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Riyahd' · 2010-05-07, 20:27

Ok, I have an HTPC, but it only has 6 bays in it. I want to start adding blu ray movies to my collection an I know I will run out of room. I would like to make a server that my htpc will be able to play movies from wirelessly. I have two questions.

1) will I be able to stream blu ray or 1080p content over the internet with a 3mb/s connection? If not, could I do this through a wired connection?

2) I'm trying to get an idea of how to build this server. I'm not really interested in all the software like WHS or ubuntu, I just want the server to share with my htpc and have xbmc play movies that are on the server.

I hear a lot of talk here about RAID and NAS and other options. Im just looking for something easy, cheap and capable of running 1080p. If there are any guides on this please let me know. thanks.

kraqh3d · 2010-05-07, 20:34

1) No. It'll probably stream but it'll be entirely unwatchable as it'll be like 1 frame per sec. It depends on the actual encoding parameters, but you need at least 10x that throughput for blu-ray 1080p content, so wired 100mbps ethernet will work.

2) Just build a box with a lot of drives and share them. There's tons of options here, and everyone has their preferences. Personally my media is split between an unRAID server, and a debian box, though I am in the process of migrating it all to the unRAID server.

Phuqz · 2010-05-07, 21:08

My personal experience of wireless for streaming (both MAC and Wintel) is that even with 'n' larger files tend to suffer and I wasn't pleased with any hidef content. Wireless nets are situational and depend heavily on the surroundings they are in (even those that work as a bridge over your home power lines), so it can end up being a suck it and see.

Can't comment on streaming hidef directly from the tinternet. It really comes down to your bandwidth / latency / provider stability etc.

Storage can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. If you have 6 bays (in your HTPC?) then worst case with 6 x 2TB drives that's just under 12TB of storage.

If you need to go above 12 TB (which won't exactly be cheap in terms of drive cost) and want protection in the event of a single drive failure then I don't see any really cheap options for you.

There are off the shelf NAS boxes, most of the (cheap) ones are <=2TB and offer limited RAID options if any. Synology offer decent mid range NAS boxes that will support 4 x 2TB drives in RAID 5 but I wouldn't call these units cheap.

I rip all my BluRay and DVD's uncompressed to HD and in the end I was forced to build my own 20TB SAN. But the 26 port RAID card wasn't cheap, plus cheap drives and RAID don't always mix well as RAID cards will often mark a drive down because non enterprise drives have a higher timeout than the raid card is happy to deal with. This is true of inbuilt raid also ICH9 etc.

In terms of network, I have a GigE backbone; however the max read speed across the wire I was able to achieve from cheap NAS units despite modding their kernel's etc was not enough to stream .m2ts with full HD audio. uncompressed video with non HD audio worked fine.

In all honesty it comes down to budget and what you really consider important. Personally, if drive failure isn't a concern then I'd stack your HTPC with the biggest drives you can afford plus if you don't care about HD audio but want uncompressed video then tsmux all your files to strip them of PSG and unwanted audio etc.

The only thing to note is that HD's do get hot and you will perhaps need to uprate your cooling if you stack 6 close together.

kraqh3d · 2010-05-07, 21:44

Do a search for NAS on the forum. There have been alot of discussion in the past. Also, do the same at the avsforum.

Riyahd' · 2010-05-08, 05:07

Great. Thanks for the info.

It looks like a server is out of the question then. I was thinking I could get like a 10 bay tower, tether all the drives and run a sata cable under the carpet to the htpc. Sort of like a massive external hard drive. Would that be possible?

**CASHMON3Y** · 2010-05-08, 05:19

Riyahd Wrote:Great. Thanks for the info.

It looks like a server is out of the question then. I was thinking I could get like a 10 bay tower, tether all the drives and run a sata cable under the carpet to the htpc. Sort of like a massive external hard drive. Would that be possible?

Thats a horrible idea. No, it wont work for many reasons, primarily the cable cant be over a certain length.

technojunkie · 2010-06-15, 19:24

a server is most definitely NOT out of the question.

My server is a simple ubuntu server that serves its shares via NFS to my revo over 100mbit. I have no trouble streaming 1080p content at 25Mb/sec.

All of my files are ripped from blu-ray via makeMKV.

*edit* sorry to necro I just just noticed the date on last post...

MacUsers · (This post was last modified: 2010-06-15, 19:55 by MacUsers.)

Why don't you go for some simple solution, like using Apple 2T TimeCapsule (or any sort of NAS drive) attached to the network, rather making it complicated? I use a cifs mounted TimeCapsule and a NFS[4] mounted RAID0 storage hosted on a CentOS server. I recently upgraded my home to gigabit network; 10/100 should do the job too but definitely not WiFi, especially if you wanna stream Hi-Def content. If your modem/router supports USB-plugin, then you can go for a external USB-disk (WD MyBook is a good choice) and simply plug it in. Hope that helps. cheers!!

Edit:
Oops!! I did the same mistake, didn't notice it's an old thread; feel free to delete if required.