Home network and DVDs

[Biffarama]

I hope this post is OK for this forum.

I'll be setting up a wired and wireless network in the house we are building shortly. I'm planning on installing a dedicated server and wiring the house with cat-5 cable. At least that's my plan. I'm looking for help from anyone who's done something like this and who might be able to offer suggestions for the implementation.

Also, a stupid question. Is it possible to rip DVDs to this server so that they may be watched by any device on the network? The idea being that at some point I could access movies on the server from my PC, notebook and/or TV anywhere in the house on the network.

Thanks in advance

Biff

[WesleyHester]

This may not be exactly what you are talking about and/or may be too expensive (sure is for me) but you might at least find it interesting to know one type of solution:

http://www.cinenow.com/us/article.php3/id,1581/

[Biffarama]

WOW, "The not-so-good-news is that the base systems start at $ 27000" Definitely out of my price range too.

[painkiller]

Two quick answers (at least it helped me somewhat).

Use nothing less that Cat 5e ethernet, preferably Cat 6 if you go the route I did. In conjuction with this, I use the Netgear GS605 5-port Gigabit ethernet Switch along with 2 Netgear GA311 Gigabit PCI adapters. This combination gives (close to) 10 times the overall speed of the usual Fast Ethernet that everyone typically buys now.

That's just for the wired network part.

For streaming video over this network, use the VideoLan software (free!) that is real good for most any video format, although I can't speak to the DVD's themselves just yet. But I wouldn't say that would be an insurmountable problem - if you convert the dvd files to avi/mpeg/divx, then the VideoLan s/w does the rest of the magic.

Whether that s.w really suits you, you will have to determine yourself. Can't beat the price, though.


Have fun.

[Biffarama]

thanks painkiller, that helps a great deal, exactly the kind of info I'm looking for. I'll look into that software you suggest.

So you have your video on your server in which format? What kind of server setup do you have?

[painkiller]

Actually, it isn't a true server (as you'd find in a true enterprise network where i work).

It is just a regular PC which has on it (hosts) the Video Lan software (other stuff, too). The software itself (some portion of its s/w) makes it act a lot like a server. The overall point is that this software does something I have yet to see combined in even inexpensive commercial s/w - it basically allows you to play almost any kind of format video file - and also stream it through your own network. (You could watch the video on your laptop screen as it is 'piped' through that ethernet cable running on that other computer.

Even Windows Media Encoder will do that much (stream video over a network - but not a large number of formats that aren't Microsoft derived), but isn't as easy to understand/setup and make it work.

In my case, I am all for easy... and my collection of video files reside on external USB hard drives, internal ide hard drives, dvd discs (as files meant for a pc instead of made to used on your tv's dvd machine). They span from Real Media format (rm), VCD (mpeg-1) for most tv captures, Half-D1 and Full D1 Mpeg-2 files (meant for eventual authoring onto a dvd for your entertainment system).

Hope that answers your question.