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My goal is to liberate myself from the bulky storage problems having a 1000+ dvd library entails, and also from the variety of cataloguing problems that also ensue.
I have found several open source project that are designed to categorize avi libraries so that you can take a video on demand approach with your collection. Similarly I have found several "home theatre" solutions.
None of these solutions seem to integrate the idea of backing up my DVD media collection and serving them on my own TV (for copyright reasons I am not looking to access this from multiple TVs or over the internet or anything like that).
I'm certain I can achieve the digital backup part of this problem, what I'm looking for a is a good HMI. An iPod cover view style interface would be the promised land with user tracking to suggest other programs in the library that the view might like.
Is anyone aware of a solution that might approximate my goals? A windows based solution would be preferred, but I can run a linux variant if that's the only option.
There are simple hardware "media boxes" both with hard drive enclosures or with connection capability and connect to tv or hdmi. with them you can Cram (meaning re-encode) thousands of movies and series into say a 2T drive, and play them back simply minus a real computer. Saves hudreds of watts of power :-) Many of them will work with the DVD data put onto the hard drive or flash stick or whatever. Popcorn Hour, Metal gear, WD media and others. Abilities are not full computer, but it beats having a stack of dvds. – Psycogeek – 2011-10-25T00:59:03.590
@Psycogeek The quality of the playback is important to me, so I do want to avoid compression where possible and leave myself lots of backup options. At present my data footprint might be around 15T with some RAID coverage so even 2T is not sufficient. The boxes I've looked at are fairly restricted in their online options as well, most do not boast wide open internet access. – Stephen – 2011-10-25T01:32:06.953
yup they sure are not HTPCs – Psycogeek – 2011-10-25T01:40:28.607