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New to this, what threads should I start with?

post #1 of 8
1/31/13 at 11:47am
Thread Starter 
I didn’t see any stickies or beginners guides when I searched so if anyone can pass on some links to get me started I’d appreciate it. Here is what I’m looking for:

I want some way to view my library of Blu-ray’s and DVD and serve them to my AVR and on to my PJ. After reading it seems like there are a number of ways and products that do this. From what I’ve read I will need the following:

1. Computer with Blu-ray drive and some software to rip BRD’s and DVD’s to MKV or some other format.
2. Some place to store these files, NAS or external HD’s
3. Some way to connect the NAS or HD’s and serve up these files, PCH, Mede8er, Dune or similar.

Is this pretty much correct? For me I’ll need a wifi way to do this as I have not run any cat6 to my rack from my router and don’t intend to. I currently have a PS3 which I know has some media server like abilities although I’ve never messed with them so I don’t know if that will already do part of what I need.

Things like streaming Netflix, Hulu and so forth isn’t of interest to me I’m just looking for a nice slick way to view my library and play the movies. If it could interact with my Directv DVR great if not no problem.
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post #2 of 8
1/31/13 at 12:20pm
To be honest I wouldnt attempt streaming Blu-ray rips over Wifi, it will be highly unstable and you will be troubleshooting forever....BR ISO\High Bitrate MKVs are best streamed either via direct connection (USB\ect) or via hardwired conection (Cat 5\6)......

While youa re correct you 1st need to dertimine where you want to store your media, how much storage you will need, what you want to rip to (BR ISO, MKV, ect)....determine if your current network infrstructure will be able to accomdate that........

You also want to determine how much you want to spend, once you give us a price and start narrowing down your choices it will help us help you better......
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post #3 of 8
1/31/13 at 12:46pm
+1 on the wireless fail. Some people have had reasonable success with power-line but a CAT cable is the cheapest and most reliable.
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post #4 of 8
2/1/13 at 5:18am
The only way you could make wireless work would be to compress all the Blu-ray's using x264 handbrake, streaming raw BD is just not possible. You can get very high quality encodes out of x264 that will be fine over wireless but it takes a long time, a single BD on a top of the line quad core Intel CPU will still take a few hours and on anything else like an i5 thats several hours then getting longer after that.

You could get lucky with powerline adapters streaming raw BD, these send ethernet over power cables of the house, but they do not always perform as well as true ethernet.

The easiest way to build a media library with a nice UI is Plex however it has a few conditions.
* You need a server capable of running Plex media server, preferably an x86 based one as Plex is demanding on the CPU
* Plex set top box clients do not support DVD/BD menus so to get raw BD you must rip with MakeMKV which does not convert/compress but simply copies the video into an mkv container.
* No HD audio.

So if happy with that get a Synology DS413+ NAS to run the Plex server and get a GoogleTV v2 box to use the Plex client, a whole bunch of them were just announced at CES but you can get Hisense Pulse, Vizio Co-start and Sony models already.
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post #5 of 8
2/1/13 at 7:35am
Thread Starter 
Well that sucks; I guess I’ll have to do without then. I’m not running new cable at this point, I knew I should have run a cat 6 line when I had everything open.

Would another option be a Mede8er box (or similar) with USB HD’s plugged in? that would only get me 6TB but would be a place to start. Then I could plug the drives into my PC, copy over the ripped blu-rays and then plug them in to the Mede8er. There may be some shuffling once I have hundreds of rips but I should be able to fit at least 60 movies per drive.
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post #6 of 8
2/1/13 at 10:48am
If youre goign to do that then you ahve a few choices....Youc an also transfer the files over your network to your attached HDD which is usually shared....Its slower, but that saves you from moving back and forth.......If you are doing large files though, youll get much faster performance just moving back and forth......
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post #7 of 8
2/1/13 at 1:15pm
Quote:
Well that sucks; I guess I’ll have to do without then. I’m not running new cable at this point, I knew I should have run a cat 6 line when I had everything open.
On the cheap there is always SneakerNet.
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post #8 of 8
2/4/13 at 12:11pm
Thread Starter 
I think the HD way would be the way to go for me, cost would be lower and I would only be putting the families favorite movies on it. The ones we'd watch a number of times so I could rip and copy them over in bunches.

Thanks guys.
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