Network Storage and Media Tanks etc???

[matt]

FWIW - FreeNAS is, erm, "free". If you've got an old PC lying around then you could turn it in to a NAS and experiment on the cheap. I've not gone down the media server route yet but I have about 750GB of space on my converted to NAS PC with a network cable run to behind the TV, just waiting to be hooked up to a suitable wotsit or other.

 

[wizer]

Here's a Video Review of the XStreamer

http://www.channels.com/episodes/show/6 ... e-Xtreamer

Seems ok. It's hard to make a decision between them. I'd like to have a play with all of them to know for sure.

 

[SimonB]

First post here, but been lingering for some while in the 'on-topic' forums.

Seems like a lot of good information so far. I currently have an Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS which offers several media streaming services as well as backup and a photo library tool. If I read right though the NAS solution has been taken care of.

I use one of the older TViX media players which is OK, user interface is better than a lot of the earlier media players, but probably not on a par with some of the newer stuff. I used to have an XBox and loved XBMC, but I killed it trying to do a cooling mod.

We are looking at the whole multi-room AV thing at the moment with the prospect of building a new house. A friend of mine recently pointed me at the Boxee software, which is apparently a spin off from XBMC. It's currently in alpha/beta release and I haven't had a close look at it, but he's a media specialist and he seems very keen on it. From what I can tell they are bringing out a dedicated box later this year, but the software will run on a dedicated PC, whether it works on these new ITX type devices I don't know, but would be surprised if it doesn't.

Anyway, just another option to throw into the mix.

As for HomePlugs, I use the 200MB ones from Solwise. They will happily stream an SD DVD ISO without breakup, but they are susceptible to interference, especially if they aren't given a dedicated power socket, and bandwidth can drop.

The one issue which I am not sure if the OP has the information on is DVD transfer to disk. If you are OK with this part then fine, if not then you need to be at least aware of the copyright issues. There is software out there to copy DVDs but it is of course illegal. The other issue is the quality of the copy. I see this has been touched upon. IMO if you are going to bother of setting up this system you would want to watch DVDs in their original quality, which means ripping them as ISOs or VOBs. As Wizer points out, some stripping is possible and would save space, especially unwanted soundtracks, especially from European DVDs that have multiple languages. A knowledge of the DVD format is useful here, but there are guides on line (www.vcdhelp.com is a good one - I think it has been renamed, but that URL I believe still works).

HTH

Simon

EDIT: I see my URL has been caught in the not-enough-posts-spam-trap but pretty obvious what it is I think, if not am happy to talk about any of the above off line, as the OP has indicated he would be willing to do.

 

[wizer]

There is software out there to copy DVDs but it is of course illegal.

Is it? I thought it was perfectly legal to back your own media up?

 

[SimonB]

There is software out there to copy DVDs but it is of course illegal.

Is it? I thought it was perfectly legal to back your own media up?

Well that's my understanding. The only way to back up a DVD is to break the macrovision encryption (for retail discs). I have been told that studios are much less interested in SD and nowadays turn a blind eye, their interest now is with DB. That's not mean to sound alarmist, the likelihood of lil old us being on their radar seems slim. I mentioned it simply because if the OP was not aware of this I think he at least should be and can then make an informed judgement.

 

[wizer]

A Brief google couldn't substantiate that. If it really is illegal, then a lot of people (like Microsoft) are wasting their time making Media Centre(s)

 

[SimonB]

Let me re-phrase then - if you break the CSS encryption to make a copy to a hard disk then this could be considered illegal. Studios primary concern is that these copies are then sold. As said a blind eye appears to be turned to personal backups. If the software employed maintains the CSS/DRM intact then presumably this is not an issue - however my point related to making ISO copies rather than loading them into some media management software.

I don't wish to get into an argument with this, I was simply trying to help the OP and ensure they were aware of possible issues.

 

[TrimTheKing]

There is software out there to copy DVDs but it is of course illegal.

Is it? I thought it was perfectly legal to back your own media up?

Nope, technically it is illegal to make any kind of backup, even of software you have purchased and it is only a backup for your own safety. It is one of those laws that is 'overlooked' for the 'personal backup' use.

Technically VCR's are illegal, but when have you ever heard of anyone being raided for their BetaMax back collection of Blackadder?

 

[Gerry]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSaoNTSNn0g

Here is a demo of how the Xtreamer works on screen. Xbox and the like are poor seconds to these. As I said I forked out a fortune for a Popcorn 110 and this is as good if not better.

Gerry

 

[RogerS]

For those more inclined towards a Mac based environment then there is a feature looking at media centres in the current issue of macFormat. Includes Wii, PS3, xbox, appleTV, mac mini.

 

[SimonB]

This is an interesting development - http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broa ... its-magic/

So an AppleTV with XBMC and one of these could be a very good solution.

I took a look at the Xtreamer video and was particularly underwhelmed. I haven't looked closely at the specs but was disappointed to see what appears to be a very limited GUI. Navigating into 'C' -> 'Partition' in the media menus is antiquated, and harks back to the early clunky Syabas based devices. Unless there is some means to create a media library I don't see how this is a step ahead of XBMC or other newer media players.

 

[RogerS]

This is an interesting development - http://xbmc.org/davilla/2009/12/29/broa ... its-magic/

So an AppleTV with XBMC and one of these could be a very good solution.

I took a look at the Xtreamer video and was particularly underwhelmed. I haven't looked closely at the specs but was disappointed to see what appears to be a very limited GUI. Navigating into 'C' -> 'Partition' in the media menus is antiquated, and harks back to the early clunky Syabas based devices. Unless there is some means to create a media library I don't see how this is a step ahead of XBMC or other newer media players.

That's covered, interestingly enough, in the article together with some other hackjs for Apple TV including one that allows iPlayer (a must-have for me).

Out of curiosity though...can anyone who streams to their TV let us know what the resolution is like and also size/type of screen and viewing distance. Reason for asking is that viewing video fullscreen on the 24" iMac isn't brilliant.

 

[SimonB]

Roger, I watch/stream SD DVD material to a 42" plasma and it's like watching it from a DVD player. Lower resolution material as one would expect does not look as good, but a one hour episode of something of around 800mb looks significantly better than some of the low res channels on Sky.

I have some understanding of source resolution and scaling and how that affects the actual display quality but perhaps not enough to compare an AV source (as it were) to a computer based source, I don't know what the difference is. With a flat panel display it should scale the input material to it's native resolution, so that will always remain the same. Where the difference in quality arises from is to some degree dependent on the resolution of the source material. Scaling an SD source (720 x 576) to a panel resolution of say 1024 x 768 is going to look better then a source with half the resolution. There will be other factors that affect apparent visual quality such as de-interlacing and colour balance etc, but IMO scaling, or source resolution, is likely going to be the primary factor.

On the few occasions that I've watched 720p material on the PC it's been very good, as have SD DVDs, so my first thought would be to look at the source resolution of whatever you are watching full screen. The quality of the scaling is also CPU and software dependent. The best domestic off board video processors with dedicated video circuitry cost 000s so the power and quality of whatever is generating the video in the PC is likely to fall somewhat short of that.

 

[Paulg]

I have the XStreamer and so far I am very pleased with it.

Dont let the online vide put you off too much. The firmware for the player has been updated quite a bit and the latest version looks nothing like it did when I first got it (only a couple of months ago). They are improving it all the time.

My set up is a Mini ITX (Atom 330) Linux server with 1.5tb data drive serving all the PC's / Macs in the house. Video is streamed over 100mb ethernet to the XStreamer and so far has not missed a beat.

Source videos are my DVD's ripped to disk without any compression. Quality is as good as a DVD player with the advantage that the XStreamer is tiny compared to a DVD player and is silent. I also have all my photos on the server so can show those on the TV via the XStreamer. I will put my MP3's there too at some point as it can play them as well.

I have also downloaded a couple of HD demo videos (only a few minutes long). Again, no problems playing those over the network.

TV is a 42" Plasma and viewing distance is about 8 ft.

 

[mahking51]

Hi All
Just got the Buffalo Linkstation and hooked it up after having a look through the quite comprhensive manual in pdf. A bit daunting this.
First problem was that manual said in the first paragraph that RAID 0 was the shipping default and in the second suggested that RAID 5 was the way to go and that that was the default shipped from the factory!
The software said it was RAID 0 so jumped in at deep end and reset to RAID5 without any problem except the compulsory automatic disk check that kicks in after the configuration finished took 10 HOURS to run!!
Created the share folders that I want, DVD, Photo & Music only to find that they would not mount as they needed to be remapped as Network Drives.
All this was getting very damn close to what I felt comfortable doing with my not very good computer knowledge but so far OK.
Have copied over all my photos and they show up just fine in Windows Media Centre after a bit of faffing about telling it where to look.
Am now goig to copy a couple of DVD's from my hard drive as atrial to see if they run and show up with their covers in Media Centre.
Onward & upward!!
Thanks to all for kicking in on this thread, all very helpful indeed.
Cheers,
Martin

 

[wizer]

After helping Martin out in this thread, I couldn't resist investing in an Xtreamer. I was impressed by the features and reviews on this unit and I liked the fact it was constantly being updated by it's makers. Features like a built in FTP and Web server make it a good stop gap before I invest in a NAS. The main reason for wanting one of these is not really for movies as we're not big movie watchers. The idea was to take all my daughter's dvds and put them out of reach so she doesn't destroy them. Also we haven't settled on a music solution for the lounge, and this would handle things well enough for our requirements. As an added bonus, it lets you display photo slideshows which solves the nagging problem I get "What's the point in having a camera if we never print the photos" (I'll never be able to explain that properly to Wife and family members :roll

It arrived on Monday and I must say I'm less than impressed. To set it all up, I used the TV in the bedroom which is a Samsung 20" Flatscreen with HDMI inputs. The on screen display of the Xtreamer is diabolical. I think it's probably designed for much larger TVs. It looked like your PC when you set it to the wrong resolution and, unless you were directly level with the centre of the TV, it was hard to read the text. I found the menus slow and not intuitive. Perhaps a flaw with all of these units, is searching for media. I setup a share on the network called 'MEDIA' and moved some content in there for testing. But you had to navigate 5 or 6 screens before you got there. Even then, it wasn't obvious how to select what type of media you wanted to view. I imagine it'd be a nightmare if you had hundred or even thousands of albums or movies. It does have a search feature but it's SO slow. The remote has a directional pad and you use it with an on-screen qwerty key pad. I can touch type like a girly secretary () but with this thing I was like my Dad trying to text :roll: My wife would not have the patience to navigate around this thing, she gets frustrated with Sky+!

It came with a free wireless dongle and this was the breaker for me, as I wanted to use it via wireless for a couple of months before I could afford some homeplugs. Even tho I was in the room next to the wireless router, it couldn't stream any video without stuttering. I know wireless shouldn't be relied on for streaming media, but my laptop can do it without fault. When I fitted a USB HDD the video did play well and it did appear to play anything I threw at it.

If all that wasn't bad enough... The company I bought it off were advertising it with a free after market silent cooler fitted and it turned up without that and then on the 2nd time I turned it on, it just hung and wouldn't get past the loading screen. When I contacted Tranquil PC about it, they just replied with a blunt email saying 'Send it back for a refund'. I find it infuriating that they've sent me something so utterly useless and I have to pay to return it! Obviously it has to go back, but I can't help thinking I should give it another go. As I said earlier, on paper it's the ideal solution. It was about the cheapest on the market and I really can't stretch my budget for the higher priced boxes.

One option is this

http://aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/2827_12765.htm

On offer from tomorrow. Worth a punt? It can't be much worse than this one and it's £50 cheaper.

Anyway. This is my rant for the day.

 

[RogerS]

Thanks, wizer, it's really helpful to read a review like this so we know what to steer clear of.

 

[wizer]

I think I'm going to take a gamble on the Medion one so I'll review that too. I'll probably end up trying all the budget options before I learn what I did with tools, cheap means cheap.

 

[jlawrence]

cheap in this respect generally means not enough horse power to display any kind of high res video imo.
Personally I'd still go with one of the Zotac ION motherboards and build my own system. Yes, it's a bit more expensive. But then at least you know exactly what it should be capable of - and having hdmi out means I don't have to disconnect anything else from the TV in order to plug the thing in.

ADDED:
The aldi one actually talks about hdmi out - might pop in tomorrow and have a nose at that one. for £50 it's worth getting to play with - that's less than even just the ION motherboard nevermind adding a case etc. If necessary butcher the median for the case etc and ditch the rest of it .

 

[wizer]

I'd love to go the PC route. It is without doubt the best way to solve this problem. But to do it right, the way I want it to work, would cost in excess of 1k easily. I'd rather buy some green power tools with that money