Home Theater Equipment "HTPC"

[Audioseduction]

Do any of you use a HTPC to store your movies and to play from? Do you store both DVDs and Blu-Rays? I'm currently loading my HTPC with all of my DVDs. Then next will be my Blu-Rays. After that I will box up my dvds/Blu-Rays and store them in a closet.

[MyPal]

George... Hmmm, I don't think I would be interested in watching a lossy compression BD transfer given the bird in the hand. Call me a purist. If i must as an alternative, I would just stream it on demand from a service provider like Sony Entertainment or Foxtel.

What software do you use to rip/strip the BD content protection security locks & region code & what average compression ratio are you filing?

[Rayooo]

Originally Posted by Audioseduction

Do any of you use a HTPC to store your movies and to play from? Do you store both DVDs and Blu-Rays? I'm currently loading my HTPC with all of my DVDs. Then next will be my Blu-Rays. After that I will box up my dvds/Blu-Rays and store them in a closet.

I do as you with Flac/Audio. (except in my case storage is a NAS device)
I would have assumed these days that one could "rip" DVDs/Blu-Rays to storage without added quality loss. Is it necessary to compress further DVD/Blu Ray in order to create a backup? If so, I'd agree with MyPal on this.

[-E-]

It is possible to rip bit-perfect BD discs, but you are looking at 25-50gb per rip. Assume 4-8gb for each DVD.

[MyPal]

Originally Posted by Vesuvius

It is possible to rip bit-perfect BD discs, but you are looking at 25-50gb per rip. Assume 4-8gb for each DVD.

For this you need a humming SAN array to store a decent collection. It would have to be iSCSI & racked in an equipment room away from the HT. Not worth the effort yet IMO until those SSD capacities increase 100 fold. By then on demand streaming services would have likely matured along with your bandwidth pipe. Older releases in true HD for a buck a week.

[Pider]

Besides the washers....

I'm interested in the guts of the HTPC. What vid card? What TV card? Etc. I just ordered a 1 Tb 2.5" laptop drive for my music server to see how quiet it is. I started to order a TV card, but thought I needed more advice first. The HDMI vid card I have works okay from server to plasma, but I haven't tested it yet to see how it behaves doing DVD/BD playback. I have a DVD drive, but would have to get a BD drive.

[Audioseduction]

This is my dedicated HT setup in family room.
Doing bit perfect 0 compression backup with DVDFab. Using JRMC 17 for player. I currently just have a DVD drive but will be adding a BD soon.

Video: GeForce GT520 with 2GB of RAM

CPU/MB: Intel ® Viiv™ Processor Technology with an Intel ® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600 2.40GHz, 2x4MB L2 Cache, 1066MHz Front Side Bus

RAM: 3072MB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM

Storage: 2TB Harddrive

[Audioseduction]

Originally Posted by MyPal

For this you need a humming SAN array to store a decent collection. It would have to be iSCSI & racked in an equipment room away from the HT. Not worth the effort yet IMO until those SSD capacities increase 100 fold. By then on demand streaming services would have likely matured along with your bandwidth pipe. Older releases in true HD for a buck a week.

Vesuvius...every time I see your avatar I want to ask about the diameter of those washers...

I'm not using SSD for file storage. It's a 2TB SATA Harddrive.

[-E-]

As long as your rips are between 4-8GB each, you are ripping bit-for-bit (and assuming you are keeping the .ISO or fully functional folders {AUDIO_TS, VIDEO_TS}).

MyPal goes a bit to the extreme. You wouldn't need a fully fledged SAN (though that would be awesome). A very well built server or NAS and a Cat6/Cat6e network is more than enough to stream full BD.

To answer Pider's question - any newer mobo on a i-series Intel chip (Sandy Bridge or newer with a 100% confidence level) even with the built-in video setup is more than enough for 1080p native playback and bitstream passthrough to a pre/pro (I would suggest 8gb+ of RAM though since the video card will eat 1.5-3gb of it as needed).

Since nobody seems to take my reco's on heat/size/sound and always insisting to make the HTPC/Audiobox into an actual serving machine - it seems a bit pointless to continue on about best practices in setting up and implementing the separating of these two functions and focusing on proper infrastructure and redundancy.

[Audioseduction]

Here is a shot of my 73" HD screen with JRMC. The HTPC plays excellent. Going to enjoy watching my oldie but goodies soon!