I'm planning on building a media file server, from which I can host
media files to several set top boxes connect to my television. My plan
is to have a huge collection of music and many emulated games, and
movies. The idea is to just have a stripped down file server with a
large and hard drive, fast network connect. So from any system in my
house I could have access to all of my media. What I wanna be able to
do is play all of my media over the network.... and a lot more. Have
it send the audio to a computer (or just have the server play it
itself) that would be plugged into my audio reciever so it would go
through my whole speaker system, and either play the movies on this or
yet again have another computer that would act as sort of a set top
box, just to play movies off of it, onto my TV (and through my speakers
of course :) .) It also would be useful for doing something like
syncing for my portable players, like my laptop, so I could have a
portion of my media onhand wherever I go :)
The reason I'm bringing this topic to this board, even though I know
it's offtopic, is because I need to store all of these media files, I
need to know which codecs to use for what purposes. Since I'm for
various purposes I'm considering the use of many ogg related
technologies for the codec, I posted here because this was the most
general ogg list. I apologize if I should have sent this somewhere
else, and if there is a better place for this message, please tell me
and I'll send it there. I've decided to definitely encode my music
into the Ogg Vorbis format, and my audio books using speex. Currently
I only have the budget for a single big hard drive, I was going to get
a 250 GB one. (Later as my collection expands I'm going to add another
hard drive) Due to this large hard drive capacity, I obviously can
sacrifice in many cases disk space for high quality.
Since I have decided on the audio codecs to use for this project....
I will also need to store video, I want to be able to access any one of
my DVDs without actually having it on hand or having to put it in. I
want to be able to store all the movies from my DVDs (hey! a legal use
for DVD ripping!) on that hard drive with the music. I've done the
math and the listenning tests and with my hearing, -q 6.5 is close
enough to archive quality for me. And with the large size of the music
collection I am building, I have decided to allocated about 50 GB of my
hard drive just to holding that music. The videogame roms take up very
little space themselves, so I'm going to include their space on the
hard drive in that 50 GB, which leaves 200 GB just for movies.
What I was wondering is if anyone could make comments or suggestions
on what I've said so far and help me with the video codec. I really
want to have high enough quality video so it looks practically
transparent (identical to source). Since 200GB will be dedicated to
these files, and my collection of DVDs is currently at about 26 and I
expect it to rise once I have finished this project, so I was hoping to
hold up to 50 full DVD size movies in this 200 gigabytes, which leaves
about 4GB a movie. What codec would be best at compressing something
to about this size and having the highest quality outcome? Could
Theora do this? Would the old fashioned DivX AVI files be best? Are
there any better codecs for this? How could would Ogg Tarkin do at
this? What I'm looking for is the best most modern codec that's good
at near transparent compression. But, I'm pretty sure most compression
formats these days (like ogg vorbis, even though it's an audio codec.
for example) attempt to achieve the highest quality at low file sizes,
so the best quality to size ratio is achieved at lower qualities. What
I need is something that could look spectacular in that file size range.
I looked ALL over the tarkin list and I still can't find what sort
of
compression to quality ratio it's expected to give or even an estimated
date for it to be at a decently workable and stable point in it's
development. Tarkin, depending on what you guys say, is my top choice
at the moment for the video codec. So I'd definitely like to know how
tarkin would do at compressing full DVD size movies to somewhere around
4 GB? Come to think of it, how big are standard uncompressed DVDs? If
they're the size of most DVD-RAMs, 4.7GB, then I'd definitely not have
a problem, and could look for any nearly lossless video codec. Being
4.7GB seems kind of unlikely to me, and I'm gonna guess 8.5 GB for a
standard commercial video DVD. With the special features and audio not
on it, I'd guess it would be down to 7-7.5GB, which wouldn't be hard at
all to get down to about 4 GB. As I was saying, all I really want is
the most modern and best way to compress video, make it a little
smaller but lose practically no quality.
I'm working on making a great entertainment system and this would be
the center of it all. Since I won't even have the place to put this
thing until maybe late July, I won't need to finish this project until
maybe late August. My point is I do have time to wait for things like
Tarkin to be improved upon before my actual implementation of it. But
I would really like to be able to decide on exactly what programs, file
formats, etc. I'm using right now. If I could decide on those soon I
could begin writing all of the little apps and scripts I'm going to be
using for this. Like a simple graphical program to select what you
want it to do, scripts for encoding all of my music and movies (things
to make it easier, like when I run the script, it would encode an
entire CD into Ogg Vorbis format, then eject that CD and ask me if I
wanted to stop or insert another CD, so I could make my collection in a
fast and troublefree manner. Plus I was hoping to write some scripts
to see what are most popular songs at the time being and things like
that, then I would write something to sync it up to my laptop, and send
the maybe 200 most popular songs and and any other songs I specifically
ask it to to my laptop. And a similar script that would encode into
MP3(until it get vorbis support!) the most popular songs and any I ask
for and send them to my nomad jukebox (this would take a while, the
kind thing I'd run overnight, heh). But I've just been rambling on
about what I'm going to do, I should stop soon because all I really
need is info on the best video codec for my purposes and
comments/suggestions/criticism on my plans. And if you think this is
completely offtopic, say so, and tell me where I should send my
question. And for the love of god if your going to tell me it's
offtopic and not tell me where I should send it, make sure no one else
has done the same yet, the last thing we'd need is like 20 e-mails
comic in that just have "Offtopic" in the body, lol.
Note--If during this e-mail I sound like my IQ is just above zero,
don't blame me, mainly because just above zero is a lot more sleep than
I've gotten tonight, and it's 5:20..... ugh, I need to be ready by
6:30. Insomnia is not fun :(
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oops, when I first sent this I accidentally sent it to the wrong address, lol. Sorry for the inconvenience, especially to the person I first sent the message to, lol. *NOTE: I am answering questions asqui asked in a private e-mail about set top boxes. Since it started with me talking about the use of ogg in a set top box project, I am posting it here, and there is some very relevant information I would like to discuss. Since most of what I could say about it is irrelevant to this board, I answered most of the questions in this post, and will soon send another post that has the information more relevant to vorbis. Plus, asqui, horrible apologies if for some reason you didn't want everyone to see this e-mail, I should have asked first but it's 2 AM and I need sleep. On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 03:14 PM, asqui wrote:> Hey there, unfortunately I don't really have an answer to your question > about high quality video compression. Have you made any headway on this > yet? I'm interested to hear an answer to that question too:) > I just wanted to say that I'm in the process of making a similar > "multimedia server" for use in conjunction with a TV and Hi-Fi system. > What kind of hardware are you thinking of using? I'm exploring the > Shuttle XPC (shuttle.com) and also mini-ITX form-factor systems > (mini-itx.com). It doesn't really need to be that small because it will > be on the ground next to a large bookcase/cabinet type thing which > houses the TV and Hi-Fi separates, but I'm inclined to think that a > smaller system will generate less heat and be quieter than a standard > ATX system. > What conclusions have you reached about multimedia hardware for > "set-top > box" applications? > > DaniWell, I've almost finished planning things out. But a large majority of the software I'll be using I haven't found anything with exactly what I want, so I'm going to be writing it myself. After planning out what hardware to get, I've noticed how steep the price was getting, so I decided, since chance are I won't be using my laptop while playing a video game, or while watching a movie, and I can easily still use the computer while it's doing something like playing music, so I was gonna use my laptop which is my main computer right now to be the computer being used as a set top box, also because it has really great s-video output. For the media server (that's what I'm calling it, you called it a "multimedia server", it's basically just a file server I'll be using entirely for storing media files) I didn't care about the form factor, and I didn't want it to be part of the set top box, since chances are in the future I'll either build another set top box machine for my other TV, I'll want to access my media quickly on all of my computers, and since my main computer is a laptop, I wanted that to have quick access to my music library, but not have put a big hard drive in it and not have to lug around all of my music all the time. Using my laptop will avoid lots of the major problems you would have with the actual designing of a set top box. It's quiet, low power, small, and cool looking (plus the built in LCD screen which does not necessarily have to mirror to the s-video out can be a cool looking second monitor, and provide a picture in picture like function (except the picture would actually be outside of the picture, but still, lol.) But since you probably wouldn't be following the same route I am I have to say, set top box does not specifically mean a box sitting on top of the TV. So you don't even need to have it nearby, but since I would assume you'd be using s-video or some other non-digital method of getting video to the TV, you would like it fairly close so signal degradation doesn't affect things. What I would really suggest is getting any case, any at all, and building the computer in that, or putting any computer back there with enough power to decode video in realtime. If your worried about the ambient sound emitted by this computer, rather than trying for a smaller case I'd suggest one getting one of those things (I forget what they are called) that controls fans, turns them on and off as needed, or let's you control the fans manually. The sound of the hard drive whirring is not an issue because it shouldn't need to spin during playback. Either you should avoid using a hard drive except to store the OS and media player programs on, and use only DVDs and CDs for the media storage (if your OS is efficient, the programs should be completely cached in RAM, so during playback the hard drive won't need to do anything.) Or you could follow my lead and store everything on a separate computer on the network. If you have the money, and don't mind the limited sizes offered, there are also many quieter hard drives and solid state drives that are completely silent. This leaves DVD and CD spinning the only issue. I'm avoiding this by not playing anything directly from it's disk, instead ripping it to the hard drive first. Yet again you could have the player located somewhere else, but that seems rather inconvenient. Even having it directly as part of your set top box if it's far away from you could be a hassle. If I wanted nice DVD/CD capabilities, I'd probably look for the quietest or coolest running external DVD player. Quiet would be nice, but if you had one that generated next to no heat it wouldn't harm it to enclose it in something to dampen the sound. So I've given advice on the case, the storage medium, and told you any computer that's fast enough to decode movies (or whatever the most CPU intensive thing you want this thing to do is) is fine, and RAM, well, not really an issue, just enough so it won't have access the hard disk during playback (With slower systems, it would be useful to be able to cache a lot of the file being played in advance, but that's not too important.) The only thing left really as far as hardware goes I think is the most important. The quality of what actually shows up on the screen. Recently on 2CPU there was a great article comparing video cards that included a comparison of their s-video out performance. This article can be found at http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/video_roundup/ and the actual s-video comparison can be found at http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/video_roundup/qualitative_2.html if you don't feel like reading the whole article, the Tyan Tachyon G9000 Pro was rated as the best card for output to a TV. I believe external scan converters are much better at the task, but they are very expensive, and I don't have any experience with them. And finally, I am making most of the software on my own, in a separate post I'll probably mention exactly what I'm writing, and if you have any interest in using any of my software, and if so, if you have any features you'd like to see in it, feel free to tell me, but keep in mind the software may not be finished until late summer. If you'd rather just download something, and have it run WELL, lol, I'd go with movix at http://movix.sourceforge.net/ --- >8 ---- List archives: http://www.xiph.org/archives/ Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/ To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-request@xiph.org' containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body. No subject is needed. Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.