ive been thinking the same thing and have been researching over at avsforum.com for a while… I’m thinking of building something similar what you are… as daddie said… Def go RAID 5… hdds are cheap.
Jay - i’ve been reading up on this for a while as well, and from the description you’ve posted in sofar, and knowing that you have an Xbox…
Make use of the MCE link? I say this because I considered what I think you’re considering, and figured KISS. You already have the MCE :shrug: Instead of running RG6 and dealing with conversion, or running 100’ HDMI1.3…
Looks like a kickass app for the purposes. Requires a little work for ripping/streaming, but so do all things.
I rip them to .mkv files with flac audio and original VC-1/H.264 video. It seems to be able to play anything recognized by Vista as a video file - so you need to have made the registry changes to make it understand .mkv extensions and you need a matroska splitter and the required codecs.[/QUOTE]
And I would certainly hope that you’ll hardwire the XBX & Server to the network. IIRC you’re a fan of wireless, but for streaming ish like this, you want the speed & reliability of wired. $0.02
I’ve been all into this stuff for a while and I have gone through multiple setups. This is probably going to be long, but I’ve really tried out a lot of options and feel confident in my recommendation
My current setup is this:
(Approx $500) 1.86 ghz core2duo mac mini hooked up to the RGB port on my LCD TV (would use DVI but did not have a DVI to HDMI cable, just havent changed it out because it still looks great (1920x1080 resolution), mini TOSLINK cable to the optical port on the surround sound.
(Approx $175) Buffalo Linkstation Live NAS to store my stuff on
I currently have it hooked up to my FIOS router, but plan to put a gigabit switch in as the backbone, all though I haven’t had any bandwidth issues yet.
You will need to run the latest perian codec pack for quicktime and you will be able to run pretty much everything in frontrow, which if you’re not familiar with it is an awesome interface for home theater setup. You can run bluray rips in front row, but Mplayer OSX works much more flawlessly. Right now the rips people are doing are in the MKV container which is still a work in process, but they are getting better day by day.
You can stream directly from the linkstation, no need to copy to the mac mini, the mac mini is nice and compact and quiet and has a remote and good interface.
Setups I tried in the past were:
Built a relatively high end computer, 64 bit, dual core athlon 2.4ghz, 2gb ram (probably should have went 4, but 2 was fine for video), sata hdd’s and a radeon x1300, used that as a server and a player. Also tried streaming that to my xbox console. First and foremost, even wired in the xbox media center BS couldn’t keep up and was barely fast enough to stream music, let alone HD video. Then there is the DRM issues you will run into… basically just rule out xbox 360 right away. Now the specs on that windows server were way above what the mac mini is but it chugged on video way more than the mac mini. I don’t know if it is just bad windows codecs, or superior mac codecs, but either way it did NOT run as well despite having superior hardware.
Now… the new mac minis coming out I think have blu-ray drives now (don’t quote me on that, but I thought thats what I heard). All though I don’t see much of a point in having a drive to play movies anyways if you’re just going to be playing rips. Save yourself money and pay for a newsgroup hosting service (like newshosting.com), and a good newsgroup search (like newzbin.com) and you will have endless supply to SUPER fast downloads. I download blu-ray rips on my FIOS connection in a few hours.
So in conclusion, the current mac minis are even faster than what I have so they will run it even better - and you can get a beefier NAS if you want, but the Buffalo Linkstation live is built specifically for streaming media and is VERY fast, and VERY inexpensive. It does not have raid though, but IMO you want it for speed not for storage. I likely will end up getting a large, slower, RAID NAS to store things on indefinitely.
edit: lol man, that really ended up being long. I guess it’s just because I’m so pleased with finally getting a good setup 
As far as I’m concerned you can even come check it out in person to see it perform…
edit2: don’t even think of doing this wireless, you’ll never been able to stream blu-ray bandwidth even with 802.11n
Pretty accurate - my setup is actually faster streaming from the linkstation live than it is if I copy it to the mac mini and run it locally… but the drive in the mac mini is not very fast so that’s not surprising. If you were using a serial attached scsi drive it would probably be fast enough. Standard SATA drive’s are definitely too slow though.
chino, I fucking love you man
front row > *
mac wins again. Except, I don’t bother with that NAS shit. Just toss a 1TB drive in the box and use sftp or SAMBA to tranfser files. SAMBA is nice because you can map the drive to your other boxes. I usually download on my main desktop and transfer them over. I use the command line though, ssh transfers the files quick.
You can either buy a mac mini, or build a MAC OS X compatible machine. I have a custom built machine for running OS X. I would actually much prefer the mini though. I like the form factor as well as the fact that I want my main server back!! Playing back HD content while 2 VMs are running in the background is rough, hah.
Software wise, Front Row comes installed by default on OS X Leopard. What I did was add front row to the startup programs. So when the box (re)boots, it goes directly to the Front Row front end.
THEN, on top of that all, if you have an iphone, you can get an application which will control Front Row right from your iphone, instead of a wireless keyboard and/or remote control.
I am pulling off of an internal SATA drive just fine. I don’t know where you are getting that from.
How could it be faster off of the network? You are still reading off of a SATA drive inside of the NAS?
Yea you could get a more powerhouse machine built but you dont really need it, and you cannot beat the form factor of the mac mini. It looks great sitting in a media rack it’s also pretty cheap…
Same for the NAS, small footprint, quiet, low energy use, and no way you can build a server for less than $200 that will even come close in terms of performance.
Well, in my circumstance it is a 5400 rpm drive… and the motherboard probably bottlenecks pretty quickly. For whatever reason, on both the mac mini, and that windows machine I had decreased performance playing files locally than I did streaming it over the network. I am speaking only about MKV blu-ray rips though… standard video of course runs flawlessly both ways.
Raid 5 is actually 3+ drives with striping across them all and the capacity of 1 drive spanned as parity. So you lose the capacity of 1 drive but you gain the ability to rebuild the volume should any 1 of the drives crash. It’s the most common raid level used for a blend of speed and redundancy.
Striping alone leaves you dead in the water if any of the drives crash. Great for speed but no redundancy.
I agree in terms of form factor. I stated I would prefer the mac mini. Is the internal drive in the mac that slow though?
That is super shitty if it is. You have tried it right?
edit: does it use a standard HDD or a laptop HDD?
raid 1+0 is more common… now, raid 5 used to be the most common. raid 5 is really not ideal for this setup as it is slower. Also you can rebuild 1+0 on the fly.
Yea… it’s just not quick enough for the big HD video - they are laptop hdd’s I believe, I haven’t had a reason to open mine up but I can’t imagine it having a full sized drive in it. I can’t explain why this setup works so much better than other options, because on paper it doesn’t seem like it should be the best, but through lots of trial and error it has been solid so far.
2.5" laptop drive in that puppy.
Good point on the rebuild on the fly. What’s a 1+0 capable card go for these days? As a side note you need 4+ drives in even numbers so it’s a tad less flexible for a lower budget scenario. I don’t know if a budget was mentioned in here or not?
Jay another win since I know you’re into photography, is that you can load your iphoto library on it and do slideshows on the tv :tup:
Lots of good info popped up in here overnight.
Probably not going to go the mac route just because I need a new PC desktop at home and as a software engineer who works mostly in .net I’ll get a lot more use out of a PC.
The MCE looks really interesting.
Yes, I will be hardwiring everything. The Xbox is already hardwired and the desktop is now just a 10 foot or so run straight down to the downstairs now that I’ve moved my office down there.
you would be better off with a dedicated media box.
If you want to serve files from a desktop server using SMB, that is reasonable. However, playing back HD videos and doing other work on the machine is going to tax the box pretty hard.
I’d never be doing both at the same time. From what I read last night over at the avsforums it looks like an nvidia 9300/9400 based motherboard like I posted will give me the most options, including excellent blu-ray rip streaming to my xbox as well as playing blu-ray disks directly via the motherboards DVI out.
I’m telling you right now you’re going to be majorly disappointed in media center… it was my initial plan and after a month or two of messing with it to make it work right I canned it. Maybe over the last 6-9 months they got better with codecs and maybe people got better solutions for non-drm video, but if those problems still exist you’re going to be pissed.
edit: media center certainly looks cool, and seems like it will work well on paper but in practice it really really sucks.
I have a 360, looks like this is only for the original xbox.
I do what boardjnky4 does: Share my MacPro’s iTunes library across a gigabit network and use a Mac Mini with Front Row to stream the library. I tried it with wireless and the lag was terrible. It wasn’t too bad waiting for a show to load but if you wanted to jump around in a show/movie the lag was intolerable. I imagine it’s similar with Media Center, MythTV, etc unless their buffering techniques are more advanced.
Oh. I also play a bluray at 1080p from from my USB external and it plays just fine. Even playing off the internal laptop hard drive is never an issue.