Quoting Dr. Killpatient:

Quote:
From what I've seen OnDemand is highly compressed.  Poor quality.

At the moment, in the US, probably.  I'm in the UK so haven't seen it there.  There have been trials here, and it's available, but it's early days yet.

Andy - sounds very interesting.  There are some good dedicated media streamers out there, but unless you're prepared to spend lots of money, they all drop into the file system to select the movie (from what I've seen).

EDIT : if HDD space is at a premium, has anybody looked into any of the USB carousels out there?  Some of them are media focussed, can hold 150 discs and you can hub up 127 off one machine.  The first one I found (very quick search) was £81 here in the UK.

Quoting Cessquill:

Quote:
Quoting Dr. Killpatient:

Quote:
From what I've seen OnDemand is highly compressed.  Poor quality.

At the moment, in the US, probably.  I'm in the UK so haven't seen it there.  There have been trials here, and it's available, but it's early days yet.

Andy - sounds very interesting.  There are some good dedicated media streamers out there, but unless you're prepared to spend lots of money, they all drop into the file system to select the movie (from what I've seen).

EDIT : if HDD space is at a premium, has anybody looked into any of the USB carousels out there?  Some of them are media focussed, can hold 150 discs and you can hub up 127 off one machine.  The first one I found (very quick search) was £81 here in the UK.

Funny you should bring that up. DVDProfiler has an excellent plugin (ahem ...) called LoadDVD that will control several brands of media changers, including Dacal-style 150 disk USB changers and the Sony 200 disc VAIO changer. Oh yeah ...

(BTW, I have three of the Sony VAIO changers - one on the family HTPC and two for myself. When my wife want to watch a DVD, she pulls up DVDPro and clicks on the icon, and "bam", there it is ...).

Another edit: in the same price / disc league iis the 400 disc Sony CX995V with HDMI output - gorgeous picture and sound, just over $300 on Amazon. Now that I have one, LoadDVD support will be forthcoming.

Quoting Dr. Killpatient:

Quote:
I saw the CX995V at CircuitCity yesterday and ended up ignoring it because it had no means of a computer interface.  Would your control be using something like a USBIRT?

Yes. I bought the USBUIRT long ago, found some code on the net for capturing IR codes from the remote, and the USBIRT author gave me all the code I need for the guts of the plugin. Also, one of our DVDPro buddies who helped me debug the USB carousel code was kind enough to share the command sequence that he uses to select a specific DVD from his CX995V (programmed into his Harmony). Now all I need to do is get up off my butt and write the code!

By the way, the more expensive precursor to the CX995V, the CX777ES, does have RS232 control. It does not have HDMI, but I have heard that it is very fine. You can get refurbished ones from Sony for about $600 (!). There is actually untested code in LoadDVD that uses the same RS232 interface module that XLobby uses (public free code). But so far, nobody has given it a shot - or at least they haven't said so.

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:
I calculate to move my current collection to HDD would require somwhere around 30-50TB...that's just movies, no operating system or any other software.

If you figure the hard disk space is going for about .20/GB, then add an average of $1.20 for each DVD you have.  That's a chunk of change, even for a large collection.  You can cut this down if you want through compression, I choose not to do so.  There's some fixed cost on top of the cost of disks as well.  We've been through this before.  It might not be a choice that you're make personally, but it's totally viable to those of us with enough disposable income to build any sizable collection to begin with.

Quote:

This would also require me to look to some form of off site backup to give myself maximum protection. Hmmmm, I wonder just how long it would take to upload a 50TB file to one of backup companies that are out there on the web.

I'm confused as to why you think you need off-site backup.  What do you use to provide off-site redundancy of your collection today?  I'm guessing you don't have any.  With DVDs sotred to hard drives, you can take the originals and lock them in a fireproof vault someplace deep underground if you're worried about fire damage or theft.