2009-09-03, 07:36
Hello. First post, Newb, ya ya.. bear with me here. (please.)
I would like to set up a (fairly) unique situation. I would like to put an XBMC in every room in our inn. That would be a total of 13 xboxes.
As these would be in guest rooms, I would mainly want to stream video content. Basically trading up our DVD collection so guests don't have to "accidentally" take home a DVD, or scratch it, etc.
I would like to have a NAS hard drive with something like a NAS adapter attached to a large hard drive (1 or 2 TB) The hard drive obviously would have all of the movies on it. Our collection is almost 1K DVDs. We would add movies slowly, as the porcess of adding/burning/encoding movies seems to take while. (right?)
The xboxes would have either a wifi bridge or wifi game adapter attached. This would be less expensive than having to run cable through the 150 year old mansion... we did it once for cable tv a few months ago, and it was pretty high up there.
My concerns are as follows...
Between Most accepted and Best: What is considered the recommended video format for movies to be played on considering video quality, wireless streaming ability, and disk storage space? I am currently using DVD shrink and AutoGK with lifehackers one-click add-on for DVD Shrink. This combo is taking me about an hour per dvd. Also, when it comes to menus, special features, etc. I would be more than willing to scrap that if it means saving me an extra ? number of minutes/hours per dvd. - you fill in the ?
Second is the Hard drive. If I am having several people access the same drive and the signal is wireless and blah blah... do I need a special hard drive? I would think that a good old external USB 2.0 hard drive connected to a NAS adapter and plugged directly in to my SonicWall tz170 would fulfill my needs. Yay/Nay?
Last is the wireless thing. I can't tell the difference and I have not been able to find anything online about the differences between
A: Linksys by Cisco WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge with Dual-Band
and
B: Linksys Dual-Band Wireless-N Gaming Adapter
...when it comes to what I plan on doing with them. Should I just go with the cheaper game adapter? It all seems very confusing to me.
Well I had modded my brothers xbox with XBMC a few years ago. I only got to play with it a few months. I just had this idea about a month ago. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while but didn't think of XBMC.
Now all I have to do is find a dozen xboxes to mod.
Thanks for all of you help! I hope that it shows that I did my homework and all, 'cause we all know we hate when people ask questions and you can tell. I am just to the point now where I am going to do this, and this is the last step in my plan before I spend the estimated $2K+ on this project. - Not to mention the time of putting that many movies on a HDD.
One more thing... What is considered "good naming" when it comes to a DVD title and XBMC automatically parsing the info off of IMDB.com? If I have a file called Sweeney_Todd.avi work just as well as SWEENEY.TODD.avi? And if I don't downconvert, does the folder name containing the Audio_TS -which are empty?!- and Video_TS do the work, or is it extracted somehow from a .ifo file or something?
Please Advise and thank you,
~Sean
I would like to set up a (fairly) unique situation. I would like to put an XBMC in every room in our inn. That would be a total of 13 xboxes.
As these would be in guest rooms, I would mainly want to stream video content. Basically trading up our DVD collection so guests don't have to "accidentally" take home a DVD, or scratch it, etc.
I would like to have a NAS hard drive with something like a NAS adapter attached to a large hard drive (1 or 2 TB) The hard drive obviously would have all of the movies on it. Our collection is almost 1K DVDs. We would add movies slowly, as the porcess of adding/burning/encoding movies seems to take while. (right?)
The xboxes would have either a wifi bridge or wifi game adapter attached. This would be less expensive than having to run cable through the 150 year old mansion... we did it once for cable tv a few months ago, and it was pretty high up there.
My concerns are as follows...
Between Most accepted and Best: What is considered the recommended video format for movies to be played on considering video quality, wireless streaming ability, and disk storage space? I am currently using DVD shrink and AutoGK with lifehackers one-click add-on for DVD Shrink. This combo is taking me about an hour per dvd. Also, when it comes to menus, special features, etc. I would be more than willing to scrap that if it means saving me an extra ? number of minutes/hours per dvd. - you fill in the ?
Second is the Hard drive. If I am having several people access the same drive and the signal is wireless and blah blah... do I need a special hard drive? I would think that a good old external USB 2.0 hard drive connected to a NAS adapter and plugged directly in to my SonicWall tz170 would fulfill my needs. Yay/Nay?
Last is the wireless thing. I can't tell the difference and I have not been able to find anything online about the differences between
A: Linksys by Cisco WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge with Dual-Band
and
B: Linksys Dual-Band Wireless-N Gaming Adapter
...when it comes to what I plan on doing with them. Should I just go with the cheaper game adapter? It all seems very confusing to me.
Well I had modded my brothers xbox with XBMC a few years ago. I only got to play with it a few months. I just had this idea about a month ago. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while but didn't think of XBMC.
Now all I have to do is find a dozen xboxes to mod.
Thanks for all of you help! I hope that it shows that I did my homework and all, 'cause we all know we hate when people ask questions and you can tell. I am just to the point now where I am going to do this, and this is the last step in my plan before I spend the estimated $2K+ on this project. - Not to mention the time of putting that many movies on a HDD.
One more thing... What is considered "good naming" when it comes to a DVD title and XBMC automatically parsing the info off of IMDB.com? If I have a file called Sweeney_Todd.avi work just as well as SWEENEY.TODD.avi? And if I don't downconvert, does the folder name containing the Audio_TS -which are empty?!- and Video_TS do the work, or is it extracted somehow from a .ifo file or something?
Please Advise and thank you,
~Sean