DivX enabled DVD deck....

[Dr Mordrid]

Link to Digital Video forum....

Dr. Mordrid

[isochar]

IMHO, the Lite-On Series is more impressive with DivX and XviD support plus ethernet jacks for streaming content. (And NOT RCA )

http://www.liteonit.com/DC/english/lvd_2010/lvd_2010.htm

[Marshmallowman]

Very nice, I am glad I have not bought a standalone player yet.

I think I might have to buy one of those liteons (don't get RCA stuff in oz)

[mmp121]

Originally posted by isochar
IMHO, the Lite-On Series is more impressive with DivX and XviD support plus ethernet jacks for streaming content. (And NOT RCA )
http://www.liteonit.com/DC/english/l...0/lvd_2010.htm

Looks great, I wonder if it can do streaming MPEG-2 off the LAN connection. That way I can store my DVD's on a HDD and have my choice w/o having to figure out where I last left it.

[isochar]

Isn't that a bit impractical at this point in time? Might as well compress the MPEG2 to MPEG4 and fit 6-10 times more movies in the same amount of HD space. That way a terabyte array could hold about 1500 movies!

[Wombat]

Originally posted by isochar
Isn't that a bit impractical at this point in time?

Nah, not really. At 2-3GB/dollar, hard drives are pretty cheap. $2 worth of HD space, and your DVDs are availabile instantly over your network, and protected from the destructive hands of children.

[mmp121]

Originally posted by isochar
Isn't that a bit impractical at this point in time? Might as well compress the MPEG2 to MPEG4 and fit 6-10 times more movies in the same amount of HD space. That way a terabyte array could hold about 1500 movies!

Normally I would say yes, but the time it takes to RIP & Convert one DVD to DiVX/XVID would be very high. Granted the space savings would be worth it. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Also, DVD would be of higher resolution anyhow if I wanted to stream it to my (can't wait for it to come out) 45 inch Sharp HDTV LCD.....

[UtwigMU]

Who said anything about converting to Mpeg4.

Just rip a DVD to HDD, remove encription, store in folder.

Takes about 15 minutes.

The only problem is IMO since while HDDs are cheap, RAID5 array with proper case, 64-bit PCI slots motherboard and quality controller adds to cost.

Despite that, I saw some discussions about such projects and some people have Terrabyte fileservers at home already. Since next year terrabyte HDDs are expected, few terrabyte array to few 10 terrabyte array to hold ~1000 DVD rips and your entire CD collection in lossless format, conencted to clients that output music to hi-fi or TV in few years won't be out of consumer reach.


For instance rough server specs:
- Chieftec big tower or a server cube
- Supermicro single P4 board with 64-bit PCI/PCI-X slots and onboard rage PCI
- Slow single P4 (2.4 or so)
- 512MB of ECC registered RAM
- 80GB boot drive
- 3Ware Escalade 8-channel SATA RAID controller
8X250GB drives in RAID5 (you have a cold spare packed in case one drive goes, you could also have a hot spare and 6-drive capacity) or 4-channel controller with 4 RAID5 drives and you can add another 4 channel controller with bigger drives latter.

Promise TX4000 also supports pseudo hardware RAID5 and costs significantly less than 3Ware controller.



If it's a personal project, you can start with old motherboard and CPU and regular SATA controller and couple of drives and grow incrementally....

[Wombat]

Why bother with PCI-X/64? DVD's are only about 2GB/hr, which is <I>way</I> below what regular PCI can manage.

And a simple RAID 0 should cover him.

[spadnos]

And to add to Wombat's point, if you're only storing the actual movie from a DVD, then a 250G drive can store roughly 125 hours, or maybe 60 DVDs.

It's not too expensive these days to keep a reasonable size DVD collection on hard disk.

(on PriceWatch, the best price/capacity ratio is at the 200G mark, for $104 including shipping - about $1/hour or $2/movie in this context)

- Steve