Help! - home media

[benjo37]

Hi, I'm having a bit of a problem getting answers to the below query and am really hoping to find someone who knows what they're talking about and can give me some sound, step by step guidance on what I need to do.

The main problem is I am not very tech-savvy and don't really know what I'm talking about myself so I live in hope that someone will get it.

I'm trying to get as close as possible to creating an all-in-one media centre. The final result I want is similar in effect to what you get from a film / music streaming service except that it belongs to me. For instance, I have been a member of Sony Entertainment Network and Amazon Prime, however, when you purchase movies / music through these services they remain in the cloud (or whatever) and you have to sign in on different devices, wherever you may be, to access them. I have an ideological problem with this. When I buy something I want it 'in my hand' (even if that is in the form of a portable hard drive) where access is not limited by constraints imposed by a particular service provider.

I want to be able to access my film / music collection in a format that can provide graphics / titles and can be flicked through with a remote control and categorised in different ways e.g. alphabetically, by genre, etc.

Taking some advice from an online forum, I downloaded a dvd rip programme and copied a movie and cover art into the same folder, expecting the art to appear when I selected the film on my hard drive but this did not work.

With regard to music, I make a lot of compilation albums. I want to be able to save my music in groups of songs (not just have one massive list of songs on a hard drive) and 'fence them off' so one group of songs does not just lead into the next but starts and stops at a particular place, giving a similar effect as playing a CD - a playlist like you would make for a party but it's a static playlist that you don't have to find the songs for and select every time you want to listen to it - they are permanently selected. I then want to apply album art to each group of songs so that they appear on my tv screen and can be browsed and selected, as per the movies, descrdibed previously.

In this way, I effectively have all my entertainment in one place and easily accessible.

Most of my films are in DVD format. If I could, I would only purchase films online and then download them to my hard drive, like I do with music mp3 files. However, I have not found anywhere that provides this service. My plan is to upgrade the DVD collection I've got to Blu Ray and rip them onto my hard drive to make them accessible digitally. I would rather not do this as it will mean I have hundreds of original DVD's / Blu Rays collecting dust under my bed after I've transferred them all to my hard drive. If you know of a way that films can be purchased online for you to download and keep 100% like an mp3 music file, I'll be very grateful to hear.

I need to know whether all this is actually possible and, if so, ideas about the kind of hardware / software I need to achieve this. My PC is quite far from my TV so anything I do will preferably not rely on this. If it's not possible, tell me so I can call off the search! I understand there is something called XBMC which might come close to achiveing this but don't know anything about it.

Many thanks for any help you can provide.

 

[cheeseboy]

ok, to start off basic, there's a couple of things you will need.

Firstly is the playback device. To be honest, I always sing it's praises, but Kodi (what was XBMC) is pretty much the dogs danglies. It will give you the flexibility you are after. I think the only thing it might struggle with is the tailored playlist/music bit, but i don't use it for music, so maybe try thr kodi forums on that one they may be able to help you.

Kodi can run on a lot of devices, from a raspberry pi to full fat pc. depending on how swanky you want things to look will depend on what kind of device you use to play it back. Kodi will however run off and get all the art work and stuff for you, so you only need to worry about ripping the dvd's/cd's. The easiest one for dvd's I think is make mkv as it will make the dvd into a single file for you - much easier for cataloguing etc.

The next thing to think about is storage. It's possible that you might want the storage with the player (so a couple of big hard drives stuffed in the pc for example) or you might want to farm that off to a NAS, which is a box which sits on your home network and serves the files to whatever client (kodi pc, smartphone tablet etc).

Once you've done all that it's mainly down to tweaking and maing things look and behave how you want them to.

Lastly I guess is cost. How much do you have to spend. This will be a big factor in what options are available to you.

Have a quick look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ql1YIaMRs it's a demo of Kodi running the Eminence skin (what I use). It should give you an idea of what you can expect and if it's something you want to investigate more.

 

[benjo37]

Thank you! In answer to how much I'm spending, it will be in direct relation to how far the technology is able to achieve what I'm setting out to do. If I can get something to do it all, I'll be more likely to spend more, if I'm having to 'make do' then perhaps not so much. I wasn't clear from what you said about how my PC / Kodi relate to the network as a whole. Do you run Kodi on your PC or is it something you can run through NAS? Having a box under my TV will be useful as my PC is nowhere near my TV so if I can avoid having to run things through it, I will. And before we go any further, you'd probably better tell me what NAS is...