Do You Need More Space for Your Media Needs?

ewanrg asks: "I have about 1/2 Terabyte of storage on my couple of home systems, and it's filling up rapidly with captured Home Videos and shows recorded off my TiVO. I'm thinking that if I want to get through the next season of TV and the Holiday season at home I need to add at least a Terabyte of storage. My first thought was to use DVD-R (since I have a burner). However, if you assume that you use about 4.4 Gigs (in real terms) per DVD-R, then you'd need 230 DV-Rs to hold about a terabyte of data. Inconvenient if you're trying to find which of 10 DVDs you put that episode of Futurama on - particularly if you recorded them as they came (over a few years) rather than wait until you could get them every night on Cartoon Network. I've also looked at the various NAS devices out there, but $8-$20K seems a bit much. What I'd really like would be an inexpensive drive or array I could hook up to my PC which has a S-Video out port. I could then use all sorts of Media Library programs to find a file and play it. Can folks suggest something big and reasonably fast with an affordable prosumer price tag?"

Comments

Build your own

[Tyrdium]

Pricewatch lists 160 gig drives as costing about $100. Assuming they cost $125 (including shipping, and not from the lowest priced place), 7 drives, giving you 1120 gigs of storage space, would cost you $875. Add in some decent hardware for a file server, and you're looking at $1250-$1500. Compared to prices for NAS drives, etc., this would probably be your most economical option, not to mention the most versatile (you could also use it as a web server, etc.). Heck, stick in a decent PCI TV tuner and you've got an uber-TiVo!

Look at firewire direct

[FattMattP]

I was in the same position as you. Look at the drive systems from FireWire Direct. I got one of those HSB Series with two 250GB drives and it works great. It was a little over $1100 with shipping. They make them up to 2TB and you can order online.

try these (should be obvious, but what the hey)

[Anonymous Coward]

-retain shows on the hard drive until you have enough episodes of a single show to put on one DVD. Then burn the episodes onto a single DVD, labeling the DVD with somehting like "South Park - Episodes 35-47 Sept 2003 - Jan 2004"

-Number your DVDs. Then keep a listing what's on each disk. If you're really 1337, create a small searchable database on your computer, complete with episode information.

-Dont record everything at top quality. Cartoony shows like the Simpsons or Futurama will take less space being recorded at medium quality, and that lesser quality is less noticeable. If loss-less compresion is available, use it. (Do any DVRs have loss-less available?)

Silicon Mechanics

[MSG]

You might be able to find a less expensive option from Silicon Mechanics:

http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

Specifically:

http://www.siliconmechanics.com/c221/storage-ser ve r.php

You might even be able to order just the chassis, controller, and disks... but you'll have to figure that out on your own. We buy all of our stuff from them.

TiVo - Transcode TySteam to MPEG2 - DiVX5

[delus10n0]

That's the process I'm currently using. I've installed a network card (via 9thtee.com) in my TiVo and installed TiVoWeb on it. I also changed the "best quality" resolution to be 720x480 (instead of the default 480x480) -- I use TyTool to extract the shows onto my PC as TyStreams or MPEG2 files, and then use AVISynth scripts to crop/deinterlace them. After that I load them up into VirtualDub-Mod and cut out commercials, add the audio track, and set up a queue job to encode two passes out to DiVX AVI. I use 1250kbps for "TV Shows" and 2150kbps for "Music Videos" and higher motion stuff. For audio I use LAME --alt-preset 96 which outputs ABR 96kbps files. A 15 minute show ends up around 100megabytes. Not that bad.

Deinterlacing television is a pain, and I think that's why a lot of people go down the MPEG2/SVCD route (it handles interlacing natively.) I've found three solutions for AVISynth that are pretty decent:

1) Using SmoothDeinterlacer (visit www.100fps.com for more info on that)

2) Using DeComb - http://www.neuron2.net/decomb/decombnew.html

3) Using DGBob - http://www.neuron2.net/dgbob/dgbob.html

Anyhow, let me know if anyone needs help. I'm going to write a guide on this soon and put up a website detailing my steps.