You are right, I should be following up with a blog post – I’ll do it, I promise. In short: nothing magic.

http://www.jboss.org/file-access/default/members/reportingservices/images/romain.jpg

A+,

sacha

No problem. i know first hand that i did a lot of web browsing when i was selecting components to build the system i have today.

I don’t know i you remember me i’m a very good friend of Noel R’s and work in Pascal’s open source team, we met a few times , the last one being the last Paris JUG.

Regards,
Romain.

Thanks for the information. BTW, your first post was being kept for approval. Your second post(s) went through probably because they were using the same IP address as one of your previous post (only the IP address was different, the usernames were identical).

For the Netgear, the community behind it was one of the big PROs I found, indeed. The X-Raid feature is pretty cool.

For the playback, I’ll check what they say about the popcorn – I’ve seen several mention of this device but never dug deeply in its features.

I’ll also check the Denon “learning remote”, that sounds funny.

Thanks for the tips, time to browse the web now…

I posted a response earlier but it got deleted
* for the storage part, i own a readyNAS NV+ and it’s working great. Debian based, ssh access, easy to configure CIFS,NFS, FTP … no problems about it. also features a nice RAID volume expansion.

* for the playback you should look at the popcorn hour A-110. i own one and like it a lot. allows playback of a very large amount of formats including flac, ogg … plays HD content such as TV shows from the “radio”, and can play DVDs straight off an .iso, including menus …not sure it plays blu rays though.

I posted a response earlier but it got deleted
* for the storage part, i own a readyNAS NV+ and it’s working great. Debian based, ssh access, easy to configure CIFS,NFS, FTP … no problems about it. also features a nice RAID volume expansion.

* for the playback you should look at the popcorn hour A-110. i own one and like it a lot. allows playback of a very large amount of formats including flac, ogg … plays HD content such as TV shows from the “radio”, and can play DVDs straight off an .iso, including menus and has and HDMI output…not sure it plays blu rays though.

I’ve researched the subject as well a few months ago.
* For the storage part, I own a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ and like it a lot. it’s dead easy to install. it’s linux (debian) based and comes with a simple configuration web interface. once it’s installed, you can enable ssh access and install other packages through apt-get. It also comes with a cool RAID expansion feature (X-RAID) that allows easy volume expansion as bigger disks become cheaper in the future.

* For the playback part, i own a popcorn hour A-110 (http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/0,39029552,49298505,00.htm) and really recommend it. it’s also running linux and allows to connect to the NAS via SMB, NFS, FTP, Upnp … to play a very large amount of formats (including flac, ogg…). I use it to play TV shows i pulled from the “radio” , that are stored on my NAS and downloaded from my desktop PC. You can store ISO masters of your DVDs on the NAS and the popcorn will be able to play them as if they were DVDs (menus, subtitles, etc…). I am not sure if it plays Blu-Rays though.
I haven’t yet stored my DVDs and Blurays on the NAS as the space required would far exceed the terabyte i have but i hear it works great. Their wiki should have more info on that : http://www.networkedmediatank.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

* For the restitution part, i’ve connected the popcorn hour to my Denon 2809 via HDMI, and used the denon learning remote to make it learn the popcorn’s remote keys, and it’s working great.

Regards,
Romain

So that would really be “cheap” automation. The reason I want this cheap automation mode is that I could start that machine with no screen/mouse/keyboard attached and simply blindly add DVDs manually.

For the eggs, I’ll try a frying pan.

AppleTV and fried eggs. My audio cabinet has good airflow (2 self-reg. extractor fans < $100) so I can use a regular frying pan – tastes much better

- Rich

Thanks for your feedback. Some comments:

Apple TV:

I thought that the AppleTV required to copy files locally? That’s not the case? It knows how to stream content from a back-end server?

Is the AppleTV still heating like crazy? I used to have one and was using it to cook eggs.

AnyDVD/CloneDVD

AnyDVD is a great piece of software, indeed, same for CloneDVD – the problem is that both cannot be scripted on the command line. AnyDVD has a very very basic command line and CloneDVD doesn’t have one – so much for the automation

AFAICT, when AnyDVD is live-converting a DVD, it changes some CRC32 hash which is being used by some tools to identify the DVD (used to query DVD catalogs) – not sure whether that still true or not

As for not buying any DVD for the last 4 years, that is an American-only (or pretty much) luxury. In Europe, there is no such thing – we are being asked to gently buy discs…

There’s some nice Windows ($$) s/w called AnyDVD / CloneDVD you can use for putting images on your H/D.

I have played with all these pieces – just haven’t had time to do the integration – I don’t think there’s anything hard.

btw. I haven’t purchased a DVD for 4 years – use AppleTV instead. For now the convenience outweighs the lockin (which is easy enough to overcome if needed).

- Rich

About NAS, I’ve heard good things about the Drobo, EmmanuelB got one he may have comments to make

Can’t wait to read your conclusion…