beginners questions

stylie

Hi,

When hard drive prices come down to sensible prices I plan on building a NAS. What I would like to do is connect the tv to the NAS, via a popcorn hour or something similar, mini pc ?
Is a connection via ethernet good enough to stream HD mkv's ? also have a yamaha sound system so I think I should be able to plug the popcorn hour(?) into it and leave it connect to the tv. I should be able to get 5.1 sound shouldnt I ?
I have never set up anything like this before nor have I seen one but I am pretty technical, build my own pc's etc.. I just dont know about the connections from the NAS and connecting into the TV, also what are the interfaces like as the end users can barely use the sky remote.

Thanks.

Tea 1000

What's your plan for the NAS? Dedicated NAS storage boxes with no hard drives in them are pricey enough... if you have some old PC cases around then it might actually be cheaper to buy a motherboard with SATA RAID controller on it and put it into an existing case, with your hard disks installed and raided. Then you can install Ubuntu or CentOS on it and use that as your storage box. It'll give you much more options than a basic NAS for similar cost.
For under the TV then you have many options. I haven't used popcorn hour myself, so others will be on here to give you more feedback on that front. You could even get an Apple TV and hack it to install XBMC on it or something similar. Or a games console can be used to stream also.

stylie

Hi, I was thinking of spending between 200-300e on the NAS. I dont have any pc cases but I might look around at alternatives and buy the case,mobo and controllers separately. Dont have any games console and no Apple product will darken my door
Because I have never seen a NAS to tv setup I dont know what the audio and visual quality will be like, reading from disk over ethernet to the tv would I lose quality ? because if the quality drops then its hardly worth the effort building the NAS and setting up the wiring.

Tea 1000

stylie wrote: »

Hi, I was thinking of spending between 200-300e on the NAS. I dont have any pc cases but I might look around at alternatives and buy the case,mobo and controllers separately. Dont have any games console and no Apple product will darken my door
Because I have never seen a NAS to tv setup I dont know what the audio and visual quality will be like, reading from disk over ethernet to the tv would I lose quality ? because if the quality drops then its hardly worth the effort building the NAS and setting up the wiring.

There is a zero quality loss from your NAS to your TV via ethernet. So you're fine there. The quality that your movies have been ripped to is the only thing you have to worry about. You'd have no problems streaming a 1080p 8GB film to your TV via ethernet.
Your options at the TV end are many. Asus O-Play and WD-TV are two.
I hear ya on the Apple... I did mention wiping it and putting a linux based media centre on it you'll note!
300e including disks?

stylie

Tea 1000 wrote: »

There is a zero quality loss from your NAS to your TV via ethernet. So you're fine there. The quality that your movies have been ripped to is the only thing you have to worry about. You'd have no problems streaming a 1080p 8GB film to your TV via ethernet.
Your options at the TV end are many. Asus O-Play and WD-TV are two.
I hear ya on the Apple... I did mention wiping it and putting a linux based media centre on it you'll note!
300e including disks?

I wish, thats why im waiting for the price of the disk to go down to sensible levels. Probably months away from that. Im doing the research now so when the prices do go down I will be prepared to splurge, the NAS shells should drop a few bucks aswell. I could get 27% off the apple tv, is it worth it then ?

Tea 1000

stylie wrote: »

I wish, thats why im waiting for the price of the disk to go down to sensible levels. Probably months away from that. Im doing the research now so when the prices do go down I will be prepared to splurge, the NAS shells should drop a few bucks aswell. I could get 27% off the apple tv, is it worth it then ?

€300 is a fair bit of money, that's why I'm going to get a motherboard with RAID on a few of the SATA ports, and put a Linux build on it. It'll cost me probably less than €200 and you have more opportunity to do things with that than you can with a NAS. It'll work just as effectively as a NAS for everything that you want the NAS for, yet will be able to give you more options in the future if you want to tinker further. Basically going that route will mean you have a much more advanced NAS for less money!
I'm not actually sure how much Apple TV is to be honest, so I'm not sure how much you can get it for with discount, I suggested it as one possible option because I know that you can put XBMC on it, which is very good. Haven't done it myself, but a good few guys on here seem to have.

mossym

may i suggest unraid as a nice solution for the nas box? running unraid on an 8Tb nas box at home using twonky as a DLNA server and it's rock solid

stylie

Tea 1000 wrote: »

€300 is a fair bit of money, that's why I'm going to get a motherboard with RAID on a few of the SATA ports, and put a Linux build on it. It'll cost me probably less than €200 and you have more opportunity to do things with that than you can with a NAS. It'll work just as effectively as a NAS for everything that you want the NAS for, yet will be able to give you more options in the future if you want to tinker further. Basically going that route will mean you have a much more advanced NAS for less money!
I'm not actually sure how much Apple TV is to be honest, so I'm not sure how much you can get it for with discount, I suggested it as one possible option because I know that you can put XBMC on it, which is very good. Haven't done it myself, but a good few guys on here seem to have.

Im not dead set on buying the almost complete solution, and Im pretty capable so I could build a solution myself. Would you mind sending me any links etc for a beginner ? Or is there a thread like in pc building and upgrading where you can have a build spec'ed for you ?

mossym wrote: »

may i suggest unraid as a nice solution for the nas box? running unraid on an 8Tb nas box at home using twonky as a DLNA server and it's rock solid

I have a raid 1 set up in my main pc and I must admit there is a certain piece of mind knowing that the data is retrievable in the event of a breakdown. Now disk was a lot cheaper then but if the price goes bad to sensible levels the extra 70-80e is worth it I think. Never heard of twonky thanks I will take a look

Tea 1000

stylie wrote: »

Im not dead set on buying the almost complete solution, and Im pretty capable so I could build a solution myself. Would you mind sending me any links etc for a beginner ? Or is there a thread like in pc building and upgrading where you can have a build spec'ed for you ?

I have a raid 1 set up in my main pc and I must admit there is a certain piece of mind knowing that the data is retrievable in the event of a breakdown. Now disk was a lot cheaper then but if the price goes bad to sensible levels the extra 70-80e is worth it I think. Never heard of twonky thanks I will take a look

Here's a link to the mainboard that I'm on the look out for:
http://www.zotac.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_images-SRW.tpl&product_id=346&category_id=96&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=100178&lang=en
It's from Zotac, it's a passively cooled motherboard with integrated Intel Atom Processor dual core. It has 2 regular SATA ports and 4 more with RAID, so they would be where you'd plug in your big drives for storage and RAID 5 them.
All you need to add to that board is some DDR2 RAM, a power supply and some disks! If you have an old PC that something is broken in, then you're sorted. You'll be able to use the case and power supply from an old PC and RAM is cheap from crucial.co.uk if you can't find any in another PC. You may need to drill a small hole in your case to fit this DTX motherboard, but that's it really. Dabs had that for around €130 approx if memory serves, but they don't seem to stock it anymore. I haven't found another site with it, but I didn't search all that hard.
But basically that's a solution for easily less than €200 that you can stick a build of CentOS or Ubuntu on and then set up a samba share for the disk space and you have not only a NAS, but anything else you may want in the future if you want to get it to do more work.

stylie

Hi,
Thanks for the help, I think I will go the complete DIY route as you suggested. I dont have any spare cases or psu so I think I might post a thread in pc building and upgrading and get some of the guys opinions too.

superleedsdub

I`m contemplating buying this NAS next month:

http://www.trustedreviews.com/Synology-DiskStation-DS411j_Peripheral_review

Was gonna get a drobo FS but the synology sounds very impressive....