Pure Digital Thought

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the Media Center I wanted to put together. I dropped plans of getting another machine, actually, I was vetoed once I got my new server. So, I’ve moved my main gaming computer into the living room to complement my XBox360.

I’ve hooked up the machine directly to the TV. It looks nice. It’s great being able to play games on a 61″ DLP. For control, I picked up a Logitech S510 wireless desktop package which has a wireless keyboard and the LX5 wireless mouse. The mouse is nice because it uses invisible optics. So you don’t see a red or blue light at the bottom of the mouse which can be annoying when using the system in the dark.

I got an account with Vongo for Video-On-Demand through the PC. Basically, for $10 a month you can play any movie in their library on demand. Their library is good for now seeing how new Vongo is and I’m hoping it will get a lot better over time. I also already had GameTap on my gaming machine so now I can use that with my DLP. GameTap provides on demand gaming for $10 a month. It has over 500 games from many different classic systems such as Atari, Neo Geo, Commodo 64, Arcade, etc as well as newer systems like Dreamcast and Windows games. I like on demand. Digital distribution is the future. I’m just going to enjoy all of it while the big boys battle it out.

As a side project, I’m still working on my DVD library. With HD-DVD on the way, I’ll need a way to make room for HD-DVDs in my somewhat small cabinet. So, I’m looking to rip all of my DVD movies to my hard drive. It takes about 3.5-4 GB per movie for an average movie. I’m using DVDShrink to backup the movies to my hard drive in full DVD quality which can then be played on Windows Media Player or using the nVidia nStant Media Center. I bought the nVidia PureVideo Decoder which allows me to upscale the DVDs from 480p to 720p or 1080p. It will also pass Dolby Digital II and DTS on to my receiver. Upscaled DVDs actually look really good.

At 3.5-4 GB per movie, you can imagine I’ll be needing some storage. So, I’m looking into getting a pair of 500-750GB SATA hard drives. I want a pair so I can mirror the disks in RAID 1. After archiving hundreds of gigs of movies, the last thing I want to do is lose the movies and have to start all over again. I’m still thinking about how I’ll do this. Disks of that size are pretty pricey and I’ll need two for mirroring. In reality, if I were to lose a drive, which is uncommon, I would only be losing my time and I would just have to start over with the archiving. I could always buy two smaller disks and run them in RAID 0 which would mean I could get cheaper disks and get the same storage amount but if one of the disks went bad I would have to replace that disk and start over with archiving. Sigh… decisions, decisions.