Are servers the new media?

[CliffH]

Originally Posted by Lotus

Watch Apple do it.

Just watch. There is a market.

That would be a great appliance that could easily be made from a PC. You would just put your media in the drive and it would automatically rip it to the hard drive at your specified settings, catalog it and set up an easily accessed menu. Now that the AV recievers are starting to come with ethernet capability it would be a great front end for such a media server.
electronics stores such as best buy could then purchase a multi dvd robotic feeder and you could just drop your collection at the store and have it installed on the server for you.
such dvd mechanisms already exist that can hold aprox 100 disks at a time. They are used for mass copying of disks. I'm sure some small niche company could set up a turn key system and sell them to the large electronics chains. It would be a good way for the store to make some extra profit or they could include it as a service if you purchase such a media server from them.

[kloneman]

iTunes already does this function for music. The only thing missing is to add identical interface support to do exactly the same thing for DVDs and subsequent HD content, along with support for a wide range of drives, including the 400+ disk changers. I had a Kenwood changer that could hold 403 DVDs or CDs, but could never get Kenwood to cough up the Technical information needed control it, and grab the title info. They had an absolutely HORRIBLE windows program for this, and they also had an add-on "Entree" thing that cataloged the titles, downloaded cover art, and acted as a streamer for some satelite speakers. That changers' cataloging program was the only reason I ever kept a copy of Virtual PC around. The changer's interface was RS-232 also, and that is more than a bit dated now as well. The changer finally died and I have no reason to keep the software.

Originally Posted by CliffH

That would be a great appliance that could easily be made from a PC. You would just put your media in the drive and it would automatically rip it to the hard drive at your specified settings, catalog it and set up an easily accessed menu. Now that the AV recievers are starting to come with ethernet capability it would be a great front end for such a media server.
electronics stores such as best buy could then purchase a multi dvd robotic feeder and you could just drop your collection at the store and have it installed on the serve

[rlpiii]

Originally Posted by kloneman

. . . The changer finally died and I have no reason to keep the software.

Keep it to fix mine . . . HA HA

[kennyt]

If it weren't for the extensive time to load all the media in, we all would have them, already. I know there are services that do this, but it would be nice to be able to rent one for a few days and just load all your stuff in in a few shots automatically.

[kloneman]

Right. Its still here so far, but it does take up way to much room. I did like the Faroudja video processing and the "disk flip" feature. It sorted out all those disks I put in upside down perfectly.

Originally Posted by rlpiii

Keep it to fix mine . . . HA HA

[CliffH]

Originally Posted by CliffH

That would be a great appliance that could easily be made from a PC. You would just put your media in the drive and it would automatically rip it to the hard drive at your specified settings, catalog it and set up an easily accessed menu. Now that the AV recievers are starting to come with ethernet capability it would be a great front end for such a media server.
electronics stores such as best buy could then purchase a multi dvd robotic feeder and you could just drop your collection at the store and have it installed on the server for you.
such dvd mechanisms already exist that can hold aprox 100 disks at a time. They are used for mass copying of disks. I'm sure some small niche company could set up a turn key system and sell them to the large electronics chains. It would be a good way for the store to make some extra profit or they could include it as a service if you purchase such a media server from them.

http://www.kaleidascape.com/experience/

If you check out this link you will see a robotic dvd ripper exactly like what I was thinking about above. This company kaleidascope has a full solution for a home media server that is expandable to many terrabytes of storage. If you look at their brochure it appears to be just a rack mountable computer server with some custom software and appearance tweaks. It works over ethernet to send video anywhere in the house. They are now working on a blu-ray add on for their system.
It seems to me that a similar system could be made from a good Home Theater PC with an few 1 TB drives added on in a Drobbo type NAS drive. I am sure there are some great Lynux programmers out there that could come up with an open source application similar to VLC Media player or sage that would make such a system affordable to more of us. The kaleidascape system seems to be a great solution but I am sure it is affordable to only the most well healed enthusiast. As far as Legal issues a court has already held that a system such as this does not violate the DMCAct.

What do you guys think.