I was looking in a highend AV magazine, and there was an ad for a company that would essentially for 20 or so thousand dollars build a video server where you could call up any movie in your collection.

i understand that this would be similar to having mp3 files on a hard drive, but how does one do it with movies?

do you just get a bunch of hard drives? is this what home media center pc's are for? should this be in the computer forum?

it would be nice instead of searching through 600 discs on my shelves to just type in the name of a movie. i like the idea of not having to worry about scratching or damaging discs, but how does one go about accessing separate audio channels, like commentaries, or other special features besides the straight up video.

and why does a company charge $20,000?

thanks for any information.

I think you could link up to 4 of the sony mega changer dvd units. Also, if you could still find them, Kenwood made something called the Sovergn (sp?) line that had linkable carousel changers and a media server unit. the changers were 300 disc units and had DCDi and did DVD-audio and retailed about 1200 each. The media server went for about 2k.

Here's some info on the media hub:

http://www.kenwoodusa.com/product/pr...productId=2357

and it links to other componets it works with, including the changers.

If it is hard drive based, you'd have to rip the DVDs to the hard drive first as .ISO images, then you could play them through any number of software based DVD players. This would be, on appearance, exactly like you had placed the disc in your standalone DVD player, but through the convenience of picking them like MP3s.

Seeing as how the smallest DVD .ISO would be 4.7GB, with many being twice that or more, you begin to understand where the bulk of the price comes into play - for massive quantities of storage space (hard drives).

I'm building one of these myself...it's simply a PC with a mess of hard drives in it. I'm planning initially on four 250-300GB drives (in a RAID array, so really only using 500-600GB while the other 500-600 is backup). I'm planning on under $1000 total, since I'll hit the HDs on sale and have the other components (case, mobo, software) already. Twenty grand is a huge ripoff, unless they're giving you several terabytes worth of storage.

Just a prophylactic warning that we really can't get into discussions about ripping.

x - i understand the potential legal issues involved in terms of talking about this. i'm not interested in discussing the methods of ripping but rather just the logistal issues of setting up such a system.

i thought about the daisychaining of dvd players, but that doesn't offer the kind of flexibility or content management that i'm interested in.

i found a website that has a smaller scale thing of what i was originally talking about. www.molino.com their's is $3000. i want to do what they do, but not pay that amount of money. i want to do that on my tivo or on hard drives or whatever. possible?

numanoid - can you tell me more about your setup?

Based on what I read at www.avsforum.com, the soon to be released Momitsu V880N will have a capability to play files from a computer hard-drrive over wireless or wired network. I think that there is supposed to be a PCMCIA slot on the DVD player (I am not sure). The price will be around $300. The player will have DVI out, upscalable to 720p or 1080i, and (hopefully) region free.

Can we discuss ripping prophylactics?

Pretty simple.

The bulk of it is my former desktop PC. An Antec SX-1040B server case; an old Abit KT7A-RAID mobo I have with an 1GHz AMD Athlon & 512MB RAM; a DVD-ROM; an old ATI Rage Fury video card; a Sound Blaster Live 5.1; Windows XP; and the previously mentioned hard drives, set up in RAID so there will be backup in case one fails (it would really suck to lose 250GBs of video).

I just set it up as a PC, place it next and connected to my home theater stuff (amp & projector), network it, then just use it as a multimedia server. You can play from the HDs or the DVD drive.

The RAID mobo will handle up to 8 drives on its own, so there is room to upgrade the storage.

The Kaleidescape system's price is high because of licenseing primarily. Kalediscape has licensed removing CSS encryption. A single "server" is only expandable to 3.3tb and while I dont remember off the top of my head, I think by default it only comes with 1 300gb disk cartridge. One of the other neat things about the Kaleidescape is you can play differant movies on differant tv's with multiple recievers (also an additional cost). Actually its a neat system, but prohibitively expensive for us normal people...