DVD Movie Server (Kaleidescape)

I hope this belongs in this forum area... Maybe more of a feature request than a question. Is this something you are working on or can it even be done?

http://kaleidescape.com/

This service seems a lot like something that could be done and maybe already is done by someones software.

In the days of ever lowering costs of hard drive space, I would love to bring up a 600 gig server, that would hold a good 75 movies or so. It would be nice to have the 50 or so I watch most often, and then room for others to watch.

Just curious if someone has developed something like this and I just missed it.

Thanks,
Jeff

One could easily (as per my ability) create such a thing with a normal computer. The hardest party really being automating a dvd-rip/copy. Although considering their basic system costs $27,000 you would merely have to decrypt, screw reencoding. You could easily just buy like $500 dollars worth of hard drives equaling about 1.2TB of space. Even more if you get decent deals. That should easily store around 150 dvd movies, no recompression. Then just put a computer in each room and stream using some nice protocol, windows and nix* have their own, whatever MS calls theirs or NFS.

You could assemble a great server for no more than $1,200. The VIA low heat/power C-something (bad memory, sorry) might be enough for clients, which would be great from a noise stand point. I will go high ball and say $1,000 per client, likely much more than needed. Easily beat their price if you just take a little time out of your life, while saving over $24,000 dollars.

And for an actual example, right now I keep about ~800GB worth of various media on my FreeBSD computer up in my room. Setup samba to share em'. Computer downstairs on big/widescreen TV with 802.11g. Sit back and pick from over 1,000 TV eps, various Movies, Music Videos, etc... That and it plays GTA3, GTA: VC, NFS2U, ... with a logitech wireless controller. Theirs plays? Shrek DVD Trivia? I guess the point of that rant is that company in particular rips people off to save them a worthless 5 hours of setup out of their day. Bah!

Anyways sorry for the rant/tangent, hope something there is of use to you

[Morten]

As soon as someone steps up to the plate and provide Hauppauge MVP support, we got pretty much the same setup with MediaPortal.

-Or when the server/client split is done.


//Morten

The Kaelidescope product is way over priced and is obviously aimed at the high end custom installer market where price is a non-factor. In fact their client base probably wouldn't buy it if it was less expensive.

More interestingly though, is the claim that Kaelidescope built their very expensive system with the support and permission of Hollywood studios and related copyright holders and encryption companies. (Since they are based in USA and selling in that market the service of DVD decryption and streaming is illegal as of Feb 2004.). So, what happned? They just got taken to court for breaking a license of some sort. Anybody have news on this latest development?

Here's something even more interesting: The below link at Sage TV is promoting the STV media center which looks exactly like Media Portal. What's with that? Any of the admins on this board have a comment on this?


http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...ead.php?t=7946

Good input...

I guess what I am really looking for is how to do this if possible - I like the concept of lossless video and menu system on the DVD's.

Thanks again,
Jeff

[jdiffend]

Originally Posted by synoptic

Good input...

I guess what I am really looking for is how to do this if possible - I like the concept of lossless video and menu system on the DVD's.

The DVDs could be saved to ISO files in shared folders or on an ftp server and the player needs to support ISO files or you need a virtual DVD drive program to read the ISOs. You just need MP to automate the copy to a local virtual drive or ISO files.

If there's a decent, free virtual ISO DVD driver out there this would be pretty easy to implement. I would suggest using some sort of utility to eliminate anything from the ISO images you don't need so they take up less space and less network bandwidth. Transferring a DVD over a wireless network is slow and 10/100 is better but there would still be a delay before you can play the virtual disk. Gigabit ethernet would make a huge difference.

[jdiffend]

The configuration has automount iso/.bin files using Daemon tools so the ftp feature might already work with this.

[jdiffend]

Download daemon tools from here:
http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/portal/download.php

[Slack]

Originally Posted by synoptic

Good input...

I guess what I am really looking for is how to do this if possible - I like the concept of lossless video and menu system on the DVD's.

Thanks again,
Jeff

XBMC

you won;t get the menus but you;ll save 26,800 dollars.

[smokeman]

I may have another alternative:
http://nolanparty.com/mediaportal.so...?p=39096#39096