Home theater setup w/ NAS storage

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Necronic

Necronic

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Been wanting to put together a nice home media setup. I already have a NAS drive picked out:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108065

which I will run with two mirrored hard drives (1 or 2 TB, haven't decided yet as some of the 2 TB hard drives are actually pretty solid.) It is also DLNA compliant.

This will store my home media (as well as back up all the important data on my computer), and will link with my computer on my home network.

From there is where I get a bit confused. I would like this to run to a TV, as well as a home audio system. I don't want to have to build an HTPC, so do I need some kind of intermediate device? If so could you give some examples? Also, the TV and the audio system have not yet been purchased, so if a TV or stereo system can directly interface with a DLNA NAS drive that would be good to know. I've run across a couple of things that seem like an intermediate hub for this (ie Boxee Box), but I've also seen a number of TV's/home theater systems that say they are DLNA compliant.

Also, I have an XBOX 360, can that operate as the hub?
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I have little to no experience with media integration (beyond the need to have a big, fat, reliable NAS in the basement and a decent speed network coming upstairs). Anyone else have experience?

--Patrick
 
W

wana10

i use a wdtv live myself. it's cheap and has yet to fail me with regards to videos ive thrown at it. only downside is that it is really really bad at recognizing network shares but that doesn't matter because it recognizes dlna servers perfectly.
also, if you get the wdtv live plus, which wasn't available when i bought mine, it has netflix streaming capabilities as well
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
So I have a better idea what I am doing now. My Xbox will operate as the media hub feeding from the network to a TV/home audio system. I may have to trick it by running it through my PCs windows media center which will have a mapped drive to the NAS due to codec issues. This will mean that my computer will have to be on to use it, but it should work better than running it straight from the nas which doesn't have an internal OS/codec.

Also, I did my normal IMPULSE BUY and picked up a small single drive Seagate Black Armor 110 NAS, which was a bit of a mistake since it's a single drive NAS, which somewhat defeats the purpose of a NAS in that there is no mirrored drive.

Anyways, going to try and return it (fingers crossed) and grab the larger black armor 220 or 440 depending on prices. I would prefer the 4 drive NAS in the long run frankly, but it is quite a bit more expensive (600$ vs 150$ for the single and 400$ for the double.) There is a ~240$ 2 drive black armor NAS but they don't have it in stock.
 
Azurephoenix

Azurephoenix

I came in here excited to discuss bitchin' televisions, amplifiers and speakers...

I'm so confused now...

*runs off to research all these acronyms that he has no idea what the hell they mean*
 
C

Chibibar

NAS = Network Attached Storage. It is a "lower" end of storage. I put lower in quotes cause that was the original concept. There are some pretty complex NAS. We actually have one at our work that is 15 drives. (not hot swap and need software to connect)

The "upper" level storage is SAN (Storage Area Network) these are really nice (if you have the money) they can be configure, partition, segmented and be use for all kinds of stuff. We have at LEAST 3 SANs here. (the NAS is for our own testing and storage SAN are use in production level)
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
I think now I will be holding off on returning this NAS/buying a new one and am going to see if I can just build one out of the junk I have sitting around my house. Seems there is a good linux OS called "FreeNAS" that should work fine. Not sure how much extra hardware I will need but it seems like an easy solution.

And yeah, I assumed NAS was not the upper level solution, but something like what you are describing is a bit out of range for home use.
 
C

Chibibar

Probably, but I am thinking of doing something similar of putting over 1000 DVDs and Blu-Rays we have in our home (I think around 40 BR and 1100 DVDs)
 
sixpackshaker

sixpackshaker

If you are paying around $400 for the NAS look into a cheap Windows Home Server Box. I don't know much of the details. But a friend of mine had one set up to run his home's home theaters. His machine imaged BluRays and DVDs. Then it could play it back to any console/bluray player in the house.
 
Covar

Covar

Azurephoenix said:
How are you guys encoding your DVD's and blu rays into a format that you can store on a hard drive?
Click to expand...
You have several options. You can just rip the disk straight up to an iso file, takes up a lot more space but you get the full video files, menus, extras etc. Something like XBMC can play ISO files just like you popped in the disk. On the other end of the spectrum you can encode the vidoes off the disk. You'll lose a small bit of quality (depending on how you encode) but if you only want the video you'll save a ton of space. Advantage of this is that with some planning you can make a video file that will play on damn near any device.

I've been encoding all my movies (DVD only I don't have a blu-ray drive for my pc yet) using h.264 for compression, AAC audio, and mp4 for the container. For the foreign movies (i.e. Kung-fu and Kaiju) I use the MKV container since it supports multiple audio tracks and subtitles that aren't hardcoded onto the video (softsubs, and hardsubs).
 
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