dvd jukebox, or is there a way to store them on a hdd?

[ineedvideohelp]

i'll try to keep my story short. i have a load of about a hundred fifty, couple hundred movies or so. i'm looking into getting a dvd jukebox and found a sony one i liked that had the least amount of glitches and problems and whatnot. but, it still has a problem where it'll delete all your manusaly typed in movie info if the power goes out on it.

so i was wondering, is there a player out there with a built in hard drive, or some sort of device with a hdd that can be swapped with a larger one to store my movies on? something akin to the way the "hdloader" for the ps2 stores your games on the hard drive.

if there isn't, man, it'd be a cool thing to have. if there is a way to do this, any info would be appreciated. thanks.

[Treebeard]

Easily done by building yourself a HTPC and a file server.

not cheap but can be done.


you can build a file server running xp pro w/ lots of hard drive space on Raid 5 configuration. Use gigabit connections to the HTPC running Windows MCE. get a the windows plugin called Mymovies. you can rip all your DVD's to ISO format on the file server and call them from the MCE interface on your HTPC.

like I said, not cheap but very nice.

[ineedvideohelp]

oh, really sorry, but i forgot to mention that i don't really want to use my pc to do it. i'd much rather just have all my movies in one standalone player on a hdd. picky i know, and it'll probably make it harder. my bad.

i was thinking a dvd recorder or pvr or something? just install a massive hard drive or something. that doable?

thanks

[ROF]

Sounds like you are a candidate for an HTPC. I would definitely not use your own PC for this especially if you have others in your household who want to watch movies or use the computer. A separate HTPC is the route to go in those circumstances. You can then easily add more drives, external drives, plug in a friends drive, hook up camcorders, and so on while watching all of this on your large screen television. Since it is not going to be doing anything spectacular you can usually build a home theater PC for much much cheaper than a quality HDD recorder and with expandability to support your future media purchases.

[ineedvideohelp]

so a htpc seems like the way to go huh?

know what i'd be looking at, cost wise, when i'm all finished?

[ROF]

Cost depends on what you want. Just like building a PC. You can start building HTPCs at about $200 or you can build a $3000 powerhouse. It depends on your needs.

[ineedvideohelp]

i found a seagate barracude 750GB 16MB cache hdd for $499 cdn. i'm thinking build around this bad boy.

[Treebeard]

If you want to go that route you would have no fault tolerance. If that is important to you.

[ineedvideohelp]

no? why? sorry i'm pretty new to this by some standards

[Treebeard]

If I was storing that much data I would probably grab 4 X 500gb hard drives and run in a Raid 5 setup, that way if a drive fails you can swap in a new one and not lose any data. If you dont care if the drive dies and you will just rip all your DVD's again then you dont need to worry about it.

[ineedvideohelp]

good idea