Nope, didn’t bother. I installed windows 7 using a 4gb thumb drive. There’s a bay in my HTPC case for one but on the really rare occasion I need to play an actual DVD movie I just use the xbox. I have one of the optical drives on my server shared so if I need to load software from DVD I can just map a drive letter to it. All 3 computer are hardwired cat 6 gigabit LAN now (yeah, I’ve put way too much into my home network) so it’s pretty much as fast as having the drive installed local.
Lol at getting 2 drives for $100 right now hope you get yours with water on them for that price LOL
Ready nas is a piece of shit drobo is way better rather have all the options then nothing at all
have you looked at hard drive prices recently?
Had a lock down on some at Best Buy the other day. $55 each in stock. They’re around, just be patient.
What size and brand and speed
don’t remember… It was a good name brand though, and plenty of size as I recall. I’m just not ready to pull the trigger on anything yet.
Yes I have smart ass I’m making a joke and they were probably 500gig hdds, I found a 2tb wd green for $79 at best buy grabed it next day they were at $130, that happened at the time of the flood so I think I kno what’s going on dudebro
Lets not talk about now the Drobo FS is horrible fucking slow, it has some very well documented slowness issues doing CIFS, AFP and NFS.
I still think the best bang for the buck NAS appliance units are Synology Units DS211 (2 drive) or DS411j (4 drive)
Eh I will agree but I’m sure they will put a firmware update out has to be software related issue
Been well documented for a while no with no acknowledgement from there side I highly doubt it. Plus the price of the drobo bare was still around 700.
wow, this went over my head quick. Anyhow, Jay, how did you upload and library all of the movies you said you have?
Just talked to my friend that has one today and he said that defaulty the drobo limits the bandwidth therefore for many different user accounts he said he changed a few things in the settings and got more out of it speed wise and they are still going for $600 with a $100mir
$500 on hardware with out drives you could build a pretty nasty FreeNAS box.
XBMC. As long as the movies are organized into folders and the individual movie folders follow their naming conventions it’s all automatic. Nothing is stored on my HTPC. I keep all my stuff on a computer in the basement with 4TB+ of disk space. At first I had 3 separate XBMC installs looking at the media but recently modified it so all 3 XBMC installs share one library. This allows me to stop playing a movie in one room and resume at the point left off in another. It also means only one computer has to update its library when new media is added.
You should do a write up on how you got xbmc to do that. And how you share your files on your “file server” and adding them to xbmc
Thank you for the link but I was curious how he did it and what is he was running on his server kinda comparing articles
He used that link, I think I sent it too him lol. The article has one glaring whole you need to make sure all clients have access to the thumbnails. Basically share the thumbnails (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\Thumbnails) directory on the server and then mount it as network drive on the htpc clients and symlink it on there appdata directory.
Second thing is when adding media sources after configuring mysql make sure you specify the network path \mediaserver\blah or smb://mediaserver/blah you cannot do a network mount for this, it doesn’t work right for whatever reason.
That lifehacker link was how I did it. The only thing I’d add is:
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When you add your sources from the main computer that will be your XBMC “master”, make sure to browse to the network share, not the local drives (even though the drives are on that machine). It won’t matter on the main PC but if you browse to the local drives the remote XBMC machines won’t see shit. Pounded my head on the wall for hours trying to figure that one out.
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Map a drive on each remote PC to the thumbnails folder on the master XMBC install. Then on each remote PC delete the thumbnails folder for XBMC and create a symbolic link named thumbnails in it’s location and point it to the mapped drive. This allows the remote XBMC installs to use the thumbnails on the master seamlessly. You need a fast network for this to work well (hardwired is almost a must). How to make symlinks: http://www.windows7home.net/how-to-create-symbolic-link-in-windows-7/
Really would suggest just getting XBMC working and the library all built once before tackling the shared thing. This has been an ongoing ever evolving project for me over the past couple years. Trying to duplicate my system from scratch would be a tough learning curve.
Great info, I do stick with hardwire all the time. I’m currently struggling with what would be best for me as I would like to have a main htpc in the living room then have clients to share the content buy everything would be stored on either a nas or file server. One thing I like is the ability to use wmc as a dvr for antenna programing ( I have direct tv but their is no possible way to remove content off the dvr) I’ve found a codec pack for wmc called shark007 that will play any file I throw at it and also the extra bound of having Netflix plug in. From what I have found and tired xbmc does offer the dvr and Netflix plug in but will play any file and run smooth at shit having ot just as xbmc and not xbmc inside windows. My other issues is the part were I have no computer ATM that I feel is worthy to to a candidate for my htpc or client for the bedrooms, my solution was to use a net top as a streaming device for 720p and then have a dual core amd with 4gigs ram 1tb HDd and a 5770 and tunner card as the main htpc but that came to a hault until I build a new desktop. I’m just ranting and stressing over some to use for basic playback right now my laptop does have hdmi and im testing my theory’s and software on their but I’m not sure what I’ll do to attack this, it’s just a matter of gathering parts and then choosing software, any of you have insight on wmc or have tired ot also just want thoughts