I have been looking for a solution for my home media for some time now. I got into the DVD revolution early, and amassed over 600 titles that I have been storing in DVD jukeboxes for years. The jukes work, but you sort of have to know what you’re doing, or else they can get into sketchy states. Kristi has always hated them, so the DVDs went largely unwatched.
With the rise of cheap terabyte-class hard drives, I have been thinking that ripping the DVD collection into some kind of online format would be better.
I have been slowly working my way through the collection, but since each disk takes about 10 hours to rip and burn, it’s a decidedly slow process. I’ll get there eventually.
The other problem, though, is what to do with the movies once they’re ripped. Using a mouse and keyboard is only going to put them farther out of reach.
A couple years ago, I bought a Mac mini, with the hope that I’d be able to turn it into a media center PC. It has a lot going for it: DVI video output, optical audio output, excellent network connectivity, and it can even be controlled with an IR remote!
The Mac comes with Front Row, which can grab files out of the iTunes Library and display them using the remote. The problem is that my movies were ripped into MKV, which is not iTunes compatible. And anything that is downloaded form torrent (not that I would ever do that) is also probably not iTunes compatible. So I needed some kind of a solution that worked like FrontPage, but had the codecs that I needed in order to run a wider range of media files.
Enter XBMC.
It was originally called “XBox Media Center”, and was designed to run on Xbox or Xbox 360 and turn them into media center PCs. It is open-source, and free, and has been ported to Windows, OSX, and Linux (as well as iPad, Apple TV, and others). There are various skins for it that make it look and feel like Xbox, like Front Row, or like a dozen other things.
And it’s easy.
Download the .dmg, install, run it, and point it at the proper folders, and you’ve got movies available with an IR remote interface. It knows how to grab movies across the LAN (via SMB or other methods). It goes and downloads metadata for the movies, including poster, plot synopsis, and release data. It even creates filters by genre and actors so that you can decide “I want to watch a John Cusack movie” and there they are.
Sure, there needs to be a little cleanup in the filenames and things in my media folder. And of course, I need the other 550 movies and TV shows to become available on HDD.
But I have a solution for HTPC now. And it just … works.
Very cool.