CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

stefuel

I don't want to build a HTPC. I just want a bare bones PC with a BD ROM drive and big goone HDDs. I want to be able to buy a BD movie, copy it to my HDD and later access it from my PS3 via my LAN connection. In fact, I'd just as soon not even connect it to my LAN but direct connection and stream between the server PC and PS3.
About 8 months ago I installed TVersity on this PC and configured the PS3 to grab SD movie files from it and it worked fine.
I know (or at least understand) that for BD playback from a PC to a analog device requires a expensive video card and a PC with quite a bit of horsepower but for simple digital video storage, wouldn't a cheaper PC suffice???
Will a BD rom drive even funtion (read and write) to a HDD in a bare bones el-cheapo PC??.

I have a rack mount PC case with a A7V8X-X mother board an AMD processor. It was to be used for a PC based video security system but I later decided to go with a stand alone DVR based system which free's up this equipment to play with.

As all my home theater equipment is located in a rack in my garage, requiring me to go out to it and insert disks for playback, a server with all my DVD's installed on it seems to be the ideal solution.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 9668

Oops, I replied in the CRT forum. Since you can get Western Digital 1TB OEM drives (3-year warranty) for $99 any day of the week, and that you can get several motherboards with eight (8) SATA2 connectors for under $100 I would think you could easily build a good storage PC for this function.

Here is a comparison of Western Digital and Seagate 1TB drives, each $99

Stonefool · Joined: 24 Dec 2006 Posts: 253 Location: Sweden

The only thing you really need is the minimum requirement for the BD side, since your not gonna use the hardware to actually drive your display. You need more RAM than CPU Horse power, and gigbit ehternet capable card. The G-card only needs to be able to handle BD movies, more for convinient then its actual use, since your using the PS3 to display the content, so the "signal" should be as "clean" as possible.

The software needed depends on what you want to stream, like for pay sites you probably need Media Player 11, due to MS DRM.

It doesn't cost too much, unless you need an XP license (or "worse"). And of course a good switch, 'specially if your using a WiFi-switch with more then one PC communicating over WiFi.

With most Switches/Routers of quality you should be able to configure it to use "full speed" for your prefered hardware, and lower the bandwidth for everything else that doesn't really need "full speed". You only get full bandwidth through "home" switches and routers if you use it with two active devices at the same time.

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 7096 Location: Fort Collins, CO

If you're going to play the movies on your PS3, you don't need a computer at all. Just get a basic NAS with a media server, but make sure the media server doesn't block movie content (some do).

E.g. I have a LaCie 1TB NAS ($229 at newegg) with a built-in Twonkyvision media server. It's not great but it works (so far anyway). My PS3 sees it and plays SD content off it just fine.

Haven't tried it with BD content, though. How do you plan to rip your Blu Ray disks?

Oh, and standard 100Mbit LAN should do fine. HD movies run around 10GB per hour, or 2.7 MB per second. That's just over 22 Mbit/sec, so your 100Mbit LAN should handle it no problem.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 861 Location: Michigan

Gary commented:
> HD movies run around 10GB per hour, or 2.7 MB per second. That's just over 22 Mbit/sec <

Are you referring to BD content? Or premium movie channels? If the later, then boy, I sure wish they did. That would improve the quality quite a bit. 10GB/hour is a commonly-quoted figure for HD content, but never realized in broadcast format. In fact, 10 GB/film is closer to reality.

Assuming unmolested content off the premium movie channels, the space requirements range from 5-8 GB/hour. Recompressed, downrezzed, and stat-muxed content will be less. And naturally, BD content will be more.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 861 Location: Michigan

Chip inquired:
> I know (or at least understand) that for BD playback from a PC to a analog device requires a expensive video card... <

Not any more. A cheap (~$30) Radeon HD3450-based card will do the job nicely.

> ...and a PC with quite a bit of horsepower <

Also, not any more. Most of the burden has been shifted to the new UVD engines on the video cards, so the CPU isn't taxed much.

> Will a BD rom drive even function (read and write) to a HDD in a bare bones el-cheapo PC? <

Sure, why not? They're just bits. You'll need something like AnyDVD HD, from Slysoft, to be able to extract the material in a playable format. This requires at least Win2K and a 2 GHz Pentium-class CPU with 512M RAM, for Blu-ray.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 9668

The 3450 chipset based video cards are like $30-80 on NewEgg, but the AnyDVD HD software is showing for about US$150, and that's with the promotional 20% discounting. Yikes.

But, I did order four 1TB drives this morning. Very Happy

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 861 Location: Michigan

WanMan,

I guess I got lucky with my ASUS 3450/256MB vidcard at $20, after a $10 rebate. Still, Chip should be able to pick one up a lot cheaper than he was thinking. They're definitely not high-end, expensive cards anymore.

As for the AnyDVD, to be honest I've never priced it out, and had no idea what it cost. I just knew it was a path to a solution for a lot of folks. I still need to migrate 45 TB of HD content from D-VHS to hard disc. Then I may think about AnyDVD to put my ~150 HD-DVD disc collection (and maybe 30 BD) on-line. Of course, by then, I'm sure I'll have a few more Blu-ray discs. Wink

stefuel · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 11:05 pm Post subject:

How about a D-Link DNS-323. It comes without drives so you can select your own.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 861 Location: Michigan

Chip,

that should work. Best price I found in a quick check was TechOnWeb, at $112, with free Ground shipping.

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5135 Location: Osceola, Indiana

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5198

you dont have to raid them, do you?

I have been looking at a 323 for awhile.

**ecrabb** · Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:37 am Post subject:

The specs say it'll run in "standard" mode (meaning, two mechanisms show up as two drives), as well as RAID 0 and 1, and JBOD. So, no- you don't have to RAID. But, as with any hardware drive subsystem, to read the drive you may or may not be at the mercy of the hardware that formatted the drive. Regardless, you almost certainly can't just take the drive out and throw it in a Windows box to mount and read the drive... Because these devices rarely use a Microsoft file system (DOS - Fat32 or NTFS).

For just over $100, I doubt the little Dlink box has a hardware RAID controller. It's probably Linux-based, which probably means you could read the drive(s) on a Linux box if you had to - if you knew what you were doing. I'm sure some Clarence-style googling could turn up a page by somebody who's pulled and analyzed the drives to see how they're formatted.

For the money, it looks pretty neat. For just over $300, you could set up a 1-terabyte RAID 1 (mirrored) music and media server.

I'm really torn. There's all these different devices out there do little bits and pieces of what I want... Man, I could spend myself into oblivion playing with this stuff....

SC

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5198

I see that link is for a Dlink 321 but I have been looking at the more expensive 323. I saw that the 323 has a built in UPnP server but so does the 321. I can't find the difference between them now. It looks like the 323 has a USB print server and supports Jumbo frames (whatever that is - sure it has to do with large file transfers).

I guess a 321 would be sufficient and quite a bit cheaper.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 861 Location: Michigan

MikeEby inquired:
> I've never played around with NAS boxes, I'm curious about them. Let say the box dies but the drives are ok however the NAS box is out of production. Do they use standard formatting to just install the drives in a new NAS box and your good to go? <

Mike, I can't speak to this box, since I haven't spent any time looking into it. But as was mentioned, most NAS units these days are powered by a Linux kernel, and support the standard efs2 and efs3 file systems. So there's nothing proprietary. I believe there are even Win drivers that will allow for at least reading (and maybe writing) drives with these formats on PCs. Also, some NAS units can actually be config'd to run with FAT32 or NTFS formatting. Just don't ask me which ones, because I failed to take note of it at the time (though I think it may have been LinkSys).

This is an area where an hour or 2 of online research will likely turn up some good options. NAS units are available in compact form, where external drives plug into a small box; or bulkier, where one or 2 drives are housed internally, with an integral power supply.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 9668

Um, considering I just bought 1TB SATA2 drives for $99/each, and someone pointed out a SATA I/O card for $20 bucks I think spending $300 seems unreasonable.

garyfritz · Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 7096 Location: Fort Collins, CO

Brian Hampton · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 1178

I'm going to set up a macbook and wireless router (airport) for someone this weekend and she is giving me her "old" pc which is a top of the line Dell circa 2003 or so. I think it's at least 3Ghz.

I have been away from PCs since getting a mac a few years ago but I think this PC will work better with my HDTV card and I'm thinking of hooking it up to the Home Theater as a DVR.

Maybe I'll set up a media server from it too... I don't know... I'm not sure working with a PC will still be any fun... Guess I'll have to wait and see.

-Brian

**ecrabb** · Posted: Thu Dec 04, 2008 4:37 pm Post subject:

Person99 · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 4901 Location: Flower Mound, TX

I'm with SC.

BEWARE: Thread Hijack in Process

Hey, SC, you watched any of the HD available for the AppleTV yet? Everything I've read is that it is better than most cable/sat HD (not sure if it would exceed my FiOS though).

I'm really thinking about dropping my movie channels and this would be a great option to replace D-VHS taping of the kids movies.