As nfaguys points out, even relatively large music libraries stored in a lossless format can probably live pretty comfortably on a terabyte drive array. A terabyte of disc space is not all that expensive, but for the application we're considering the need for backup and redundancy is significant (who wants to re-rip an entire music library, much less a video library). That means that we need to look toward something like RAID5, which means that a terabyte of disc space won't yield a terabyte of capacity. (Depending on how many drives, you'll likely see a capacity closer to 750GB per terabyte, give or take 100GB.) That may not be a problem for music, but DVD's will often be a different matter. The size of a person's DVD library varies pretty wildly, but if we take a good-sized library of 175 to 200 titles and make a few assumptions we can get an idea of how much disc space we need. Assume the bonus discs and extra features will get left off the server and that a fair number of those titles are TV box sets with half a dozen discs each. That means you could be looking at 275 or 300 discs of movie and TV content (more if you feel the need to put extras on the server). Assume that a good number of the discs are double-layer, so that the average data requirement per disc is perhaps 6GB. We now need 1700 to 1800 gigabytes of useable disc space in our array just for the video library. If we also have a similar-size CD library encoded in FLAC (assuming perhaps 200 discs at about 50% compression, which would equate to perhaps 275MB per disc), that's an additional 55 GB - storing as raw WAV files would be a more "audiophile" route that would double the space requirements per disc. Based on this theoretical case, we end up needing the better part of 2 TB just to archive the data already on hand - with no consideration given to future growth or for space to store live TV (SD or HD) for time-shifting. Building a good, robust RAID5 array with a capacity of at least 2TB to 3TB would be key to setting up the sort of media server I'd be interested in. That's going to lead to a pretty substantial first cost - nowhere near what a Kaleidescape server would set you back, but still more than many pocketbooks would allow (including mine). I think the time will come, but for most of us I still don't think it's here yet.

No, you take one of these :




And one or more of these:

[img]http://akamai-lq.bizrate.com/resize?sq=100&uid=260803957[/img]

Or some places even sell them together:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007MGEOC/sr=8-7/qid=1142018673/ref=pd_bbs_7/103-9540948-3982255?%5Fencoding=UTF8


And no PC is required.

Transcoding to MPEG4 can reduce a typical movie to 1-2 GB with surround sound and excellent video quality. Music storage is small beans in this equation.

I plan to RAID 6 320 GB spindles for a media server - the capacity should be about 5x320 or 1.6 TB, plenty for the immediate future, and the storage cost will be about $300 for the RAID controller and $700 for the disks. Not too bad.

I need to assemble a VPN/HTTP/SMB server anyway, so the other parts costs are paid for already.

Also, for those not inclined to roll their own NAS file servers in a box can be had with a nifty web interface and RAID, etc.

As long as we're dreaming, I'd love to see a pre/pro with the option of digital outputs, S/PDIF or AES/EBU. That would be marvelous.

It wouldn't take much I bet.

Charlie,

You are correct about the MPEG4 encoding. But as to the media hub, I did not see any DVI connections, only S-video, composite and component connections. Also, can you play a computer game through it? If you look further through the manual, it is running Windows ME, 2000 or XP, so its still somewhat a PC.

And, since you're totally geeking it out, are you sure you wouldn't be better to go with a Sun Fire setup? That easily covers your Unix/Linux OS usage demand and you can just plop down a Sun Ray wherever you want in your house. Then, they have storage arrays that can easily handle 200-300 DVDs worth of storage without compression. True they're SCSI, but hell that's a thousand times better for RAID than SATA. SATA only came along to look like SCSI. Try a Sun StorEdge 9980 with a few 15,000 rpm drives to get your 1.6 TB and then up it from there to a total of 74.7 TB.

Now, for the average Joe, who isn't a computer geek, but enjoys high quality audio and video, they can go with the Media PC.

But, Gonk, seriously, how many people out there have 275 - 300 DVDs? Maybe 100 on average for a semi-movie aficionado, and with them being simple 480p format 6 GB maybe pushing it, but I'll give it to you, for some discs contain both wide screen and full screen formats on them. But even so, that's a requirement of 600 GBs on average, leaving 400 GBs of space out of the 1 TB.

Now, a WAV, zero loss, format consumes, on a less than normal average, 650 MB, or roughly 615 CDs worth of space in that 400 GB available space. (Note: Most of the old music is actually uses around 450 MB of a CD as the lengths of albums were often shorter than they are today.) But seriously, I can see 200-300 CDs being the number of discs in a semi-music aficionado’s realistic statistics. So that would actually require 200 GBs of space, erring on the safe side (it's only 195 GBs with the 650 MB average, still leaving 200 GB's for recording.

Now this is without using any compression, when we throw compression into the mix, that only benefits us more, giving us greater storage space in the 1 TB array. Now, are you telling me that 2 500 GB HDs can’t be afforded easily and still allow future expansion if needed? That’s using RAID 0 configuration. That should not loose you any space of the full 1 TB. Now they could go 4 250GB HDs for even less investment and implement a RAID 5, 6, or 7 at a lower cost and more reliable, so you don’t have to worry about re-ripping everything if a drive fails, as you said. Then just throw in a extra 250GB to handle that loss.

So you may be a little wrong in your dismissal of storage availability per price. And, Charlie, who doesn’t want to see their favorite porno site on a 80” screen, so web surfing availability is a must? Just Kidding about the porno!

I still think that it's a little early for archiving video libraries to a media server. I was basing my numbers on my own collection (actually aiming a bit under), and the 220 or so titles that I've accumulated since '98 add up to over 450 discs total (at least 325+ when you exclude bonus discs) - many of the extra discs are the result of buying TV shows, which is why the count gets a bit elevated. I also was keeping in mind the many links I've seen to people's DVD Profiler pages, where 200+ titles seemed a not-uncommon number. As for the 6GB figure, any dual-layer movie disc will probably use at least 6GB for the movie itself. With movies often running 2+ hours (~2:20 for the Star Wars prequels, 2.5+ hours for the Harry Potter movies, ~3 hours for the LotR theatrical versions, and so on) and a fair number of titles including both DD 5.1 and DTS, I think there are more discs in your collection that use 6GB+ for the movie itself than you think. (And I'm not counting titles with both widescreen and full screen, since I have almost no such discs in my collection.) Many of those TV show sets put four 42-minutes episodes on one disc, which requires a dual-layer disc (some actually use dual-sided dual-layer discs, which put eight episodes totaling probably 12 to 15GB on that one disc). We may be talking about a "simple" 480i format (not 480p), but the reason that they've been able to achieve such good picture quality on DVD within the limitations of MPEG-2 is making use of dual-layer discs to allow them to apply less compression. I still think that my numbers are not unreasonable - until both the cost of storage and the media server/client interface evolve a bit more, I think that many people are going to continue to hold off.

Also, one reason that a central media server with a separate client appeals to me is the ability to have that server somewhere out of the way and to have more than one client accessing the data (so that you can record CSI to the server on Thursday evening while getting the kids in bed and then be able to watch it either in the den or in the bedroom later). A media PC in the main system wouldn't quite get there unless it also supported a remote client, at which point it'll potentially be easier to put the server in a stock (noisy) case, hide it somewhere, and put a client unit in the equipment rack.

I think you'd be crazy to run RAID 0 on a system like this unless you've backed up to tape or some other format - a failure in either drive (something that will happen at some point) would wipe out all of your data. RAID 1 or 0+1 would be a safe approach, but mirroring means you'd need to buy four of those 500GB drives (that's $1200 just for drives using your link, before you add a system to put it in). RAID 5 is probably the most cost-effective and safe scenario, but I think the reason we see so many 1TB setups right now is because that's the cost threshold beyond which most folks aren't ready to go. For audio, the hardware and prices have reached a point where it's possible to put a CD library onto the computer. For video, I think it'll be a bit longer before it starts really catching on.

Boy, we've really hijacked this thread, haven't we?

One thing about HDMI 1.3 inputs and outputs is that this will be 100% necessary for the raw audio bitstreams of the new formats from both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to make it to an outboard surround processor. Not toslink, not coaxial, not pro-digital connectors, and Firewire doesn't seem to be in the picture.

Also, digital video and audio are sent down the same HDMI pipeline. The surround processor would strip out the audio and send the video stream on to the display. This HDMI 1.3 switching is again necessary.

HDMI version 1.3 published specs. are expected this year.

These are NOT "dream" items, these are features that must be included.

As is, the 1st gen. HD players with built-in audio decoders seemingly need at least four audio DSP decoding chips to handle most of the formats (and some don't even include full Dolby Digital TrueHD or DTS-HD support so full format support in outboard decoders is a must and you need all the processing horsepower you can muster!).

Oh, and the much touted Arcam pre-amps are in the $2,000 - $5,000 range. That's dealer MSRP, with Outlaw they're supposed to have cut out the middle man.

Dan

Personally I think we'd all be better off if HDMI was scrapped completely and some sort of DVI + audio format was created instead.

As far as I can tell the whole HDMI spec from the connectors to the included DRM is crap.

Most of us will do just fine with today's digital surround formats for many years to come anyhow. After listening to what the 990 is capable of TODAY, I don't put much stock in gaining improvement from going to the higher bitrate formats.

I expect that it will take them at least 3 years to bring the new HD DVD specs up to a level of maturity that makes them worth investing in. By that time Outlaw will most likely have their new flagship piece out with all the requisite bells and whistles to take advantage of the new formats.

Until then, it's all just so much vaporware and not even good vaporware at that.

Lusting after cheesily designed connector formats?

That's just crazy talk.

Barring something truly unexpected, we're stuck with HDMI for a while. Ideally we would have HDMI 1.3 in time for inclusion in a successor to the Model 990. Considering how "smoothly" the standards development has gone for AACS as of late, I'm leery of accepting any target deadlines for standards publication, but I agree that 1.3 will come and will be a necessary feature/evil once it's here.

If we're thinking of the same units, the $2000 Arcam's HDMI switching is actually no different than the 990's DVI switching: it only support video switching, with no capability of getting audio across the HDMI.

For sure, HDMI is crap. Its main purpose is for the studios to make sure they can contain copyrights to their material, and no one can illegally distribute and view them. The current use of separate audio and video is fine.

As to toslink, or even firewire not being able to handle it; Ummm, don't you thing your media center computer could easily format that audio data to go across a toslink, and if greater is needed, send the audio via firewire, with the video image going out the DVI? Oh, yeah, I forgot, computers are just a passing phase.