[iPad] Hard drive for HD movies on the go
#1
I was looking for a solution for HD movies on the go and decided to try out the Seagate GoFlex Satellite hard drive. It's a 500gb external hard drive, battery powered with it's own wifi network. You can connect to it and access any media you put on it.

When researching, I was a bit skeptical if xbmc would be able to see it, but turns out it does. You can add it as a uPnP source, and it works fine.

So far, I've found 1080p files are a bit too much for it (too much buffering), but 720p (4-6gb) files work great. This is on the original iPad running 4.3.3.

I haven't tested out how much long it lasts on battery yet. The website lists about 5 hours, not sure if it would be different with HD movies. It charges over usb and comes with a car charger.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004Z0S...PDKIKX0DER

Just wanted to share my findings, as I'm sure a lot of other people have the same problem to solve.
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#2
you could also use an ipod classic.
Ok, it doesn't have 500 gb, but it still has its own battery.
I can confirm this ipod method works.
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#3
I've tried the iPod classic method. It works, but the battery on it went from about 80% to empty in less than an hour and a half, watching just SD content. Possibly my iPod battery is defective, it's a 120gb version a couple of years old. Does yours last longer?

I've tried many methods so far. Before this drive, I was storing content on SD cards and small USB sticks (each 32gb) and connecting using the camera connection kit. However, they have to be formatted fat32 to be recognized, which means I can't put anything over 4gb on them.

This drive solves for that too.
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#4
Pocalypse Wrote:Before this drive, I was storing content on SD cards and small USB sticks (each 32gb) and connecting using the camera connection kit. However, they have to be formatted fat32 to be recognized, which means I can't put anything over 4gb on them.

Oh, but you can! Remember that xbmc can play from RAR. Archive your larger-than-4GB files with RAR, use compression method Store (which actually means no compression) and use the split archive function to e.g. 700 MB pieces, and then you can put the resulting files on your SD card.

Xbmc handles the archive transparently, you'll never know the difference. Smile

Best regards,
Durniplot
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#5
Interesting, I've never heard of that method, it's pretty clever. Thanks for pointing it out.

However, my aim is to not have to manipulate files in order to play them on the iPad. If I'm going to have to change each file in order to get it to play, I may as well transcode it completely into an apple friendly format.
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#6
All good tips! Sounds perfect for an XBMC wiki page about getting more storage for the iPad version while on the go. Also, that's kind of awesome to see what is basically a small 500 GB wireless file server that runs off of an internal battery!
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#7
Pocalypse Wrote:I've tried the iPod classic method. It works, but the battery on it went from about 80% to empty in less than an hour and a half, watching just SD content. Possibly my iPod battery is defective, it's a 120gb version a couple of years old. Does yours last longer?

I've tried many methods so far. Before this drive, I was storing content on SD cards and small USB sticks (each 32gb) and connecting using the camera connection kit. However, they have to be formatted fat32 to be recognized, which means I can't put anything over 4gb on them.

This drive solves for that too.

I don't know about the time, but when my sister was playing a movie of 1 hours and 33 minutes it lasted long enough with extra juice left. It was an ipod 6G iirc, 160GB.
Maybe it's because the screen brightness set on the ipod?
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#8
Have u managed to test how long it's battery lasted for you? (the hdd not the ipod)

I'm keen to get one of these these bad boys Smile
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#9
Th3avatar Wrote:I don't know about the time, but when my sister was playing a movie of 1 hours and 33 minutes it lasted long enough with extra juice left. It was an ipod 6G iirc, 160GB.
Maybe it's because the screen brightness set on the ipod?
I think the ipod doesn't leave the screen on when connected. It's been a while since I've tried though, I could be wrong.
danfozzy Wrote:Have u managed to test how long it's battery lasted for you? (the hdd not the ipod)

I'm keen to get one of these these bad boys Smile
Had a 5 hour flight yesterday where I got a chance to try it out. Unfortunately, it only lasted about 3.5 hours. Watched a 1.5 hour 720p movie, messed around with the file system for about 15 minutes, then got 1 hour 40 minutes into a 2 hour movie when it died.

This was my first full discharge, so it might be better next time around, but still not very good. Also, the low battery light came on when I still had 1h20m left of battery.

I had one issue using it. About 10 minutes into the first movie I got a popup in xbmc saying cache full. A few second later it quit out of the movie to the xbmc menu. I tried again and it happened again. I then quit out of xbmc, freed some space on my ipad (from 2gb to 8gb) and it didn't happen again.
Is xbmc really saving the entire file to the local drive? Seems a bit odd.
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#10
You may want to doublecheck the RAR suggestion. I heard that XBMC can play downloaded RAR files just fine. But that's because apparently, most groups are using RAR as a splitter and container with NO compression.

Try a compressed RAR movie file and let us know if XBMC can play back those. I didn't look into this further...but that was my understanding.
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#11
dazex Wrote:You may want to doublecheck the RAR suggestion. I heard that XBMC can play downloaded RAR files just fine. But that's because apparently, most groups are using RAR as a splitter and container with NO compression.

Maybe you should do the double checking, because that's exactly what I said. Use method "Store" (no compression), and split in chunks. Your assumption about how scene groups use rar is correct.

dazex Wrote:Try a compressed RAR movie file and let us know if XBMC can play back those. I didn't look into this further...but that was my understanding.

Well, I believe atleast the windows version will handle these, too, however not without unraring to the local cache dir first. This, too, is transparent for the user, though does it takes quite some time over a network, and xbmc will appear to "hang". Wait long enough, and your movie will start to play.

Best regards,
Durniplot
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#12
You can probably dramatically increase battery life by increasing the buffer size, or even manually copying the movie over using iFile, then start watching it in XBMC even before it's done. Right now the HDD is constantly running during the movie, rather than just transferring the needed data to the iPad and then spinning down/power saving.
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#13
Ned Scott Wrote:You can probably dramatically increase battery life by increasing the buffer size, or even manually copying the movie over using iFile, then start watching it in XBNC even before it's done. Right now the HDD is constantly running during the movie, rather than just transferring the needed data to the iPad and then spinning down/power saving.
Forgive my ignorance, but how can I increase the buffer size? I don't see an option for this in the xbmc settings.
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#14
Pocalypse Wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but how can I increase the buffer size? I don't see an option for this in the xbmc settings.

There's no GUI setting for it, but it can be set in the advancedsettings.xml file.

However, I see there that the cache is loaded in RAM (which I should have assumed), so it wouldn't help to increase it as the iPad, since iOS devices don't have a lot of RAM. Increasing that setting would likely crash XBMC.

I guess what would be neat is some kind of add-on for this kind of situation that would automate copying over the file from the wifi HDD to the iPad as a kind of cache/buffer, and then clear out the file after playback. The time it takes to transfer the file over is less time than the length of the movie, so the Wifi HDD is spinning for a lot less time if it only copies and then plays, rather than playing as it streams.
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