How to Build a DVD Server

The Hardware

Up until now I'd been doing all my MainLobby testing on an old Dell SFF desktop that I'd picked up on fleabay for cheap. It was fairly quiet and handled DVDs without any hiccups, but with only a P4 inside it didn't really cut the mustard for playing High-Definition material. Sure, it would play HD files that were transcoded to something else, such as the ever popular Matroska MKV container, but that required hours of processor time for each film, something which I wasn't overly keen on.

Thankfully, the birthday fairy came up trumps, and I found myself the proud owner of a dual-core Atom-based ION motherboard. The ION motherboards are perfect for film playback, as not only are they quiet, they're capable of hardware PureVideoHD-based decoding of High-Definition content.

I went for a cheap 16GB SSD for the operating system and software- it's fast enough for my purposes, since the bulk of the storage work is being handled by the unRAID server. I also added a 250GB WD Green hard drive for temporary storage while ripping films, and I then put the whole lot in an Antec NSK2480 HTPC case. A Blu-ray drive rounds out the system nicely and allows me to rip and play Blu-ray movies without any hiccups.


The ION board runs so cool that, even when playing HD content, I was able to disconnect one of the case's two fans making the system whisper quiet. I use the motherboard's HDMI port to output both video and pass-through audio to my AV amp and I now have a seamless film browsing experience.

Conclusion

So, was it really worth all the time and effort – do I really have a Kaleidescape killer on my hands? Actually, yes, I probably do. It's not as flash as a Kaleidescape system – there are none of the flashy page transitions, and I have yet to add things like browsing by genre. But that's the beauty of the Cinemar system: I'm not limited to somebody else's design. If I decide somewhere along the line that I want to change or add something to the system, then I can do it.

There are still a few glitches to iron out – for example, PowerDVD insists on automatically displaying subtitles on every film, I need a better way of automatically looking up film details and I'm still looking for a way of automating the ripping process for BluRay movies onto the unRAID server – but even so, it works much better than I could have hoped.

Even more importantly, it passes the WAF – the Wife Acceptance Factor - possibly the most stringent test any gadget has to pass to succeed. It does it so well, in fact, that my wife keeps suggesting that we watch a film because she keeps seeing films that she's forgotten that we own. I'd say that just for that alone, all of the money and time spent on my DVD server was entirely worth it!