I'm actually thinking 2TB of storage and 2 TB of backup.
Other options are starting to look better and better for movies. I was planning to get an Xbox 360 anyway. Maybe I should stick with
TV for music, photos and iTunes purchases, and consider the 360 for movies. I sure would like to see
TV handle all of it, though.
The pisser about doing this through a 360 is that I want the same content (music and movies) in 3 rooms. Buying 2 more
TVs is one thing. Buying 2 more
TVs and 3 Xboxes is a different animal!
I don't mind some crossover. It's the loss of the sub channel that kills me, after dropping all that money on a Klipsch reference series 12" sub.
Well, the 360 won't do 5.1 either unless you use WMV. I considered that briefly, but decided I didn't want to get locked into MS products/formats. H264 is pretty universal, so I suspect lots of hardware in the future will play it back well.
If you want back up, whynot do a RAID 5 and get 3tb of storage out of your 4tb array, and still have backup protection against a single drive failure (which is all a mirrored setup would give you?)
As far as the loss of the sub channel, here's somethings to consider (it annoys me as well, btw)... first, if you rip the DD soundtrack from the original DVD (which most have, btw) you should retain some LFE - it's a professionally mastered DPLII track designed for that express purpose. The AC3 to DPLII in HB is nice, but a bit of a kludge. Second, I think that you could probably configure your system to emulate the sub channel from the low frequency info in the other channels... it wouldn't be perfect, but it would work. I'm playing with mine, but haven't got very far as I've been really busy with work, selling my old Mac for a new one, and a pregnant wife. I think though that it'll be workable.
I'm also trying to figure out a way that I can encode two audio tracks into my handbrake files. I think it's possible, but I'm just not sure how, and I'm pretty sure it will take a HB patch at the very least. I'm also not sure if I can make one of them a non-AAC track. Ideally, ripped movies would have a DPLII AAV track as the main audio (which would assure compatibility) and a second (normally disabled/ignored?) AC3 track. That way you could make files that work now and work in the largest array of playback devices, but also have easy future compatibilty for when/if a device starts supporting AC3 passthrough. I'm pretty sure this is doable after the fact, but the time sync would be difficult and it would be a PITA doing it as a second task for each movie. All in all, it's just more than I have time for (see above) atm.
Still, with 2-4TB of storage (and $1200 into the project already) seems like you have better options. One thing would be doing an un-re-compressed MPEG2 rip of the DVDs with the AC3 audio track and using Window XP MCE (or Vista Home Ultimate) to stream them to a 360 acting as a MCExtender. The 360 does support MPEG2 w/ AC3 -
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/extender/mcefaq.mspx about 1/3 of the way down. An average movie, sans the extra features, menus, extra languages, directors commentary (all of which you lose with HB and MP4 anyways) is likely about 4-6gb without applying any transcoding. So that's ~350 movies on the low end (2tb w/ full back up and 6gb movies) to ~1000 movies on the high end (4tb no back up, 4gb movies), and ~600 movies with a reasonable estimate (5gb average movie, 3tb RAID5 with parity bit backup).
If I had $1200-1600 to throw at something like this, I'd snag a crappy old PC desktop, fill it up with a bunch of huge HDDs and a hardware RAID controller, a DVD-RW, XP MCE, and I'd rip the DVDs that way using a 360 for the front end. As it is, $300 for a couple 500gb FW drives and $15 for a generic 360 remote is more than I can really afford for this sort of project (after factoring in I'm buying a new iMac at the same time), so it is what it is for me...
Man, I'm bored today, this is m 3rf or 4th HUGE post that no one will read (because they're too long
)
