Well, this seems to fit best in the catch-all forum, so I thought I'd post it here. I was wondering if with the advent of terrabyte harddrives, anyone had a link to a good guide on storing and retrieving video. I read in Wired magazine a few months ago about some guy who had such a system so he could watch movies or listen to music in any room in the house, but the article (not surprisingly) was very short on details. If anyone knows about such projects or links to likely websites, please let me know. Thanks!
------------------------ Man, it's a good thing nobody has invented "Scratch 'n Sniff" for the Internet, ain't it?
You're in the right place :) Welcome to Doom9! The system you are describing is a Home Theater PC (or rather a complex network of Home Theater PCs). Basically, the idea is that you copy all your media (DVDs, etc) to a main "server" computer. If you have scads of storage (multi terrabyte), then you can just make ISO images of all your DVDs. If not, you can compress them with any of several popular standards like MPEG-4 ASP (XviD / DivX) or MPEG-4 AVC/H.264(x264, Apple H.264) to save space. Then you build any number of "client" PCs, that are specially equipped to output TV signals - be it standard or high definition. Surround sound is also possible of course. Theses PCs are networked, and using special home theater PC (HTPC) software, they can stream video / audio straight from the main server. They also have devices that allow remote control, and extensive on-screen display functions. Toss in local DVD playback, and standard cable / over-the-air TV tuning, and you have a media hub that basically does everything. Build one for every TV in the house :D I have one, an old Pentium 3 1 GHz box with 512 MB of RAM, Windows XP, a Radeon 7500 with S-Video output, craptacular 2ch onboard sound, and an awful old 10 GB hard drive. It's not pretty, and it hides in my entertainment center, but it gets the job done and plays basically everything I throw at it. I can stream my extensive collection of movie and tv show DVDs (compressed with x264). My HTPC software of choice is MediaPortal. It's free, and very polished. Good luck. ~MiSfit
I heard that originally the PS3 Linux was only able to access one SPE, but I guess that's no longer the case, as I saw some clustered real time raytracing video on youtube, and they were using all of the SPEs. I would imagine that the PS3 could be terrifyingly fast if there was some nice assembly optimized code for x264 :D And yes, the PS3 could be a great HTPC, especially through Linux, since this would allow you to have VLC, and potentially even one of the media center front ends. Native HD H.264 in the PS3 firmware is nice too! ~MiSfit
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RE: Digital Video Storage
