Building a Media Centre Juke Box

Myrddin

Hi people. I plan to build a media centre juke box with between 4 and 6 hard drives to house all my movies. There are two choices when ripping DVD's afaik...rip/encode to DivX (which is gonna take a CONSIDERABLE amount of time to do with my collection - circa 200 movies, Star trek TOS,TNG,DS9,VOY comoplete sets, X Files complete set). Or I can rip a disc to an image file (or else its constituent files from the Video-TS folder). So here lies the question - I dont think space will be an issue as I will keep adding hard drives if necessary - can XP Media Centre play image files/DVD files from its interface?? All I can get it to do is play DivX etc.....

8T8

MCE yes and no is the answer to VIDEO_TS/VOB/ISO.

Yes to VIDEO_TS folders if you enable the DVD changer functionality via a registry tweak, this exposes a My DVD's menu where you can add movies and cover art but it is very basic no filters for searching and it does not support episodic content like TV shows.

Third party software must be used to add movies into the database as the DVD changer is meant for the US market only so all the ID's in the online database it probes belong to North American DVD's. The software remaps the ID's to whatever movie you specify.

You can also use the DVDxml site to do the same thing, download an XML and place it in the folder of the VIDEO_TS and MCE will download the metadata linked to that XML (see the FAQ section on site).

Alternatively you can also rip to a single VOB file using DVD Decrypter and then rename it .MPG and it should show up in My Videos.


The other way to go is the My Movies plugin this is a very versatile plugin for MCE that gives a UI for movies with search options, software for adding to the database, episodic support and supports practically ever format out there for movies so you can stick ISO, AVI, MP4, VIDEO_TS whatever and it will play it.

The only downside is that the software still hasn't made the jump to the native renderer of Media Centre however this is only available on Windows Vista to begin with so the software uses HTML to mimic the look of MCE.

Given space is not a problem I would go with VIDEO_TS as the best course of action.

If space is a problem I would suggest compressing with H.264 if you have a decent computer.

Myrddin

Most imformative reply thank you. I applied those registry tweaks to no avail...no new options became available in the xp mce ui. However I did rip a dvd to a single vob, rename it and mce found it and played perfectly so thats probably the way I'll go.

Upon further thought - 200 movies (average 6/7 gigs), close to 200 episodic dvd's (average 8 gigs) = a hell of a lot of space. Its roughly 3 terabytes. Thats 6 500gig drives (probably 7 after formatting) = thats a fair bit over a grand. Id really rather not go through compressing everything as it would literally take months on end of encoding to DivX, however can you elllaborate on this H.264 encoding method? I checked in google and seems to be the standard encoding method of tv broadcasters etc so the quality must be quite high - but how long on average would a standard movie take to encode? And what software can be used to encode with it also?

Thanks again

8T8

Showgallery = Enables My DVD's
ShowPlay = Resets to standard Play DVD mode

{Make sure you have the latest version of MCE as well on XP go to Windows Update and download everything.}

When a DVD is in the DVD drive it will appear under the My DVD's submenu so thats the easiest way to test if it is working.

H.264 is the best compression codec available & is the most popular method of compression outside the mainstream which is pretty much DivX. It is much more advanced and retains more detail at lower or equivalent bit-rates compared to XviD/DivX.

However a recent computer is required for encoding due to the fact that because it is much more advanced it is much more demanding in it's requirements so basically that means slow computers will take a long time to encode whereas the job will be a lot faster on a decent machine ideally a dual core one.

For reference I use the constant quality mode of H.264 on my quad core Intel Core 2 CPU at 3Ghz and it spits out a high quality encode of a movie in about 2hrs (of course that is a very high end machine). Before even recommending anything more what kind of CPU do you have ?

One other thing you could do is keep the movies in original form but convert the TV shows into DivX or H.264 and that will shave a fair old chunk off the space requirements.

Myrddin

I dont think my current antiquated box is gonna handle anything like H.264 by the sounds of it. Here is the lists of specs for my planned mce box:

Abit IP35-E Mobo - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=335662
Core2 Duo 2.2Ghz E4500 - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=338080
1gb DDR2 Ram - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=324015
Radeon X1650 Pro - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=324858
2TB SATA2 Storage - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=338481 X2
2.1 Channel Speaker Sys - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=325446
XP MCE Remote Control - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=309575
DVI/HDMI Cable - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=316701

I'll probably do most of my ripping/encoding on this new rig as my current rig (amd athlon xp3200+, 768megs ddr400 ram, abit nf7 mobo) is SO dated at this point. Ill build a gaming rig later on maybe next year when dx10.1 etc is all settled. How do you think the above components would hold up encoding H.264? And good idea re leaving movies alone and encoding episodic content - ill do that!

SouperComputer

I dont think my current antiquated box is gonna handle anything like H.264 by the sounds of it.

I think you are mixing playback up with encoding. Your AthlonXP system will be fine for encoding, it will just take longer. Playback of DVD res in h264 can be done with a 1.8Ghz P4, maybe even lower.

Quickest way to get your collection encoded is to use both machines, just share the folder via the network and have the AthlonXP system rip to the CoreDuo HTPC.

Myrddin

Hi Souper - yes encoding time is what I was referring to with regards my athlon not being able to handle it (i.e. take WAY too long). Good idea though by using the two machines ripping to a shared My Videos folder! If it took 3 hours to encode a standard movie on 8T8's dual core 3ghz machine...can you imagine how long the same movie would take to encode on a single core 2.2ghz athlon...

btw what software can you recommend that encodes in H.264?

Cheers guys

SouperComputer

EnterNow wrote:

Hi Souper - yes encoding time is what I was referring to with regards my athlon not being able to handle it (i.e. take WAY too long). Good idea though by using the two machines ripping to a shared My Videos folder! If it took 3 hours to encode a standard movie on 8T8's dual core 3ghz machine...can you imagine how long the same movie would take to encode on a single core 2.2ghz athlon...

btw what software can you recommend that encodes in H.264?

Cheers guys

Id hazard a guess that the software 8T8 is using is not SMP aware. Im guessing here, but if that is the case then 4hours would be a fair figure per movie on the athlon system, probably less. Also, if your motherboard is decent, you could overclock

dahak

You could always go with a hybrid approach, rip the DVD images to your hard drive and then set up the encoding app with a queue of the images to convert.

As you add the images to the hard drive, you can keep adding them to the end of the queue. You can then delete the original images as they are converted.

I think some of the encoding software can be set up to only work during set hours or as a background task as to not slow down your computer when your using it.

An added bonus of ripping the DVD's directly to the hard drive is there should be less overall wear on the DVD drive itself.

Myrddin

thanks for the suggestions/advice guys - much appreciated!

Finally, with regard to htpc capabilities would the graphics card i have selected above or this http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=336747 be a better choice?

8T8

My machine is actually a quad core at 3Ghz and the software I use is SMP aware {MeGUI} which is why it is so fast at only 2hrs.

On a single core system you could be looking at anyware from 5-8+ hours depending on the job.

The Intel Core 2 CPU in the HTPC would be better suited to the encoding job than the AthlonXP single core.

That graphics card is fine for the task.

As for the software well if going H.264 there are two popular ones AutoMKV and MeGUI. MeGUI is the more advanced one in that it is much more hands on but it gives you great control over the process with lots of options to tweaks things. It's a bit messy to install and get up and running though if you need any help just ask.

AutoMKV is more straight forward but less hands on so it's a bit more simple and easier to use. I cant recall if AutoMKV is multi-threaded or not maybe be a feature of x264 {open source H.264 encoder}.

Other alternatives NeroDigital AVC found in Nero Recode is a H.264 encoder though not quite as good as x264 is it the easiest to use.

Handbrake this is another front end to x264 but was developed for the Apple Mac initially it favored simplicity above all else but over time it has gotten a lot better and is now actually multi-platform. However because of it's Mac roots it still lags behind MeGUI and AutoMKV in terms of features and support. Actually Handbrake is pants on anything but the Mac so avoid it.

So take your pick, I'd start off with AutoMKV first and then stick with it till you get your footing and try out MeGUI, got any questions you can ask me here if you want.

(A great way to splice TV shows out from a DVD is to use DVD Decrypter in IFO mode, you will probably need to have Slysofts AnyDVD working in the background as DVD Decrypter no longer works on extra protected DVD's. You can also use PGC.NET which basically does the same thing though you will need AnyDVD.)

Myrddin

My bad 8T8 - puts me in an even worse predicament lol. 5-8 hours is really not going to be a reality for me - thats 2 and a half months of 24 hour a day encoding just to get my movies done! Ill do what you suggested and leave the movies in a raw form (large vob file) and compress some/most of the episodic stuff.

Excellent details on the encoding software sincere thatnks to you there. And again Ill follow your advide and begin with AutoMKV - Ill know where to find you should I have any future questions re encoding with H.264. Thanks again guys

8T8

AutoMKV also does XviD so you can convert that into AVI or MP4/MKV containers. XviD would be a lot faster to encode plus if it is only TV shows at 30mins or 45mins a go then the job will be a lot faster overall. Nero Digital which is MPEG-4 ASP {XviD} is worth checking out if you have Nero you can find it inside Nero Recode and it will convert anything pretty quickly {NeroDigital AVC = H.264}.

The different containers have different properties;
AVI = very old and limited video/audio support MPEG-4 ASP and MP3 audio.

MP4 = recent container can take MPEG-SP, MPEG-4 ASP {XviD}, MPEG-4 AVC {H.264} as video and MP3, AAC as audio.

MKV = most advanced container can hold any type/combination of video and audio. For example if you really wanted to save space you could strip away the audio from the DVD leaving it in MPEG-2 original format and convert the audio into AAC at a low bitrate cutting a few hundred megs of the file size.

SouperComputer

8T8 wrote:

My machine is actually a quad core at 3Ghz

Jasus!


Enternow, to paraphrase what 8T8 said you can still encode in good time and in good quality by using another codec and or by changing compression settings. A 1:1 ratio is possible even on an AthlonXP in my experience.

TBH though, I think for the sake of keeping the menu structure of the DVD's, I'd just spend the extra cash on more HD space and rip the directory structure to the HD/NAS.

There is another codec called RAT DVD that will retain the DVD menu's however im not sure how it integrates with the MCE UI.

Myrddin

i tend to agree souper - the mobo ive bought has 4 sata2 ports....and ive bought 4 500gb hdd's. Silly question but if i need to add more hdd's i simply buy a sata2 pci controller card, add more dives and upgrade the psu to one with 6 or 8 power connectors right?

whats the normal delivery time for komplett in the west dublin region? The site states 3/4 days however Im guessing its a little longer?

SouperComputer

Provided your PSU can provide the juice it should be fine. However you may not be able to dynamically expand the volume by adding new drives. Ie you may have to start over.

Four drives is a lot of heat, not to mention the rest of the stuff in the case. You better make sure you have excellent airflow in the case or be prepared for HD's dieing or general instability. Use speedfan to monitor temps.

Myrddin

hi souper - when you say i may not be able to "dynamically" expand storage space by adding more drives - what is it you mean exactly?

Calibos

You're being put off by the time and space involved in ripping/compressing 200 movies!!:D

Imagine how I felt when I calculated the space I'd need - 6tb for just rips or time - 6months for h264 compression for our 500 movie collection!!:eek:

Problem solved though and our collection will be on the server and taking up about 1tb in another week or two.

How??

Why get your mate to spend the six months ripping and compressing on his work computers for you instead of course!! If only they new that not only are their staff browsing the internet on work time but using company resources to rip movies!!

Because of this I'll have an off site backup of my collection if you know what I mean:D It was very kind of my friend to do the 6 months of compression for me and also to provide the off site backup storage. What a guy!!

As for playback of H264. I'll be browsing/searching/playing our movie collection on our 4 xboxes modded with XBMC. Thats a 700mhz celeron circa 2000 vintage silcon with 64mb of shared memory. I don't think you will have any playback issues on your PC's:D

SouperComputer

EnterNow wrote:

hi souper - when you say i may not be able to "dynamically" expand storage space by adding more drives - what is it you mean exactly?

IE when you add a physical drive or drives, they may have to be mounted as new drive letters, rather than making an existing driver letter/volume larger.

Calibos wrote:

As for playback of H264. I'll be browsing/searching/playing our movie collection on our 4 xboxes modded with XBMC. Thats a 700mhz celeron circa 2000 vintage silcon with 64mb of shared memory. I don't think you will have any playback issues on your PC's

Careful now! It depends on how you have compressed it and what post-processing you want to have. Yes the odds are very good that it will play, but just remember "your mileage may vary"

Myrddin

ingenious idea lol - and you certainly owe him a pint or two!
6 months good god - although the result is sweet - i take it the xbox's are media extenders for your htpc?

Just to diverge here slightly....ive been reading another post re image quality with dvi-hdmi cables. Ill be connecting to a plasma (Pioneer PDP4270XA) which doesnt have a VGA input...I just have the HDMI input so Ive no choice but to use the DVI/HDMI cable. After a little research the resolution of this panel is 1024x768 - which is not a native HD resolution. Apparently from what I can see the panel supports 1080i/p,720p,480i/p,576i/p. Can anyone foresee any display issues I might have due to this panels resolution?

Ah souper I see what you mean - yes new drive letters would be the only way, and adding the new media to the database

SouperComputer

6 months good god - although the result is sweet - i take it the xbox's are media extenders for your htpc?

Nope, he uses XBMC


For the screen, try them all and see which looks best. HD is going to be resampled to fit the XGA screen. XGA may well be the best way to go, as HTPC's generally go a good job of reprocessing resolutions.

Ah souper I see what you mean - yes new drive letters would be the only way, and adding the new media to the database

Not the only way. Most entry level NAS's allow you to do this. You could get a 4 drive NAS and fill it with 4x500GB drives now. Then in a years time, you could buy say 4x 1TB drives and expand the box by changing one drive at a time and syncing it.

You proabbly know already, but its called RAID 5. Some RAID controllers on motherboards will allow you expand a RAID 5 volume dynamically. Failing that, you could get a RAID card that supports this, if you are hell-bent on having the drives in the actual HTPC.

Myrddin

XBMC sounds pretty cool? So they stream the media over lan/ip? So for example my media juke box is going to be based in my bedroom...but if i run xbmc on my xbox, put the xbox in another room, and lan them together, I can view all the content from my htjb through my xbox??

Phew I was hoping you would say something like that....and not "yeah your screwed mate - you'll need a new tv" lol

Thanks as always

SouperComputer

yea, XBMC is IMO one of the most seussed soultions out there. Very polished.

But yea, you need a chipped Xbox then "LAN em up" and you can access your files form any network share, including that of a NAS or your HTPC.

The only somewhat messy issue is that it cannot access the MCE TV database, so when you are looking at your recorded TV shows, you will be looking at the filesnames only. Still for the price (what 70e for an xbox these days?) its a great deal

You're not screwed on the TV, but its a farce that a TV with an XGA panel can be passed off as HD

Myrddin

yeah i found the xbox very easy to chip (xecuter3ce) so thats no prob - ill defo look into that as an aded bonus thanks for the heads up.

Yeah bit of a farce all right - im really hopefull the playback will have excellent quality on my ripped stuff. Ive no interest in using it for games/net etc so fingers crossed

SouperComputer

well in any case, you can comfort yourself with the fact that the quality on the TV is still going to be way better than a "traditional" TV.

Myrddin

thats all i wanted to hear

8T8

In regards the Plasma panel that is normal as some plasmas have a 1024x768 panel and use an internal scaler to resize the resolution to the display.

If it only has HDMI inputs then try 1024x768 or 1280x720 as resolutions and see what happens, I'm guessing the 1280x720 is probably the best one to go for first.

Compressing to H.264 wont take that long if you use the "Constant Quality" mode it's sort of a funky mode that delivers high quality encodes in a fraction of the time as it's sort of equivalent to doing a 1-pass encode. You basically set a value which tells it how much to compress and it does it's thing thats how I'm doing my movies so quickly as I just prep 5-6 movies queue them up in MeGUI and come back later & they are done in just one day.

Calibos

SouperComputer wrote:

IE when you add a physical drive or drives, they may have to be mounted as new drive letters, rather than making an existing driver letter/volume larger.



Careful now! It depends on how you have compressed it and what post-processing you want to have. Yes the odds are very good that it will play, but just remember "your mileage may vary"

Well I certainly got lucky. The mate didn't really know what he was doing but we lucked out in that he picked an encoding profile with the right settings almost by chance. ie no cabacc and deblocking I think it was. Have played a few samples and it drops 10 or 20 frames once every 15 minutes or so which is no biggy.. PQ is 99% dvd quality. Much better than xvid PQ. I was sh*tting myself when initially the xboxes were dropping hundreds of frames every minute or two....Arrrggghh 6 months wasted!! 99.99% issues resolved when I downloaded the latest XBMC SVN thank God. My build was a year old and obviously a lot of tweaking had been done since then.

We're probably only a year away from the media streamer holy grail though. All the different technologies maturing and coverging on the ideal.

ie small form factor, connections galore, aesthetically pleasing PC's like the mac mini. Oct revision will apparently have the latest Penryn core duo's with Pixel shader 3 integrated intel graphics. Those in combo will give the (in Progress) Linux Port of XBMC the power to play 1080p VC1. Pretty much anything you can throught at it basically. The hardware like the mac mini. The GUI like the XBMC Linux Port and multi terabyte drives in mature Nas technolgy. AV HEAVEN!!:D

8T8

Calibos wrote:

We're probably only a year away from the media streamer holy grail though. All the different technologies maturing and coverging on the ideal.

ie small form factor, connections galore, aesthetically pleasing PC's like the mac mini. Oct revision will apparently have the latest Penryn core duo's with Pixel shader 3 integrated intel graphics. Those in combo will give the (in Progress) Linux Port of XBMC the power to play 1080p VC1. Pretty much anything you can throught at it basically. The hardware like the mac mini. The GUI like the XBMC Linux Port and multi terabyte drives in mature Nas technolgy. AV HEAVEN!!:D

{FYI SM 3.0 support does not equal video performance Intel does not have dedicated logic like ATI/NVIDIA do all they are doing is pushing it through the shaders but on such very weak GPU's and the X3000/3100 are actually worse then the GMA950 in some aspects so it wont help things too much. The CPU is really doing the brunt of the work in those machines}

Thats something I've been keeping an eye on too nothing out there fits the bill which is why I've stuck with my HTPC for so long & I don't really record anything these days so I'm waiting for someone to get their act together and do a proper media streamer like XBMC was.

AppleTV is nice to look at, slick UI but a major pain to mod in software needs a Mac as well to make the changes.

Xbox is too old, noisy but still has the best UI, features, codec support, folder browsing with XBMC.

Generic XviD players with at best networking, crap UI's and basic codec support.

Netgear EVA8000 good codec support, okay UI but uses database tags no classic folder browsing/network shares support so the database must be updated manually to see anything new in the folders.

TViX very good codec support, plain if clunky UI supports database tags and direct browsing of network shares but can be a little odd sometimes about that.

Xbox 360/PS3 very limited codec support but slick UI's.

Mac Mini running OSX/Windows/linux/XBMC great UI, codec support still a full PC though so not quite instant on + cost.

For me the holy grail would be something like Windows MCE's or Apple front row UI on network streamer with instant on and XviD/H.264/VC-1/DVD:ISO:VOB support but were not there yet.

I've been hoping the XBMC team will cook something up for the AppleTV as I know some of those guys on that boards have it running under linux but it is a fair amount of work to setup I gather.

The next generation of TViX machines are also worth keeping an eye on due in September/October I think or at least according to rumour sites.

Myrddin

Just to let everyone know - all the parts arrived from Komplett (truly excellent service), assembly went without a hiccup and Im really REALLY happy with the quality of the results on the tv (maybe its in my head but the movies actually seem BETTER? Is there upscaling going on? Is it because the tv is in 720p mode? am i crazy lol??). Anyway the one and ONLY thing that is bugging me is when i start the mce gui and begin a film...the mce remote reciever led seems permanently lit - causing the film to restart randomly! After scratching my head for an hour (nearly went down the tin foil hat road lol), i figured out it was the damned plasma casing a "wall of IR interference"...im too tired to start on this now so tomorrow ill confirm that by repositioning the reciever and hopefully all is well.

Cheers for your input on this thread guys

SouperComputer

Glad to hear you got up and running. Its normal for the quality of DVD playback on a HTPC to surpass that of VERY expensive, top of the line DVD players as you have lots of CPU power and post processing.

Myrddin

Late update - it turned out not to be the plasma interfering with the ir reciever (althoug it does make it pulse but its harmless), what was actually causing the random stopping of movies was the mpeg2 codecs (i had ffdshow installed so its weird?). I installed the nvidia pure video decoder codecs and all is well again

Im currently about half way through backing up my movies, seems i overestimated the size of them. I have been backing them up into a single vob file and they are averaging around 4/6 gigs so I should have some extra space left at the end of it all.

Its been enjoyable and anybody musing over the idea should definitely go ahead with it - VERY convienient, superb quality, all it has the wow factor when you show the system up and running to people!