The story began well over a year ago. I purchased several HDDs in order to convert an old 5-drive SCSI enclosure into a SATA enclosure. The end product was a roughly 900GB, RAID-5, MultiLane eSATA addition to my file server (sad how cheap a 1TB external drive runs nowadays).
One of my primary desires for so much storage was to give me a place to rip all my DVDs. My dream was to stream them to my living room using my XBOX 360 as an extender. And that's when the problems began:
- I could never get an encoding process down that would work to my satisfaction. Despite having a rather strong gaming rig, it still took far too many steps and too much time to encode a DVD as a WMV (to maintain the 5.1 audio).
- Media Center Extenders don't seem to play nice with domains. Extenders login with a local account that flat out refuses to see the network shares from my file server, regardless of security permissions I set.
- The 360 would periodically decide it didn't want to talk to my Media Center PC anymore inciting a long process of getting them to be friends again. Couple that with the 360 sounding like an aircraft carrier deck, and the idea of boxing up all my DVDs slowly faded away.
This year, I reevaluated my options and decided to pick up an Apple Mac Mini and slap Vista Ultimate on it. The small (and quiet) Mini could be tucked away in my living room giving me full Media Center functionality with very little impact to my living room feng shui (or lack thereof).
Next, I had to tackle my encoding problem. I've gotten rather tired of encoding DVDs every time a new and better CODEC comes along. Rather than deal with it, I decided to just store the raw DVD as is and enable to DVD Library functionality in Media Center. IMHO, external hard drives have become cheap enough that I can tack on several more TB for roughly what I paid last year for 1TB.
The end result is a nice fit. I rip my DVDs with DVD Decrypter* direct to the file server, grab the dvdid.xml file from DVDxml.com, and BINGO, they show up in Media Center. The XML file lets Media Center know what the DVD ID is so it can download additional movie details and cover art. So provided I get enough storage space I can officially box up my DVDs and hide them in some obscure closet (I do not condone illegally ripping DVDs, so I own every movie I rip).
[*] officially discontinued but easily found with a quick Google search.