DarrenW
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:14 AM |
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CD / DVD storage
The kids are driving me mad by leaving DVD's etc out of their boxes and the resultant damage. Im thinking of putting all their discs into a soft
case and the original boxes up in the loft (this will also solve issue of finding somewher to store them all in our next small house). Ive done this
with some so im threatening to lock them all away for 2 days at a time if they carry on mis-handling them (and also other toys etc they dont put away
which keep getting damaged).
So, just thought id ask what you do to store CD's / DVD's in a convenient / compact way. The softcases dont seem to last too long before
they fall apart, any other cheap storage solutions?
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tegwin
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:16 AM |
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Have you thought about going one step firther and moving all your dvds/videos onto a media PC/storage box....that way you have no physical objects
atall!...
Can be done relativley cheaply if you have a bit of locobuilders spirit
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Would the last person who leaves the country please switch off the lights and close the door!
www.verticalhorizonsmedia.tv
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DarrenW
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:31 AM |
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I sort of have but sitting converting the discs etc doesnt appeal to me. Its took 6 months to put some CD's into i-tunes. Also kids have TV and
DVD player in their room and also in the car so having a portable holder works well - apart from needing to teach them to put them away before getting
next one out.
Kids are only young so dont really understand.
Explain further how you would do a locost media box? Im interested to know more.
[Edited on 18/4/08 by DarrenW]
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andyd
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:34 AM |
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Do you have an XBox at all? If so you can do as tegwin has said, rip the CD's/DVD's to a PC and stream the video signal via the XBox to
the TV.
Does take time to rip the films/music etc but they'd all be instantly (more or less) accessible at all times with no physical media problems.
Personally I'd buy a network storage device i.e. a hard drive with no PC connected via a network like
this one. It can store up to 1 terrabyte (that's 1024 gigbytes) and is
pretty good value from PC World at the moment.
The lower cost alternative is to use one of those folders with the plastic sleeves but as you say they are prone to ripping etc.
Andy
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tegwin
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:44 AM |
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You can get dedicated boxes that have a VCR player in them, a DVD play/rewrite and a hard disk...
Its an ok machine, but will only play in once place....
The locost option would be to get a PC with a big hard disk and a decent graphics card and set it up like a server. There are several programs that
can take the dvds and other media and convert it to either a video format or into flash and then store them in a searchable database...
It takes time to get the media into it, but once its there you can then stream the media....
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Would the last person who leaves the country please switch off the lights and close the door!
www.verticalhorizonsmedia.tv
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Bluemoon
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:48 AM |
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One of these?
dvd
jukebox
locked in a cupboard?
Dan
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DarrenW
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:59 AM |
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Some good techy ideas here but im going to use the simple folders. One for kids, one for me.
I actually bought myself one a while back. I put some of the family discs in there to keep them safe (you know the ones - priceless kids birthdays,
holidays, christmasses etc). This week ive caught the kids with it, empty folders with their discs in and 2 of the priceless discs on the car floor
being kicked about! Not happy in the least. Hence my new 'lock away for 2 days' rule im bringing in. You still have to love the kds
though, eldest one (nearly 6) has asked me where ill be locking them away to!! I wonder what she was thinking of.
Biggest challenge is getting my wife to enforce the 'putting things away in their place' rule while im at work. She is the biggest
culprit. Im sure housework means scoop everything up and hide away in closest convenient place. Nothing is ever in the same place twice in our house.
Drives me nuts. Paperwork is the biggest bug bear....... rant over
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tegwin
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 09:59 AM |
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Nagh...I have a toshiba thingamajig...using it at work to convert all the VCrs to DVD and then move them onto the SAN (Storage area network)...
Cost us £160ish...which is why we bought it..nice and cheap LOL!
There are quite a few PVR (Personal video recorders) out there that are basically like a set top box with a hdd in....
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Would the last person who leaves the country please switch off the lights and close the door!
www.verticalhorizonsmedia.tv
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RazMan
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 10:04 AM |
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My son used to have one of those Jukeboxes (CD version), in fact he had two in tandem so he could catalogue his 800+ CD collection.
Personally O think the media-pc is the way to go. You also have the advantage of being able to 'borrow' stuff from other sources and bung
them in too. A terrabyte system should be able to store a few hundred DVDs in their ripped form but if they are reduced to AVI size then they are less
than 700Mb each.
p.s. Has anyone got any media-pc building links?
Cheers,
Raz
When thinking outside the box doesn't work any more, it's time to build a new box
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eznfrank
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 12:26 PM |
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Hide them all away and open some kind of "Dad's video/dvd library" - give them 50p at the start of a week and allow them to rent
films off you at 10p a time but insist they only have one at a time and return then within 24 hours? or something like that?
[Edited on 18/4/08 by eznfrank]
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trogdor
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 01:02 PM |
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this reminds me of when i was little, we had a record player in our room and were always using dads records, some of them were very expensive. The
sergeant peppers Beatles album for example.........
Dad only found out recently that we used to do this, he thought we only played our own, he was not amused.
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DarrenW
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| posted on 18/4/08 at 01:37 PM |
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quote:
Originally posted by eznfrank
Hide them all away and open some kind of "Dad's video/dvd library" - give them 50p at the start of a week and allow them to rent
films off you at 10p a time but insist they only have one at a time and return then within 24 hours? or something like that?
[Edited on 18/4/08 by eznfrank]
Now this i do like.
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rgr33n
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| posted on 21/4/08 at 08:37 PM |
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i've put all our music onto a media centre which runs across the hard wired network i installed in the house.
was goin to do the same with the dvd's but never bothered. i store all the cds and the dvds in the study on shelving from ikea (those screw
together media racks they sell)
i started on the soft case idea in my imprerza with mp3 dvd's, but just use an ipod these days (audio and video)
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ChrisW
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| posted on 22/4/08 at 02:01 AM |
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Personally I'd go the XBox route, and either modify it with a bigger disk or buy one of those storage units.
It doesn't take that long to store a DVD onto the hard disk - 10 mins or so I seem to remember. If you convert to divx (or similar) it will
take hours, but hard drive space is cheap (in relative terms) so you might as well copy the full ISOs and keep the quality the same.
Advantages are that everything is 'on demand', and you can have multiple XBoxes running the same DVD. You can also watch programs you
have downloaded via P2P or whatever on the TV. If you get yourself on a couple of the reputable invite-only torrent sites there is a wealth of UK and
US programming, films, and 'adult material' available for download. The big sites download stupidly quickly - I regularly see 40MBit/sec
with my laptop connected to my fibre connection, so you would easily max out even 24MBit ADSL. If you set up RSS too, and you essentially have an
on-demand TV system.
You can pick up an XBox from eBay for under £30 - look for one that comes with the DVD remote - and it will usually come with a handfull of games that
you can either stick back on eBay or take down your local Game Station (or similar) and trade in to offset the £30.
You either need a NAS box, such as this LINK which is 500GB and will
take 70-100 DVDs in full quality, or about 1000 hours of good quality DivX encoded material. You could instead just put a big HD in your PC and save
all the material on there, but it does mean the PC needs to be on whenever you want to watch a DVD, which kind of removes the whole 'video on
demand' concept.
I've set this up loads of times before, so if you need a hand with it, just ask!
Chris
[Edited on 4/22/2008 by ChrisW]
[Edited on 4/22/2008 by ChrisW]
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