Designing Windows Based Home Media – Part I

Part I

For some time I’ve been dabbling with pc based home media. When I started, I had a pretty good library of mp3 files collected over the years, mostly pre-Napster days – downloaded file by file at 56K when ‘time’ was cheap. I also have a few racks of DVD’s, and a CD collection from high school that was once my pride and joy. Now thick with dust, cases broken, disks mostly missing. I also play guitar in a contemporary Christian band and learn most songs by listening to it over and over, picking up the basic structure and working out the details. Fundamentally, my media needs include music for enjoyment, music for entertainment, learning music, access to a library of digital photos, and watching movies.

My entry point was a couple years ago when I purchased an HP Entertainment Center. Basically a PC in a chassis that looks like an audio component so it could go in your rack, and has all the peripherals you need to get you rolling from the start. HDMI & DVI video, Dual TV tuners, Optical Audio, and a Remote control are the fundamentals. It has and internal 300gb drive, and a secondary 300 gb drive that inserts into the chassis, but can be removed and connected via USB to another PC. To get the ball rolling, I set up in my living room with a 20″ flatscreen setup by my couch. I connected the LCD on my wall as a secondary monitor. Now I could work on the PC, browse the internet as if it were a workstation, and throw slideshows, movies, etc. up on the wall for everyone to see. Cool! I then started moving media onto the 600 gb I had access to. The audio library went first, then, 15 years worth of digital family pictures. Pretty straight forward and smooth.

Next, I went after TV. I have satellite service from Dish Network, digital DVR with all the goodies. The only advantage to running through the media center was to centralize everything, and not have to switch video inputs on the TV. After fighting with the inputs, guide, etc for a few days, I did finally get it to work. The obstacle being that I could only render the native signal. That meant that a TV show that was not formatted widescreen could not be ‘stretched’ as my satellite receiver did so nicely. Instead of Black Bars on the top/bottom like most people complain to me about, I had black bars on the sides. Now it was my turn to complain! I decided that, for the time being, we were going back to the Dish equipment (oh yeah, I never got the guide figured out either).

In the meantime, I had played a couple DVD movies through the tray and thought that it would be really cool to dial-up a movie on the system, like I could with music. I started copying (ripping) DVD’s onto the system. This was an investment of about 60 minutes and 4-5gb per movie. After a few weeks, I had about 70 movies in the library and was starting to realize that 600gb may not be the infinite storage area I thought it was!

Base Camp 1 – Climbing the mountain of integrated home media, we have packed our gear and started up; the weather is good, but the peak is nowhere in site. At this point, I could sit in my living room and watch a movie, listen to music, put on slideshows of old pics, and even throw some ‘mood’ music behind it. I thought I was pretty awesome and proved it by putting on vacation recap of a trip to Lake Mead and to Jamaica for friends and family!

About this time, my wife and kids started wanting to use the system, and my design limitations started showing. Working in IT, I would never let a 15 year old on a system with Admin access. I started creating user accounts and my first flaw came to light. All my data was stored in My Music, My Video, and My Pictures. I had no access to the files from the new profiles. I discovered that the media center had predefined shares for Shared Music, etc. I moved all the data to these locations, and was able to access the data from any account I created. Simple, except now I have teenagers and a computer illiterate wife playing with my new toy – (oh yeah, that was the whole idea!) In summary, at this point I had invested $800 for a refurbished HP Entertainment Center from Amazon, a 20″ flatscreen for $120, and a 32″ flatscreen for $800. Getting setup and building the core data library took 4-6 weeks of my spare time. My data was a blend of legitimately purchased DVD’s and CD’s, Digital Photo’s, and mp3′s of questionable origin. I also pay monthly for TV and Internet service.

Advertisement