Is there a HDD Movie storage device.

[Lightwave]

I'm Chuck the Canuck from Canada, Hey there from the Great White North, well, more Great Wet North this time of year.

Being somewhat of a movie fan and have spent what i consider a small fortune on a home theater system and stereo system, I figured this is the place to be if I had questions.
Not experienced with forums so I hope I'm posting in the right place.

I'm looking for help right off the bat and i'm sure someone's posted information on this already, just not sure how to look for it.

I've collected over 1580 DVD's to date and it's just taking up way too much space. I keep them in the jewel cases so you can imagine what that looks like.
I keep collecting so this is going to keep growing, I want to look at an alternative storage method.

Is there a device where I can store huge amounts of data specifically built for theater purposes. No compression or quality reduction. True HD DVD and Blu-Ray quality storage.

I want to interact with it as easy as pulling up a guide on screen and picking a movie, no cumbersome external device that i have to hook up each time and fumble with.
I want all the sound and picture quality to be as if playing from the DVD player through the amp.

Anyone versed on this stuff yet or am I thinking of something not released yet.

[tonyvdb]

Hello Chuck, Welcome to the Shack.

Have a look at this thread as it is discussing this very topic. The biggest issue is for uncompressed AV in High Definition is your looking at a huge amount of hard drive space and is usually not cost effective.

Enjoy your stay here.

[mechman]

Welcome to the Shack Chuck!

[nova]

Hi Chuck, Welcome to the Shack,.... man 1580, thats a lot of DVD's.

[drdoan]

Welcome, Chuck. Great DVD collection, congrats. Have fun, Dennis

[Mike P.]

Welcome to the Shack, Chuck! Enjoy the forums!

[basementjack]

Welcome Chuck

for media playback, given your requirements, your probably best off with a popcorn hour or klegg mediashare device.

these will run you about $200 (US)

the system would work like this:

you copy your DVD's to one or more computers in your home.
you connect the device to your computer network, and to your home theater.
the device opens the dvds you've copied to your home network and you use the remote to navigate the DVD menus, just like you would if it was in a dvd player.

for storage, you could either have a small server with multiple drives, or you could have several machines - I assume you'd categorize them somehow to make it logical.

I personally own the Klegg device, and find it's as good as my ordinary dvd players.
given the size of your movie investment, it's probably safe to purchase one for $200 and mess around with it to see if its something you'd be happy with.

you'll also need a copy of dvdfab (www.dvdfab.net) to be able to back up the movies to your hard drive. - That'll run you $50

[Britton.Yoder]

There are two reliable systems I am familiar with both are costly though.

The first is a pc based system that is pretty cool allows you to add modular storage.

http://www.niveusmedia.com/

The second is extremely costly. A large portion of the purchase price goes into a slush fund to cover license costs to avoid the issue of copy right infringement.

http://www.kaleidascape.com/

Check em out. If nothing else they are something to model a home made htpc around.

[Lightwave]

These look like really cool systems. I'll do some reading on them and let you know which one i prefer.

[MatrixDweller]

You'd probably need 6 terabytes (plus or minus a bit) to store all the DVDs you own. A NAS (Network Attached Storage) would probably be the most cost effective, but still expensive. If you're computer savvy you could set up a PC with FreeNAS. Unfortunatly most desktop motherboards only have two to four SATA connectors so you'd need one 8 or two 4 port SATA RAID controller cards.

You would need 8 1TB drives to do 6TB in RAID 5. I would not recommend using RAID 0 even though you would only need 3 drives because if just one of the drives were to fail your 100's of hours of work would be lost. If one drive dies in RAID 0 all data is lost. You could do JOBD (just a bunch of disks) and only use 6 drives but there would be no redundancy and if a drive failed all data on that drive would be gone.

I think 1TB drives are in and around the $250 mark right now. So you'd be looking at $1500-$2000 in just the drives. Add another $1000 or so for a base system with a couple RAID controllers, a good case or rackmount design and hefty power supply. You would be looking at around $2500-$3000 for a system if you built it yourself and used a free OS. If you had to buy a system prebuilt from Dell or other manufacturer you'd be looking at a lot more.

That still doesn't give you a software interface, bu the other products mentioned earlier in this thread should suffice.

There is a company called PrimeArray that has an out of the box solution for DVD jukeboxing. For something your size it would be expensive.

Note: You'll also want to allocate about a 3 months of solid 8 hour days to copy everything onto your RAID array.

[Lightwave]

i like the suggestion of 8 1TB drives as it leaves room for growth, however i'm inexperienced in building something like this and am worried that it would be more complicated than if i invested into an out of box solution. Your right, i'm going to have to invest some serious time into just copying all this data let alone time to set up a custom storage system.

What concerns me above all is the user interface. I don't want to build this elaborate system and spend more than 10 minutes being able to choose and load a movie. I want it as easy as an on screen menu displaying my titles in categores Drama, Comedy, Horror etc. then clicking on my choice then the movie loads and plays. Basically just like satellite TV or pay per view.

[Lightwave]

just want to say thank you to all who have come up with some really good suggestions to my query. Got some very impressive replies and it's given me some good ideas. Obviously landed in the right place considering I asked several sales folks at some of the major stereo outlets around town and everyone told me something like what i want doesn't exist.

Now i've got too much to choose from

[MatrixDweller]

Lightwave wrote:

i like the suggestion of 8 1TB drives as it leaves room for growth

Running it in RAID 5 configuration makes it safer. You would loose 2TB of space however so you would only have 6TB total. RAID 5 makes the drive array faster and if one of the drives stopped working you wouldn't loose any data.

A cheaper solution would be to build a library system of shelves on a wall. You could have wall to wall shelving and a shelf in front of the shelves that slides on a track. Alphabetize it and you just saved yourself $10,000. It would look pretty impressive if done right.

The type of server you are wanting to build is the type only large corporations or internet hosts buy. A prebuilt product would probably be well over $10,000 with that amount of storage.

[Lightwave]

As far as building shelves for my DVD collection, you're right, it does look impressive because that's what i have now. Looks better than most video stores. I even went so far as to get the shelves customized so they don't show any hardware, looks like the disks are just floating inches from the wall.

Alas, i'm running out of wall plus decided to take the condo plunge. Living in a house now but paying WAY too much to heat and cool and maintain a ton a square footage i don't use. So I'm doing the downsizing thing and with that loose a lot of space. But in this day and age, we have a lot of space savers.

I think my wish may be a little ahead of its time. I know this is corporate or ISP priced stuff as i work in the industry.

You really think i have to spend $10k.
I would do it just for the convienence, but it would really peeve me off to see the same Sh$t available 5 years from now for $500 bucks. And it's happened to me, I've got these high end laptops collecting dust which are only 3 years old and i can't sell, I'm practically giving them away at $600 considering i paid $3500. Then theres the Cars and TV's every 5-6 years, you want to talk depreciation .... sorry, I'm ranting

My point is that i wish i knew someone like me so i could buy their well cared for used stuff at a resonable price when they upgrade to the latest and greatest.

[MatrixDweller]

In 5 years they will probably have 100TB+ drives and CPUs with 8 cores and 32+ GB of RAM and will cost only $750 for a complete system with a 32" LCD monitor. Such is the state of computer technology. The best you can buy today is worth a tenth or less of it's value in 3-5 years. You just have to buy what you can afford that meets your needs today and the not so distant future.

I should add that you would probably want to get a DVD tower with 4 or more drives in it to import your data. That will drastically cut your time down.

You may also want to consider archiving, selling or giving away some of your older, not watched titles (or start up a rental company). It's good to 5S every now and again. You have some movies that you don't like, are poorly rated, have duplicates of (ie: reg edition + platinum ed + ultra deluxe collectors ed box set, etc).

[Lightwave]

i looked into storage devices and there are several options out there but what i don't see is a software interface that will provide an on screen display of movie selections. Anyone know of something that exists for mass storage of DVD