Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Media player discussion (moved from 861v6 thread)

I believe you, honestly. I may be fine too. We know good things won't last if we do.

I have roughly 800 DVDs. Since I only watch a couple of movies a week, I don't mind putting a disc in the player. Keeping discs I watch at most once or twice a year, if that often, on a constantly spinning multi-terabyte server with RAID backup makes no sense to me. To each his own.

With a dune you just hook up a hdd and get a screen full of bitmaps.
It is a bit a problem keeping track of all the hdd's and which movie is on what hdd though. I use a excel file..

Or use a standard NFS NAS and be done with the diskswapping

MyMovies also released an iPhone app called MyMovies Lite, this keeps all your movies handily browsable on The iPad. When the paid version arrives I bet you can watch trailers and it will use the native iPad resolution.

If/when Dune gets http control you could potentially start your movies from the iPad MyMovies interface..

Only time will tell, but it doesn't look too far off now, maybe this year

That dune is real impressive.

i did not see affordable 30 TB+ NAS yet. Also the power consumption is too much to have it all on-line.

When I bought my 8 1TB disks the cost of them were twice of the cost Hitachi 2TB disks are today. In other words if I bought them today I would get 32TB. I would need a slightly larger raid controller 16 ports but not much price difference. A proper case, something like this. I put in a 24port internal card to be able to expand into all 20 slots in the chassis:

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=RPC-4220
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/Controllers/Hardware/sas/performance/SAS-52445/
http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/products/deskstar/7K2000/

Every RAID5 will contain 8 disks, not more to preserve performance and reliability. When the server is fully loaded it will have 3 RAID5 of 8+6+6 disks. BTW something like this will probably be my next NFS NAS server..

Now about power, when the disks are not in use the RAID card will allow them to power down..

Crion - That's a good solution. Do you find that you get sufficient bandwidth to stream blu-ray rips? Please can you tell us what you're using for your network switch (sorry if this is mentioned earlier). Were you able to stream successfully with this set-up and your older TIVX?

Cheers
Tom

Im running a Linksys wrt 610n for my router and a linksys 16 port gigabit switch and I have had no problem. Recently Ive gone with HP Pro Curve switches when Ive needed a new switch and they work great. I have had zero bandwidth issues. My network is all cat5e cables.

Hi Jerry - That's excellent - I'm using D-lInk gigabit switches with CAT 5 and a TVIX - I get lots of problems which are resolved by using an external hard drive. I wonder if it's my network or the player or PC?

Cheers
Tom

Anyone thinking of purchasing a switch for use in an environment where there is the possibility of bridging a network intentionally or not (ie a mixed wired and wireless network where there is the possibility of creating multiple routes between network devices) should consider a switch that supports stp (spanning tree protocol) to prevent network storms from crashing the network. Sonos and Apple Airport Express are two such devices where, in certain configurations, I have witnessed storms due to a wired and wireless route being available between devices.

Switches that support STP are not standard specification so if the switch specs doesn't specifically say it supports stp then it is likely that it does not. STP is likely to be supported on managed or smart switches rather than unmanaged soho type switches.

I am currently evaluating a Netgear gs108t (not to be confused with the gs108 that does not support stp) and have found it to be nearly as plug and play as soho type unmanaged switches as long as it is used in a DHCP environment or it's subnet does not change frequently. I have yet to test it in a scenario where multiple routes may occur ie 2 Sonos players being physically connected to the same network which would simultaneously create a wired and wireless connection between the two zone players.

I concur with Ian, I used to use "prosumer" Dell switches that didn't support STP in my home LAN + Sonos, and after making changing in my Apple Time Capsule router (and forcing a reboot!) there would frequently be broadcast storms. I upgraded my switches to the new Dell switches that support STP, and it hasn't happened again.