It's been said before -- KnoppMyth ROCKS!

I just started putting my DVD collection into my R5F27 box, and I am SO impressed at the polish of KnoppMyth and the improvements in Myth in general. The DVDs just plain "rip" if you know what I mean! The playback quality is much improved over previous versions, and the pure ISO rips just look perfect.

The best parts is, IT JUST WORKS! After adding my favorite tropical fruit to the libraries (Pineapple, if you're searching), the system just works perfectly out of the box. The player configuration gets the right aspect ratio, the AC3 passthru passes through, etc. It all just works out of the box.

I have no desire to steal movies -- I want a convenient way to store and use 100 of my favorite DVDs, and this is the perfect solution. Now my stacks of DVD boxes can go into storage and I can reclaim all the space in my entertainment center! This is the original reason I became interested in MythTv, before I even realized it could record HDTV programs.

Thanks Cecil, Dale, and all the guys who make KM such a great distro!

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Joe -

What size of storage do you use? I am assuming you have at least 1 TB to hold all those movies.

Don't necessarily need a huge hard drive. If hes just ripping straight from the DVD's and not re encoding then ya a larger hard drive is needed. I have an extra 300gig hard drive in my box thats mounted to /myth/video. I backup my DVD's and then re encode them into xvid. Most of my backups end up at around 1-1.2 gig per movie and they look perfectly fine. I have all 70-75 of my DVDs backed up on my drive and I'm not even filling 1/3 of it.

I will have to give that a try with my machine. It would be nice to eliminate my kids dvd's and have them watch their DVD's that way. I am in the process of building a Slave Backend machine so that may be perfect to hold some videos (My current master backend machines case is maxed out with 2 drives).

Agreed. Now that the Internal (with a capital I) player is working well, it's SOOOO much nicer to play DVDs or images through Myth than to switch over to the regular DVD player (stand-alone box).

For those who haven't tried it - the skip forward/back, Play/Pause all work like they do when watching recorded TV. It's even got the same OSD. And of course, YOU have control over the playback, not the movie studio. No more "action prohibited by disc" garbage.

When I re-constructed my Myth box I gave it three disks:

Seagate 400G -- partition /
Seagate 750G -- partition /myth/tv
Seagate 750G -- partition /myth/video

This gives me approx. 100 movies stored as "ISO (perfect)", another 100 hours of HDTV recordings, and plenty of storage for MP3s, etc. I travel a bit and I work odd hours, so I sometimes don't get to watch TV for awhile. It helps to be able to record several weeks worth of shows for when I have some downtime and can relax.

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Do you back up your 750 gigs of shows somehow? Or is it not that important to you. I know my wife would go berserk if I lost Gray's Anatomy!

So would mine, but that's what torrents are for

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My family isn't very concerned with recordings, but the music, pictures and ripped DVDs would be an issue. I built another box with a matching set of HDs in it and rsync the media to that box each night. Not foolproof, but if I have a catastrophic failure in one system I can recover the data from the other. Not the most cost-effective solution either, but I learned my lesson after I lost a drive in an LVM before the "backup" solution was in place and had to spend another X hours re-ripping my wife's ~500 CD collection.

Just another option...

I just may be wrong on this, but I think 400G is just a little "overkill" for root isn't it Liv2Cod ??

Whats the smallest you can get away with for root these days?

It contains /home as well. If I were using it as a computer as well as media centre, I'd think this were a bit on the small side, actually

Mike

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Not to mention that larger disks are usually also faster ones. I had problems with my very old 80 GB drive (DMA was on), but when I swithed to 250GB, all the speed problems were gone.

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Jari-Matti

MBE&FE: GeForce MX440, Athlon XP 2000+, MSI KT333 Ultra, onboard audio, 512 MB, 2 x Technotrend T1500 DVB-T, LiteOn DVD±RW 16x DW1650-488C, Seagate 250 GB
FE: 1500MHz Geforce MX200-V, int. audio, 256MB

In my own defense... The 1T drives for $280 at Best Buy were not available when I made my choice... Else I probably would have had 3TB in my KM box!

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I run 10GB drives on my Frontends...

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LinHES 8.3, 1 BE, 3 FE