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

Well it all depends.

[SmallFurryCreature]

I have gone the cheapo method.

A dual P3 (second hand) fitted with cheap promise ata cards. Let linux combine them into raids and you got pretty cheap storage for home use. Sure the speed is not going to win any benchmarks but for home use who cares?

Only problem is that you can have a max of 3 promise cards. So that limits you to 16 discs.

Of course if you are an american you can now get pretty cheap 200gig drives. So that gives you a lot of storage even with raid5.

Maybe the problem isn't storage space....

[phamlen]

My suggestion: watch less TV.

If you don't have time to watch it within the first week, are you ever really going to watch it? I think you're trying to create the modern equivalent of the "dusty box of old videotapes that I meant to watch one day".

Re:Maybe the problem isn't storage space....

[NanoGator]

"If you don't have time to watch it within the first week, are you ever really going to watch it?"

Obviously you've never done the "oo I got a day off" M*A*S*H marathon.

I hate problems like this. The guy wants a problem solved, not a reason not to solve it. If he wants to build a library, let him do it. Frankly, I wish this technology had been around a few years ago. Shows come and go. It's damn near impossible to find the majority of Mystery Science Theater episodes that aired on Comedy Central. That's why the Digital Archive Project is up and running. They don't want that show to die just because Comedy Central wouldn't renew it.

Me personally?

[NanoGator]

I'd use stronger compression. MPEG2 for broadcast is a hog compared to DivX and other MPEG4 related codecs.

If I were out to archive TV, then I'd look at two approaches.

1.) Use a PC instead of a TiVO with a program like Snapstream to capture and encode the video using DivX in real time. You can get 1.5 hours per CD, and I think 9-10 hours per DVD. If you drop the resolution to 320 by 240, you'll do even better. There's a little suffering in quality, but trust me when I say you won't notice once the show starts. Now you only need a fraction of a terabyte.

2.) Similar to step one, only use the TiVO (or a Replay with a network out) to capture the shows and transcode it into MPEG 4. The quality will be better than the previous approach, but you'll encode the same video twice. Personally, I don't think it's that big of deal.

There are considerations here, though.

- Playback of DivX files to TV is *almost* there but not quite. (makes you ache for a cracked XBOX, doesn't it?) On the flip side, though, these shows will easily travel to your laptop and PCs. I've done this before, and it was DAMN COOL to have several episodes of Quantum Leap to watch when I went on a 5 day business trip.

- Video quality probably won't be as good as captured with the TiVO. It has superior capture nad playback equipment. I can't help you there, but I can tell you that you won't notice after a while. I have a bunch of QL eps recorded at a strained bitrate, and they all came out wonderful. At first glance it's blocky, but once you're immersed, it just isn't noticed anymore.

- I don't think this would be ideal for home movie capture. For that, I recommend a digital video camera with firewire.

- Step 2 involves automation and extra processing. You might feel that after a while.

Personally, I'd rather go this route at the sacrifice of some quality than to try to get a terabyte of storage going. With 250 gig drives floating around, it's not all that challenging or expensive to do, but that is a backup nightmare.

Maybe you should get a life

[fm6]

So a guy collects stuff you consider useless. So what? I own too many books, I know an otherwise sane lady who owns way too many shoes. Maybe we all need to cut back, but I don't think any of us are ignorant of that possibility.

If we start a conversation based on "how do I organize all my crap", butting in with a lecture on the crappiness of crap is arrogant and offtopic.

I'm assuming, of course, that you don't have any little vices that you prefer to cope with rather than simply get rid of. Or am I mistaken?

Get a media database

[Kris_J]

Inconvenient if you're trying to find which of 10 DVDs you put that episode of Futurama on

You don't need more on-line storage, you need a decent indexing program.