Quoting TheJohnDoctor:

Quote:
I believe a "bare-bones" system starts at about $35,000.00 and will store several hundred DVDs. The price goes up as more RAID drives are added for more movies.

THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND freak'n Dollars ???!!   

D A M N  ... that buys a LOT of DVD's, A/V gear, cars, boats, vacations, and other stuff!

$35,000 is several times the combined total cost of making El Mariachi and Clerks 

If it works, as advertized, $350 is much better than $35,000.

Ya, I know what you mean. D-Link has one too, and it's a 100 also.

$35k you got to be joking? I bet I could make an HTPC for $1k-2k with a lot of space. What I would do is rip the movies and compress them. I bet Kaleidescape is not compressing them which make it take up more space. I would compress a dual layer to a single layer disc. so it be like 4.5gb or less movie only instead of 8.4.

Only thing I couldn't do is make dvd covers show on the screen so when you click on the movie plays.

They have a triple redundancy custom RAID.  This tells me that movies copied onto their system is stored on three drives (not split upon).  So if one or even two drives go bad, you can still watch your movies while you wait for a tech to come in and replace the bad drive modules.  They also don't compress DVD's but likely do encrypt.

Quoting rocket_man:

Quote:
Quoting Randall_Lind:

Quote:

Only thing I couldn't do is make dvd covers show on the screen so when you click on the movie plays.

If you use XLobby you can do this. You click on the dvd cover, you get the description of the movie and you click play. Best of all if you have an older version of XLobby it's free.

I also know that if you are a law breaking copyright infringing criminal you could buy a used xbox off ebay for 60 bucks, mod it, and install xbmc which will allow you to stream computer files from your computer. It works real well...from what I've read in some sketchy underground black market tabloid.

Sorry I have been gone for so long folks. Life got hectic on this end. The cost of the system is in no way whatsoever inexpensive. There are indeed installs that ran over $100k. (George Clooney's system has over 6000 movies on it, but he's made of money so...) The system I had designed came in at $21k, holds 3500 DVDs and 2000 CDs. Another expansion drive is planned and will cost another $700 and hold approximately 1500 more DVDs. That number is probably a bit high though since I am now moving over to Blu Ray and they take up more room.

To answer other questions:

No the data is not compressed

Yes the RAID 3 is 3 full copies of the data stored independently for maximum protection

The cost of a movie is "only" the cost of obaining a rental AND the HD space. This still brings the cost of most older DVD titles up to about $20 or so. Granted, the studios are not getting much of that, but then they don't really get much from users watching streaming movies on their PCs either.

Klaidescape has won now THREE lawsuits brought against them for their technology. On top of that, they have also payed out to be allowed (not sure if it is a license or what) to break the encryption. In essence, each time the encryptions are upgraded these days, the fix is sent to them by the developers. I'm pretty sure that the studios are going to continue to be SOL in this arena.

There are indeed plenty of other options available. This one just happens to be a beast of a system that comes with just about every bell and whistle to begin with. Before looking seriously at the system I tried to design my own. I found that in the long run it was still going to cost me over $15k to do it anything close to like what these folks were already doing. At that point the extra expense was no longer as big an issue for me. I find the price entirely woth every penny.