Which Media Repository

[Target]

Howdy all,

I'm getting ready to set up a media repository, and after reading through the information on the website pertaining to the various options I'm still unsure. I currently have a medium sized music library of about 4000 songs in itunes. These are in a variety of different formats. I have a majority of the disks and would be willing to re-rip if necessary for the most robust solution. I'm also slightly interested in moving to a lossless format, so re ripping doesn't bother me at all.

For movies, I have a medium sized collection of ripped content stored on a 500Gig HDD and a 180Gig HDD. This is primarily MP4 content ripped by myself with an H.264 codec. There are some avi files.

For TV shows I have a large collection of several hundred television shows ranging across a plethora of formats with terrible metadata I'm sure.

My understanding of the CQC media repository is that it only supports disks for DVDs, is this correct? I'm not interested in dropping the $$ for a changer when I am developing a nice digital collection, and feel this is the wave of the future.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Target

[klindy]

My understanding of the CQC media repository is that it only supports disks for DVDs, is this correct? I'm not interested in dropping the $$ for a changer when I am developing a nice digital collection, and feel this is the wave of the future.

It requires you to have the disk in the drive to search for metadata. You can always add a movie manually (i.e. - entering all the data yourself). I actually have a few movies which are on disk AND on HDD that had to enter the second instance manually. It's not ideal but not too tough once you work out some kind of a system. But having the disk to get what you can is helpful for sure.

In terms of advice on repo's - It sounds like it will be easiest to use the iTunes library first and migrate to something lossless over time (if you desire).

For movies, If you have them in a DVDProfiler database, I believe you still have a one-time shot at converting to the CQC Repo. From there you'll enter them into the CQC Repo directly.

I currently use JRiver (WMP Lossless) for music and I have some movies on a 777 changer and others on HDD. I will likely migrate to the CQC Repo for music too at some point. My biggest issue has been getting my templates far enough along to be able to use them for control. Currently I use a mixture of CQC (with the CQC player) and JRiver to play whole-house audio. The playlist functionality is resident on Jriver and I haven't built that functionality into my templates yet. Once I do, I'll convert over to the CQC repo.

Incidentally, I also have an iTunes library (imported from the WMP library) so we can use it on the iPods. However, I am not using the iTunes library with CQC at all.

Hope that helps.

[Target]

So with DVD profiler I can build a database of everything I own and import it into the CQC media repo. From there I can link everything in it through the CQC media repo to HDD locations. FOr future content I can rip the disk and enter the information manually?

If that is correct, then I'm fine doing that. Since the CQC media repo allows you to enter the info of a disk, can I put the disk in, get the info, use another program to rip it, and then point CQC to the ripped file? I would love to solely use the CQC media repo if I can, at least for movies.

Target

[IVB]

FYI, i went down the ripped DVDs only route, only to deal with heat, hard disks dying, & power-consumption issues. Given that I rarely watch 90% of my owned DVDs, it didn't make sense to allocate time or money to that. A 777 can be had relatively cheaply on eBay, of course "cheap" also means comparing to my electricity costs in CA. My incremental energy cost is $0.36/Kwh, and assuming I needed 2TB in space with a backup plan, that's at least 4 750GB drives for RAID5, 4 1TB drives for RAID1. At 10W/drive, that's $8-$11/month just to store DVDs. Plus the upfront cost of $130*4 or $180*4, and the cost of replacement drives when they fail, and there goes your "cost savings" of ripped only. It's actually cheaper to get a megachanger, of course the distribution is still an issue given the HDExtender can't handle it.

I now do both:
- Ripped DVDs via DVDProfiler for some, but capped at 750GB (1 drive, no backup plan) max
- DVD Megachanger via CQC Media Repo

BTW, There is zero chance ripped DVDs in their current form are the wave of the future given the legal hassles. Movie Downloads are too far off to worry about right now.

[klindy]

So with DVD profiler I can build a database of everything I own and import it into the CQC media repo. From there I can link everything in it through the CQC media repo to HDD locations. FOr future content I can rip the disk and enter the information manually?

If that is correct, then I'm fine doing that. Since the CQC media repo allows you to enter the info of a disk, can I put the disk in, get the info, use another program to rip it, and then point CQC to the ripped file? I would love to solely use the CQC media repo if I can, at least for movies.

Target

If you put the disk in the drive the CQC Repo will look up the data for you. My rough success rate is 98% for basic movie info like title, studio, director, rating; 50-60% success rate for duration, categories and decent/usable cover art (note there are generally 4-5 cover art images to choose from but not always relavant to the movie); 20-25% success rate for aspect ratio, cast and UPC code; and 0% for description.

My basic process to add movies includes opening amazon.com and imdb.com and searching for the movie (on both). I also open the calculator because the CQC Repo requires duration in seconds which is counter-intuitive since it's always found (and displayed) in minutes.

The steps are -

1. Search for the movie on amazon.com and imdb.com
   
2. Load DVD in drive (and hope for the best).
   
3. Verify any incoming information
   
4. Load the title as collection
   
5. Enter Director (if required - Amazon)
   
6. Enter the aspect ratio (Amazon)
   
7. Calculate duration (Amazon)
   
8. Enter UPC (DVD case) and ISDN number (Amazon)
   
9. Navigate to "synopsis" link on IMDB and select a decent discription (Copy text - click "desc" button - Ctrl-V to paste)
   
10. Enter cast manually (if required - IMDB; I only enter the cast found on the main page at IMDB)
    
11. Enter the path or slot number
    
12. Save

This takes about 2-3 minutes a movie depending on what's available.

[Dean Roddey]

We are always looking at options for getting access to better metadata sources. Some possibilities are out there, so we may be able to do something post-2.4 on this front, particularly for movies.