Media Server Build

[adk highlander]

I'm a PCH 200 series beta tester so I get all the stuff early. I have been testing NMJ for several months now and at this point it does not a YAMJ replacement make. It has a LOT of potential but is not very customizable at the moment and its still not very stable.

I sent you a PM with further details.

Good to know. I'll stick with YAMJ then for now.

I've taken a couple of under-the-hood pics. As I expected it is fairly sparse inside.

Pic 1 is with top off but with the 3.5 HD/DVD tray still attached.

Pic 2 shows the tray removed and the location of the 2.5 HD that I installed. This HD will just store applications and no media files.

 

[adk highlander]

Here are a couple of pics of YAMJ.

This is the Wall view I have setup:

This is a detail of a movie:

Movies start amazingly fast. Iron Man 2 starts from the detail screen to the movie starting is less than 5 seconds.

Sorry if some of my other images are broken tonight. I had a domain expire on one of my sites and it may be another day before all of them are back up.

 

[krzywica]

Looking good man!

 

[adk highlander]

4 days in to ripping movies and I have 29 completed. I do the AnyDVD full rips during the day and set up a batch routine for Clown BD to extract the move only portion at night.

29 Movie only BD's - 702GB

I hope 5.5TB is enough.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

4 days in to ripping movies and I have 29 completed. I do the AnyDVD full rips during the day and set up a batch routine for Clown BD to extract the move only portion at night.

29 Movie only BD's - 702GB

I hope 5.5TB is enough.

Just make sure you don't have any of those lip-sync issues I had back then.

 

[adk highlander]

Just make sure you don't have any of those lip-sync issues I had back then.

Nope. At least none yet. I've checked and I am yet to see an issue.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Nope. At least none yet. I've checked and I am yet to see an issue.

One time I ripped a Dexter BD. I watched the 1st episode, and the audio was perfect, so I assumed everything was perfect. Later on, I watched the 2nd episode, and that was when the audio lip-sync screwed up for the rest of the disc.

Another one was Life of Bees BD. The 1st half of the movie was fine, but then the 2nd half of the movie was out of sync.

 

[dkane360]

One time I ripped a Dexter BD. I watched the 1st episode, and the audio was perfect, so I assumed everything was perfect. Later on, I watched the 2nd episode, and that was when the audio lip-sync screwed up for the rest of the disc.

Another one was Life of Bees BD. The 1st half of the movie was fine, but then the 2nd half of the movie was out of sync.

What causes the lip sync problem and how do you remedy it? I'm trying to gather as much info as possible before I start ripping my blurays.

 

[krzywica]

What causes the lip sync problem and how do you remedy it? I'm trying to gather as much info as possible before I start ripping my blurays.

Sounds like its likely an isolated incident. I have used Clown_BD for hundreds of BD's and never had an issue like this.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Honestly I never done Hddvd or Bruray rips, but I did do hundreds of DVD rips and re-codes in my time.
Usually lip-sync issues are created during audio/video compress process. If it's 1 to 1 rip (minus extras) lip-syncs should be highly unlikely....

 

[krzywica]

Honestly I never done Hddvd or Bruray rips, but I did do hundreds of DVD rips and re-codes in my time.
Usually lip-sync issues are created during audio/video compress process. If it's 1 to 1 rip (minus extras) lip-syncs should be highly unlikely....

Yes, I have seen desynchronization issues when either the software is written poorly and is unable to create a suitable buffer, or the hardware (usually CPU) is not able to keep up with the encoding process. But for a 1:1 file remux this should NEVER happen.

 

[adk highlander]

I have now ripped about 70 Blu-rays in total.

65 have been done with AnyDVDHD and then extracting the movie only with Clown BD. All of these are working perfect with no lipsync issues or menu oddities.

5 Movies I did with AnyDVD then DVDFab to pull the movie only. Here I've had some issues. Avatar will not play. The movie starts but just hangs. The other is Iron Man 2 which seems to be adding these extra SHIELD animations which are cool but distracting. The other three are fine. I will redo Avatar with Clown BD and see what happens.

My IR kit will arrive today so I can start programming the c-200 into my URC setup. It does stink that URC does not have codes for popcornhour in their database. Heck Harmony has them. So it looks like a night or two of learning IR codes. Unless anyone has a CCP file with these... (Hint Scott)

 

[krzywica]

The other is Iron Man 2 which seems to be adding these extra SHIELD animations which are cool but distracting. The other three are fine. I will redo Avatar with Clown BD and see what happens.

I have the same issues with a few BD's that seem to have some type of BD Live overlay structure that is meant for interactive content. IM2 and Terminator Salvation both have the same issue. My solution was to just keep the full BD structure and play it back like a normal BluRay, only you don't need a disk.

 

[adk highlander]

Thanks. Terminator Salvation is in my stack to rip tonight so I'll check tomorrow to see what the Clown BD version looks like but I'll remember to keep the full rip in case it keeps the added material.

 

[istar]

chassis review

Hi,

I see you have a nice setup there from one of our product,
My name is Kevin Liang represent from ISTARUSA

I am wondering if you would like to do this chassis review for us or success story

Looking forward to hear from you
Please let me know,


Thanks

Kevin Liang
kevinl@istarusa.com

Ok it looks like I have all my parts to start my build. I want to thank krzywica for all his help on my hardware selections (even though I changed a couple last minute)

I have been needing extra storage for my music for a while but wanted to add a way to store all my movies if I was going to take the plunge. I kicked around the idea of a little Windows Home Server device with not video card that was a NAS on steroids but I would still have to rip my movies on a separate machine and it did not have the storage size or redundancy I was looking for.

So after seeing krzywica and warps servers (not even going to mention that behemoth that AcudefTechguy calls a NAS) and thought that was the route I wanted to go. I will still have to get the C-200 popcorn hours to use as a front end but I figure I have a little time to build this and rip all my stuff.

I do IS work during my day job so I had hoped to use some spare parts around the office to keep the price down. That was a failure. After all was said and done the only parts I was able to use were the Core Duo 1.8ghz processor and 4GB of RAM.

Specs:

Intel Core Duo 1.8ghz
4GB RAM
3 - 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Drives (4th to be added soon)
RocketRaid 2710 PCI-Express 2.0 x8 SATA Controller Card RAID 5
Intel MOBO
iStarUSA 4u rackmount server case
ASUS Blu-ray drive
Windows Server 2003

I am planning on ripping everything to MKV files to be organized by YAMJ.

Any of you that have one of these please let me know anything you did that you should not have or pointers for what formats you use for your ripped media. For my music I still plan to use my Fireball for a front end for now and see where things go in the future.

 

[DevinMariah]

Try Macgo

I always use Macgo Blu-ray player to deal with my Blu-ray discs even the latest I bought. What's more, the Mac version could even read the original Blu-ray menu.

 

[D'prived]

I checked out the Dune stuff as well and while Zappiti is a nice easy to use tool it doesn't have the community development or tweakability of YAMJ. The Popcorn Hour 200 series has come a LONG way since its inception and 99% of the bugs are fixed. If you want to save some money check out the C-200's and YAMJ, I know your a Crestron programmer so I'm sure you won't have issues with the configuration aspect. It really is hard to explain how good looking and easy to use this setup is unless you see it in person.

I've have a Popcorn Hour C-200 running YAMJ for about three years now. I decided to get a Zappiti Dune HD player to try out. I did not like the Zappiti player interface and use YADIS which is similar to YAMJ but also has its own built in editor. After all was said and done I liked the Popcorn Hour/YAMJ best.