Managing Mass Amounts of Digital Media

As you may know, I’m a bit of a pack rack when it comes to digital media. I save almost every single TV show and movie that I download. The end result is for nearly any show I watch (24, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc), I can watch any episode on demand.

As you can imagine, storing all of the information can be a bit of a pain, especially when you’re dealing with HD media. The following article gives a brief glimpse into my method of madness for dealing with this media.

Storage

If you’re looking to save everything, a storage device that has the capacity to store everything is an absolute necessity. TV shows are typically 400MB for an hour long show (1.1GB for 720p versions). Movies can range anywhere from 700MB for a compressed file, 4GB for a RAW DVD, and 4-10GB for HD content. This adds up fast.

My initial solution involved building my own FreeNAS box and stuffing it with hard drives in a RAID5 configuration. While this solution worked fine for a while, I eventually ran out of space, and in the process of upgrading the capacity, managed to lose everything. While the file lose was clearly my fault, I abandoned my FreeNAS box in a favor of a better solution. If you know what you’re doing and don’t mind adding more storage than you immediately need, FreeNAS is still a great solution, but it wasn’t for me.

The Current Solution: Drobo

After ditching my FreeNAS box, I purchased a Drobo and stuffed my free drives into that. The beauty of the Drobo is it takes any size SATA hard drive and builds a protected array out of the mixed drive sizes. Any drive can be removed at any time and replaced with a larger drive for more storage. I’m currently sitting at 3.2TB of storage (1.5TBx2, 1TBx2) and may even need to upgrade one of the 1TB drives shortly. Since switching to Drobo, I haven’t had any problems on the storage front.

Watching the Media

For computer-bound viewing of video, I tend to stick with VLC or XBMC, with XBMC being my choice for HD media playback. Both applications work cross-platform, so they tend to be the optimal solution. However, computer playback is never the problem. The real issue is watching the content on a real TV.

Having the Right Network

Any solution I’ve used to get content on a TV has always involved streaming the media. Before I get into the streaming solutions, I want to drive home the point to ensure your home network is up to speed before looking at any streaming solutions. Wired network needs at least a 10/100 ethernet connection. For wireless, 802.11g is absolute must for standard definition streaming and 802.11n is required for HD streaming. Don’t even think about streaming unless your network can handle it. You’ll save yourself a lot of headaches (trust me).

Watching Media on Your TV

Surprisingly, I’ve used a number of devices over the years for streaming. I’m going to briefly go over the pros and cons of each device, completely from personal experience.

Modern Gaming Consoles Like the PS3 and Xbox 360

Some of the earliest media extenders I have played with have been the Xbox 360 and PS3. While both devices have excellent menu systems and connectivity options, they have always been plagued with codec issues. Up until last year, neither device could play DivX content, a popular codec for downloaded media. To this date they still have this issue. Neither device supports MKV, the format that 99% of HD content is distributed in, and the PS3 seems to hate about 10% of DivX content out there. Unless you’re willing to convert nearly everything you want to watch, using a console as a media extender has been nothing but a headache for me.

Xbox Media Center on Xbox, AppleTV

While not really hardware, XBMC is an amazing piece of software, and I’ve used it on three different hardware platforms: Xbox, AppleTV, and computer. Given the right setup, XBMC is without a doubt the optimal solution for media playback. Unfortunately, there is one major problem with XBMC.

XBMC is completely reliant on the CPU. This can cause trouble with HD content, especially with more advanced codecs like H.264. XBMC on the Xbox can’t handle H.264, XBMC on the AppleTV can’t handle content over 480p, and the PC requires at least a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or equivalent. Due to this, the lower powered devices are essentially out of the question, and any media center PC built requires some serious horsepower.

If you can overcome the CPU requirements, by all means get XBMC up and running, but I personally didn’t want to invest in a beefed up home media center PC.

Western Digital TV

After ditching XBMC on my AppleTV, the next device I ended up getting was Western Digital’s new WDTV. At only $100USD, the WDTV is a steal. The main plus for the device is it plays anything – and I mean anything. 1080p MKVs, raw DVD ISOs, whatever you have the WDTV can play.

Unfortunately there are some major disadvantages for the device. The first being the device isn’t networkable. All media has to be played through an external USB hard drive. While this may work for some, the pain of constantly unplugging and re-plugging in flash drives or hard drives was a pain. Furthermore, while the menu system looks nice, it’s really slow, making navigating any intricate folder structure a royal pain.

If you don’t mind dealing with flash drives and a slow menu system, at the price the WDTV is the way to go, but it still wasn’t the right device for me.

Popcorn Hour: Network Media Tank

Enter the Popcorn Hour. At the surface the Popcorn Hour seems like the king of media devices. Like the WDTV, it will play anything you throw at it, and it has some serious connectively options. Two USB ports, an internal SATA drive, and an ethernet port are all available for use. On the output side of the device, there is an HDMI port, component hookups, optical audio, etc. Essentially, the Popcorn Hour will hook up to anything and play anything.

Outside of the hardware, the software is pretty sweet. There are built in applications like a Usenet client, torrent client, internet streaming services, FTP server, and more. To round out the software, there is even third party developer support, allowing the device to run anything that can be coded.

While the Popcorn Hour may have it all, there are still some drawbacks that may shun the device away from the average consumer. First off, the menu system isn’t that great. The menus are about as barebones as you can get (although they are fast). While functional, the software doesn’t seem as polished as some other solutions, leaving much to be desired. To make things worse, the remote isn’t all that intuitive.

Essentially, it’s a device for geeks made by geeks. There are some serious barriers to overcome for the average user (for example, my device didn’t ship with firmware, and I had to flash it myself), but if you can overcome those issues, the device itself is solid. Outside of the firmware problem, I haven’t had any issues, and therefore I have chosen the Popcorn Hour as my main device for TV media playback.

Conclusions

Dealing with media, especially HD content, can really be a pain. While devices do exist to playback downloaded media, I feel the market still is not there for the average consumer. Some of these devices are extremely technical, or lack key connectivity options.

The good news is with devices like the WDTV, I think the market is getting there. Companies realize people have a media dilemma, and they’re looking to address those needs. I think in a year or two the media extender market will have more options and be better consumer oriented.

I hope my rundown a devices and solutions will be useful for anyone looking to start a collection of there own. While getting started can be a pain, I’m extremely glad I invested the time and money in my current solution. Nothing can beat watching an episode of Lost in HD glory whenever I want.