What's Easy, What's Hard
It's been years since I've been excited about home media servers. Partly that's because 80 percent of the problem is *so* easy to solve: a commodity PC, a couple terabytes of storage, and a free, easy OS like Ubuntu Linux with a full set of free drive encryption tools solves almost all my needs. With that box, you've got household backup (using *any* backup software you want, since the server just shares its drives to the LAN), you've got somewhere to rip and store all your music and videos (use any music player you want on whatever PC is handy, again, mounting those huge drives over the LAN), and somewhere to put your photos and ripped ISOs for your game CDs and so on and so on. Attach a DVD drive and a copy of Handbrake and you've got an easy DVD-ripping station (if your script-fu is strong, you can even set things up so that every disk you rip is automagically transcoded to thumbnail-sized versions for your portable player -- the free ffmpeg is good for this).
Add DynDNS and some firewall rules, get an ISP that doesn't suckily throttle your inbound connections, and you can access the whole thing from the road. The problem of making a giant, secure archive of files available to four or five people is solved. You may need to find a clever 15-year-old to work out the details, but it's the 21st century, there's a massive glut of 15-year-old geeks. A "media" server is just a server attached to a box like the Neuros which feeds your TV an on-screen menu of stored files.
Media centers: the exciting, the boring; the solved, the unsolved
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Speaking of media centers, you had a short story competition for a media center maybe six weeks back, did you ever announce the winner(s) of that?
Can you be more specific?
What I want is some way to put a server in a waterproof, fireproof container. Optical media will survive a house fire in a cheap commodity fire chest; magnetic disks, not so much.
Either that, or an offsite backup I can really trust. Maybe partner with a friend so each of us has an encrypted link to storage on the other user's system...
I would definately be worried about power usage. Commodity PCs can and will suck up lots of juice.
This reminds me - every few months I still see somebody make a blog post about how computers and tv will or won't eventually integrate. They always seem to be so fixated on computer capabilities being worked into TVs, that they've missed the fact that it happened the other way over a decade ago.
Yeah, it was from this blog post. Back in July, it seems.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/07/13/competition-write-ga.html
Winners were announced here: http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/08/03/gadget-fiction-the-w.html
There's was another haiku competition, winners yet to be announced. I'll do that today! I was waiting on one of our judges, then it slipped my mind.
Technogeek, rsync -az my_videos rsync.net:/technogeek/backup
Daemon, the things that bothered me about the PC solution, until recently, were hard disk space, lack of A/V device driver support and a main system viewing component that didn't clutter the cabinet in the living room too much.
We live in the age of Pretty Freakin' High Capacity Drives. Though I am waiting as patiently as I can for reasonably small 300GB solid state drives.
As far as a viewing component, I go with a central server (an Ubuntu box) and a second machine functioning as a client- the "TV" part.
Ubuntu has stepped forward in the driver support area, to say the least, so I can use the capture card I want to use with reasonably good quality. (Actually, I'm discovering in retrospect a Mac Mini would have made a good candidate for a media server.)
Apple's latest line of iMacs has about all I could want in that area. Gorgeous video and the computer part jammed elegantly into a package no thicker than most flat screens.
I'm not an Ubuntu or Apple shill or anything, just pointing out the various players in the media center game have needed to mature, and now we're pretty much there imho.
I'm doing exactly this, with a 1.5 TB drive and an IOBox-1000HD - http://www.dragontechcorp.com/products/iobox-100hd.htm.
It's silent (fanless), wireless, serves Samba and FTP, plays any codec you can dream of..and I can telnet to it. I wouldn't have dreamed this was possible two years ago - an open platform small and quiet enough to meet the Wife test.
It's funny...I've made myself a small network in the house for streaming music and video between our various pieces of computer and A/V equipment wirelessly, but I mostly end up just transporting the hard drive to where it needs to be...
Still, it would be cool if that kind of networking was less bother. Although, I suppose it did force me to learn a little more about networking than I knew before! Win?
Windows Home Server does a pretty good job of making it very fast and easy to set this up. It automatically detects drives and adds them to its large storage pool, allows simple folder duplication (i.e., duplicating folder's contents on another disk in case of failure), and has a good interface for controlling everything.
I've spent countless hours trying to set up my own solution using tools running on top of XP and FreeNAS, but WHS just works.