wrote: | | Mark_A_W wrote: |
Well, Blurays are A$50 here.
40 Blurays are TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS worth.
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Wow that much
I usually buy mine used and rarely spend more than $15USD per movie. |
Me too. I go to the F.Y.E. store in the mall buy used or Ebay specials mostly. With the exception of Firefly and Serenity, I probably only bought 2 others new. Same price $15 USD.
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emdawgz1
Joined: 14 Mar 2006
Posts: 7949
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 1:32 pm Post subject: |
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| tri_joel wrote: | | Sorry to hijack this thread, but I'm interested also. Although I don't need that much storage. I don't know the first thing about it, not even how to stream to my PS3. Where do I go to learn just the basics? Is ther a "for dummies" about how to do this? |
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HK-Steve
Joined: 15 Jul 2006
Posts: 849
Location: Switzerland
TV/Projector: Marquee 9500, Epson 8100
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| Posted: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:29 pm Post subject: |
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Some times you just need an easy solution,
It was a couple of years ago, I was going to build a server for all my movies.
I gave up as there was no way to spin down disks to save power, plus also the life of the disk itself.
This may have changed now, but with the original 20 disks I had in mind would never have worked, plus the heat.
Still have the PCI 8 channel IDE cards I bought.
Currently, I use the Popcorn Hour Media player to playback all my 1080i ts files plus my over 800 Blu-ray movies @1080p.
http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/
I have both the A-100 and A-110
I used Clown BD to pull the streams I wanted to keep,
most movies are about 15 to 30GB for the movie, best english audio and english sub's.
I plug the naked hard drive into the Popcorn, it plays perfect every time,
or you can use USB and an external HD enclosure, no buttons to press depending on which enclosure you get.
I have over 80 hard drives full of HD movies. 40Tb and counting. 2600 movies.
Gotta Love watching movies with that many to choose from
Cheers
Steve
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freak1
Joined: 04 Apr 2009
Posts: 13
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| Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:59 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with Steve, although I use a different approach.
since storing harddisks that are not running is risky bussiness (spinup and spindown in different climates is very very tough on the drives) , I have a dedicated server running.
granted I use the server to virtualize a lot of my work machines as well (I use them to test my designs).
the server is a supermicro casing, with a supermicro motherboard and an areca 24 channel SATA RAID card. it has 2 gigs of dedictated memory for the raid card, and has 24 1TB harddisks. running raid6 this gives me 22 TB of diskspace. the drives are allways on, no spindown. this keeps the drives in the best condition. the room the server is in has a very constant climate. I have a virtualized PC on that server, running vista with WMP11. I download and rip bluray to WMV-HD, and can play the WMV-HD over my netwerk to every xbox 360 in the house. for series that are not in HD, I use XBMC on my xboxes. for me, this is the best solution. I have approx 800 WMV HD movies, and approx 180 complete TV series.
messing around with disc changers and everything is just too expensive and prone to failure. my server runs a RAID 6, that means that more then 2 disks need to fail without me putting in new ones, before I run into data issues. I will be upgrading to 2 TB disks, which basically means replacing the disks 1 by 1, then expanding. this keeps all of my data but gives me another 22 TB 
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Mark_A_W
Joined: 15 Mar 2006
Posts: 3068
Location: Sunny Melbourne Australia
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| Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 10:39 pm Post subject: |
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"since storing harddisks that are not running is risky bussiness (spinup and spindown in different climates is very very tough on the drives) , I have a dedicated server running"
bull****.
I will not run a PC 24/7 on the off chance I want to watch something.
So all of my hard drives spin up and down when the PC wakes for use, and then goes back to sleep. I've been running this way for years, currently have 16 drives in a number of PCs (8 x 150GB crap ones I got for free), and NONE of them have failed (touch wood). Most of them are in removable racks with fans so they are always cool.
That's a load of FUD. And you are wasting god awful amounts of power.
Also, backed up media data is not mission critical data (like the family photos), it DOESN'T MATTER if you do lose a drive, it's just entertainment. And of course you have the originals don't you!
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MikeEby
Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Posts: 5237
Location: Osceola, Indiana
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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Mike... Plus OS, plus software, plus keyboard, mouse, plus monitor... blah blah blah...
Doesn't happen very often, but I agree with Mark... A server with 24 1TB drives running 24/7, primarily for entertainment, that you only actually use MAYBE a couple of hours a day is pretty silly and wasteful.
Figure something like 8W * 24 drives, and you've got 192w. Add least another 100w or so for a MB, PSU, fans, etc. and you've got nearly 300w, all running 24/7. That works out to nearly 1700kWh annually... for something you use less than 10% of that time. Even if you don't care about conservation, that would run my $140/year in electricity alone to power that server. Never mind the heat-gain in the summer, the noise, the maintenance, not to mention the relatively expensive clients... Several 360's in my house to stream WMV-HD? No thanks.
Running a big giant, inefficient, noisy box with server virtualization, RAID 6, two dozen drives, Windows... It's total overkill and a solution to a problem that probably less than 1/100 of 1% of the population really has.
Personally, something like the Popcorn Hour and a good NAS really appeals to me, and probably makes sense for a WHOLE lot more people. It could have a single drive for local storage (or not) and connect to a nice low-power NAS device with power management features and a 2-drive RAID 1 or 4-drive RAID 10 setup for speed and redundancy. That's the way I'm gravitating - seems like a good fall project.
SC
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MikeEby
Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Posts: 5237
Location: Osceola, Indiana
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| Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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| ecrabb wrote: | Mike... Plus OS, plus software, plus keyboard, mouse, plus monitor... blah blah blah...
Doesn't happen very often, but I agree with Mark... A server with 24 1TB drives running 24/7, primarily for entertainment, that you only actually use MAYBE a couple of hours a day is pretty silly and wasteful.
Figure something like 8W * 24 drives, and you've got 192w. Add least another 100w or so for a MB, PSU, fans, etc. and you've got nearly 300w, all running 24/7. That works out to nearly 1700kWh annually... for something you use less than 10% of that time. Even if you don't care about conservation, that would run my $140/year in electricity alone to power that server. Never mind the heat-gain in the summer, the noise, the maintenance, not to mention the relatively expensive clients... Several 360's in my house to stream WMV-HD? No thanks.
Running a big giant, inefficient, noisy box with server virtualization, RAID 6, two dozen drives, Windows... It's total overkill and a solution to a problem that probably less than 1/100 of 1% of the population really has.
Personally, something like the Popcorn Hour and a good NAS really appeals to me, and probably makes sense for a WHOLE lot more people. It could have a single drive for local storage (or not) and connect to a nice low-power NAS device with power management features and a 2-drive RAID 1 or 4-drive RAID 10 setup for speed and redundancy. That's the way I'm gravitating - seems like a good fall project.
SC |
I'll go along with you on the power saving...This board has all power saver stuff Mark was talking about in another thread using the "Magic Packet" to wake it up.
http://social.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/whsdevelopers/thread/d4e90140-9121-46e5-8230-345c0bdb8819/
I don't think Chip wants any media being swapped in/out. Raid...I can't see the need for fault tolerance in a home media server... That's silly.
Mike
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 11:55 pm Post subject: |
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I have a pair of Abit AB9 Pro motherboards. Each of these has 11 SATA ports. 
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Mark_A_W
Joined: 15 Mar 2006
Posts: 3068
Location: Sunny Melbourne Australia
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 1:26 am Post subject: |
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SC (what's your name anyway?)
A NAS and a popcornhour is a good solution, but you'll still need a PC somewhere in the system to rip the movies. It's possible that could be the same PC used for everyday stuff...like crapping on in forums
It's probably the simplest solution. IF the popcornhour does everything that is needed.
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 5:58 am Post subject: |
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My name is Steve, Mark!
Yeah, I think I'd like to try out a Popcorn Hour. Looks like a 90% solution for me. I was reading about the HTML-based GUI... Sounds a little goofy, but other than that...
As for needing the PC... Yeah, that's a given. I have my main MacBook Pro that do all my design work, photography, video, etc. on. It's a 2.33 Core 2 Duo w/Radeon X1600... I rarely ever do any 3D stuff anymore, so it's actually a great all-around machine and plenty powerful for most of what I do. Heck, my wife's little MacBook is even a pretty nice machine...
I'm not that excited about ripping BD's at this point... I don't watch the same thing over and over, and I don't mind throwing BD's in the PS3. I can boot into Windows and buy an external BD drive if I want to play with ripping, though. The media tank/NAS would be more for captured video (I'm thinking about buying a Canon HF S100 AVCHD camera), special "keeper" video (trailers, events, concerts, etc.), photos, etc... Hence, the redundancy. A terabyte or so should last me awhile.
Since I've pretty much migrated over to notebooks, I don't have a desktop machine that stays on 24/7 anymore. That's one reason I'd like to look at some sort of NAS. I've gone pretty green in the computing department, Mark!
Not exactly relevant to Chip's situation, though - Sorry for the thread detour, Chip!!!
SC
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 6:02 am Post subject: |
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Back to something more relevant to Chip's thread, but also of interest to me... What if you're not re-encoding, but just doing direct rips with this Clown BD you guys are talking about... At ~30GB/title, that means you're looking at around 120 movies or so to a 4TB JBOD volume. That could be done quite inexpensively... The real question I have though is time investment... If you're not re-encoding, but just ripping... How long does it take? Is it real-time? Half real-time?
SC
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Gino
Joined: 22 Apr 2006
Posts: 1363
Location: Trinity Beach, AUSTRALIA
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 6:03 am Post subject: |
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| HK-Steve wrote: |
Currently, I use the Popcorn Hour Media player to playback all my 1080i ts files plus my over 800 Blu-ray movies @1080p. |
Yikes, didn't know there were 800 Blu-ray movies even released yet!
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Wed Jun 17, 2009 6:49 am Post subject: |
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If you list all Blu-ray titles on Amazon, it says 4,035. Of course, that includes unreleased, duplicates, special editions, crap like fishtanks, fireplaces, etc. So, there's lots...
It used to be that with the costs to produce BD, it seemed to there was a bit of a barrier to keep some of the low-budget crap off BD altogether. In other words, chances were that at least it was fairly high-budget. So, the wife and I watched a movie last night which proved that paradigm is no longer in effect.
It's called "Night Train" and stars Danny Glover, Leelee Sobieski, and Steve Zahn. It's brand new, so it's not reviewed yet, but lets just say it's not exactly surprising it was a "straight to video" release. It was terrible. Production value sucked, acting sucked, terrible CGI... I mean, a couple of friends and I could have done better exterior snowy night train shots.... Way better, in fact. It was bad. It was like a Twilight Zone TV episode, only not that good.
SC
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