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Home media management requirements

I'm putting together a list of requirements for our home media system. We don't watch any live TV here -- no cable, satellite, roof antenna or even rabbit ears (yes, we're freaks). We do however like to watch movies and let the kids watch a video or two now and then. We also have a pretty big music collection, two iPods, two Mac laptops and a home stereo, and we all like to listen to music -- even (especially) the deaf one. In the hopes of getting some advice from the net, here's the list of requirements and tools:

Must Haves

  • Store all of the media on a central server -- both audio and video.
  • I would like to store some of the audio in a lossless format, perhaps transcoded on the fly if necessary. FLAC or some open format is preferred, though Apple Lossless is acceptable I suppose especially given an open source ALAC decoder. I estimate the entire audio library would be about 100GB in lossless format.
  • Video is currently a jumble of MPEG-4, DivX, AVI, etc. A reasonable set of codecs should be supported, though I don't mind converting things if need be.
  • Storing one and only one copy is not a requirement (storage is cheap), but one place needs to be the master, or at least the management procedures must be straightforward.
  • Play audio file on any of the home stereo, laptops or iPod; at least two simultaneous different streams
  • Manage the music collection on my Mac laptop.
  • Laptop accessible interface for playing music locally or on the stereo
  • Sync a couple of iPods from time to time with a compatible portion of the library
  • Play video on the TV
  • Play video on the laptops (though a copy / play routine is OK)

    • Nice To Haves

  • RSS feed / Podcast downloads of audio and video

    • Tools available

  • Linux server with plenty of disk, CPU, etc.
  • One relatively small and quiet PC (running Linux)
  • Slimp3 player
  • AirportExpress hub/audo bridge
  • 100-BT and 802.11g everywhere
  • A bit of time, some system administration knowledge, programming skills, and so on.

    • Discussion

    After some searching, I find that there are several systems available for managing media libraries on Linux. Unfortunately we use Mac's on a daily basis, and I've become use to the clean iTunes interface. I currently have tons of music ripped in a variety of MP3 and AAC formats managed with iTunes on Mac OS X. I'm OK with re-ripping the stuff I want to be lossless, but I'd like to just copy the rest of the data to wherever it needs to be. Since I use the Powerbook laptop every day, it seems to me that is 'has' to be the central management interface. Unfortunately that complicates the picture for lossless encoding, as 100GB is no problem for the server, but not practical on my laptop.

    There seem to be several solutions for streaming music, including the slimpserver software I already have running under Linux for the Slimp3. Unfortunately I don't really like to use the slimserver web interface -- especially for music management tasks. It is fine for finding some music or a playlist to play, but not much more (IMHO). There are many, many interfaces to the music player daemon, which can enable remote playing to the stereo via the server or via Icecast2 to the slimp3 player and computers.

    For video, I think a simple web interface will do -- freevo and MythTV look nice, but as I've said we don't need a PVR so they seem like overkill. Basic control (start / stop / fast-forward, select file, etc.) is all we need. VLC itself has a Web Interface and there is also other remote control options (such as via my Bluetooth phone or a Dashboard Widget.

    Intermediate Setup

    Here's what I'm currently thinking for audio: Continuing to use iTunes as my main music management interface. Use rsync to periodically keep the database of music on the server to match that on my laptop. Since it's the path of least resistance, I'll continue to use slimserver for playing music on the stereo and on the second (home-bound) laptop. Both iPods will sync from my laptop.

    For video, I'll move the small, quiet PC to the living room, and connect the video output to the TV, and run a remote VLC with a simple custom web interface (or existing free software that I might yet find). Eventually this same box could be made into the audio player too, using one of the soft slimserver clients.

    I'm especially interested in suggestions for achieving similar results with fewer parts and things to manage -- the whole project seems overly complex right now...

    Categories: music technology

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    Comments (2)

    David Mollerstuen on Tuesday 31 January, 2006:

    Uhhh ... isn't this the type of carefully qualified question that we asked on usenet ten years ago? And then didn't responses get propagated universally, and uniformly archived? So much for the new paradigm :->.

    You've got pretty extensive requirements for a family that hasn't had live TV in five years. Y'all are freaks. Best!

    Jason Culverhouse on Sunday 05 February, 2006:

    Why not just get an X-Box and load a copy of http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/ ?
    Digital audio and HD output, supports almost every media format out there, has a web interface, a remote control, and streams music from DAAP. you can also modify the whole thing with Python...

    The best part... when you are not using it for music/video your kids can play Grand Theft Auto.

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    This page last modified Tuesday 31 January, 2006 by David Creemer
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