Hello! - and my first questions :) (1 Viewer)

[PWF]

Managing movies would be nice but unless I could store everything I owned in HD I won't bother, and I can't as we'd be talking multi-terabytes

Streaming TC to multiple clients - now that my friend is a bloody good point and one I hadn't considered back at the beginning. I've got a quick and dirty RF2 output to my TV in my bedroom but that's obviously not as flexible.

Multi-terabytes is a problem? I've been building my system for a couple of weeks and I have the same issue. I own more than 300 movies, and at 7gb per that's a lot. Since I don't have a budget I've been using parts laying around my place (and a couple of my friends' places). I'm up to 1.1 tb on 9 drives. I have 3 more 80 gb drives to add, but I'm waiting to see if I can find anything bigger. If I had any cash, I'd pick up the Seagate 1.5 tb drive I saw on Newegg for $189. Or maybe 2.

 

[globaldonkey]

Seriously dude - spend the $189. You'll save it in electricity in a few months! 9 drives - WOW!!

 

[Bagal]

Seriously dude - spend the $189. You'll save it in electricity in a few months! 9 drives - WOW!!

I was about to say the same thing...

let's say the average power consumption of a hard drive is around 10W, you've currently got 9 drives and you want to add 3 more, so that's 12 * 10W = 120W for a capacity of about 1.3TB, or you could just go buy yourself a 1.5TB drive and have a power consumption of 10W...

 

[yakboy]

I'd say that unless you're willing to 'cope' with SD movies then really storing them on hard disk media is just not a real possibility for anyone unless you're minted. That said some people will argue that if they've only got 40 HD films or so that need storing so the storage requirements are minimal, and indeed they are but if you've only got 40 HD films or so then storing them on a HDD array is just daft and using tech just for the sake of it as you are unlikely to revisit those 40 films for a long time.

I've had a multitude of collections that sat on Hard Disks either in machines, in USB enclosures or NAS boxes.... without fail every single one I have ever used has within a period of 24 months of solid use developed a fault and I've had to recover all my data.

Dual instance is an absolute mininum, RAID 5 used to be the answer but interestingly it seems to be on it's way out for future arrays built from large disks.

And if you want to think about backing it up?.... oh god, I'll cry.

So unless you're super rich (read : own your own SAN) I can only imagine a HD film library stored on Hard Disks to be a toy as opposed to an ongoing media installation with real shelf life that you'll still be using in 5 years time.

 

[Bagal]

Ultimately nobody goes into this without having a passion for it because as you've just put it, it's not worth it.

Anyway, I don't quite believe you need to be super rich to have your HD film library on disk, in your example those 40 HD films would fit on a 1TB drive, quick check on ebuyer.co.uk says I can have a samsung 1TB for £73.98, newegg.com says I can have the same drive for $119.99, neither price is going to break the bank and the cost of hard drive space is always falling, I bought that same samsung drive a few months ago for £99....

but I digress, as I said if you don't have a passion for this then you're not going to do it, just the same as I'm not going to go and spend a fortune suping up my car when I can go buy a stock sports model with the same performance for half the price

 

[yakboy]

...as I said if you don't have a passion for this then you're not going to do it, just the same as I'm not going to go and spend a fortune suping up my car when I can go buy a stock sports model with the same performance for half the price

Couldn't have put it better myself.... I used to have a real love of fiddling with this sort of thing. I built a Shuttle based media PC several years ago that I spent a very very long time making very very quiet. Now I just can't be arsed with the whole fiddling bit.

I always want a better media experience and I'm sure that MP could offer me exactly what I want but I have to question how much of my time will be taken up fiddling compared to how much time will be taken actually putting ass-to-sofa and thumb-to-remote and using it.

There is only one thing I hate more than a failed electrical device that I can't fix....
..... and that's the the ones I can fix

It's just the worst feeling (and doubly so when you know it was caused by your own tweaking)

 

[PWF]

Seriously dude - spend the $189. You'll save it in electricity in a few months! 9 drives - WOW!!

Believe me, if I had any cash whatsoever I would. My wife and I are at the tail end of an adoption, so that's where all our money is going. But hey, I'm having fun tinkering with this stuff, and it's a nice change from designing and building large scale systems at work. If it doesn't work, no one is mad but me.

 

[globaldonkey]

That's the attitude PWF Congrats on the adoption too. That's far more important than any HTPC

It's how I started out with HTPC, and now I'd class myself as a HTPC enthusiast who has, over the period of the last 3 or 4 years, built a solid High Def HTPC based on MP. It's taken time, effort and a bit of money (and a few bad choices along the way), but it's all worth it if you enjoy it. It's great watching how this product has evolved.