Hi all -

I'd like to build a movie jukebox, by which I mean I am going to make a set top sized box with 200+gb or so of harddrive space and a DVD-r/w drive. I would then like to be able to drop in DVDs (that I own) and transcode them to high quality MPEG4 files for easy later playback.

Other features I want to add are writing saved movies to DVD-R and also playback of video downloaded from the 'net, preferably via the torrentacracy plugin. I've got no real interest in TV recording (I've got a TiVo, and most TV is junk anyways).

I may setup an automated sequence to copy stuff from the TiVo to the 'movie jukebox' for the few things I do watch, but that's low on the list.

Anyways, I wanted to know if KnoppMyth or another MythTV build would work for what I want to do? Any advice on how to start this and for hardware requirements? Is there any chance something like an XBox would work for this?

Thanks in advance,
Rob

I used the information at this link to do it.

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/85254

then I modified the playiso to allow me to play either the dvd iso's or normal movies from the movie list

#!/bin/bash
# iso file is parameter so use "playvid %s " as mythtv play command
mountdir="/cdrom/"

ext=${1:(-3)}
if [ "$ext" = "iso" ]; then
sudo mount -o loop -t udf $1 $mountdir
xine -pfhq --no-splash dvd://$mountdir
sudo umount $mountdir
else
/usr/local/bin/mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -vo xv "$1"
fi

I suppose that I could use xine for everything, but mplayer starts so much faster and supports more media types.

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bit of forum humor I see. anything that looks like obfuscated code is turned into an emoticon! Well I could leave you to guess what the proper characters are by which emoticon was picked but it's supposed to be a colon followed by a left parenthesis.
: (

_________________
FRONTEND 1 - R5A16, Athlon 3000+, NVidia Motherboard, SB live, GeForce 5200, AA 9A60
FRONTEND 2 - R5A16, Athlon 2500+, Nvidia Motherboard, SB Live, GeForce 440MX, TV-OUT
BACKEND - R5A16, Althon 1700+, Nvidia MB, 2- HD3000's, 450GB LVM partition

That's what the "code" markup is for. e.g. -


Go to your posting, click on the edit button, hilight the code section with your mouse, click the "Code" button, and hit submit again. No translation is done on code so you'll see this: rather than this:

I'm also interested in a DVD jukebox, but I'm torn between transcoding to xvid or copying the DVDs to ISO images. I like the ISO image because it retains the menus and extras. But my experiments with transcoding shows I can save about 2/3 of the movie's size by discarding that stuff and transcoding. I think the extra time taken by transcoding is pushing me toward ISOs -- it takes longer to transcode the DVD than it does to watch it.

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Well, for me a jukebox would only be usefull if it could hold a couple hundred movies at least. I have about 110-120 or so DVDs right now, and I would want to be able to double that at least. You can get pretty good quality at 1gb for a 2 hour movie with DiVX, so a 250gb HD would suffice and leave plenty of room for expansion.

Transcoding time is an issue, but using 1-pass encoding along with 500-600 megs/hour and a fairly quick PC you can do a 2 hour movie in under 3 hours, which isn't aweful.

Also could do MPEG2 transcode down to about 1-1.25gigs/hour in about 30-40 minutes for a two hour movie, but the quality isn't as good.

As far as doing full ISO rips to keep the menus and special features, I only usually watch the extras once, and then I would rather be able to just start the movie without dealing with menusa nd stuff.

I've been looking into it more and it seems like MythTV might be overkill for what I want to do... Using (as much as I hate to say it) Windows and creating some sort of autolaunch script for easy DVD transcode with something like SimpleDiVX and a custom made menuing system (would be easy to do a nice looking menu with HTML, CSS, a little javascipt, and it would let you control it from other PCs on the network as well) might be the way to go for this.