HDD Media Player

[kitamesume]

If you're looking at building an HTPC, this is the case I bought for my build. It's a bit difficult to work with if you are planning to use an SSD or some other 2.5" drive even with an adapter (but if you are using regular 3.5" drives, they fit perfectly, and you can actually fit several of them), and the optical drive tray cover thing makes a loud clunk whenever it opens and closes, but otherwise it looks very sleek and fits right in with the rest of your typical TV equipment.

The lack of user friendliness when it comes to 2,5" drives is no problem for me! I was planning to outfit whatever I was going to buy/build with a fat 3,5" drive, be it Media Player or HTPC, anyways. Being able to fit even two of those in there is absolutely a pro! Definitely looks sleek!

You can probably have the unit constantly re-encoding videos too. A properly encoded video will run off the GPU so the CPU really has nothing to do (audio playback is hardly stressful to a CPU).

doesn't work with Hi10P/10bit, you're stuck with CPU doing all the shitty work, including re-encoding i suppose(since re-encoding uses [decode->encode] sequence).

Yeah but 10bit to 8bit isn't exactly beginner friendly, if you've checked out the playback forums you'll see.

I'm not sure I'm getting what you guys are getting at, but I assume this is about "manually" reencoding the 10bit MKV files to 8bit MKV files on a PC. I've been trying to do some reencodes yesterday, and it went really great with no major quality loss. The file size shrunk a couple of 100MB's per file, too. It sure is CPU intensive, but I'm running a 2600K at 4.7GHZ, when fully stressed at 100% over four cores rarely sees temperatures above 65 degrees celsius, so I'm good there.

I'll look into a better way to create myself a task sequence rather than having to reencode every file manually though, but for now, it will do

i'm currently a fan of retro-fitting slim-line ODDs and a 3.5" bay on a single 5.25" slot, quite a space saver considering you can turn that free 3.5" bay into two 2.5" bays with a converter. might wanna look into that since it encourages more drives to be fitted on a tiny case, more so on a large case.
http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-3-5-Inch-Mounting-5-25-Inch-SLIMCDFDCAGE/dp/B0009F8DV4/ref=pd_ybh_18

you got quite a beast rig eh, have you considered streaming the decoded content?

i also found a slightly cheaper and (i think) easier to configure case on amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Aluminum-Steel-Center-ML03B/dp/B004GGUAUE/ref=acc_glance_pc_ai_ps_t_5

(click to show/hide)

[Freedom Kira]

That case doesn't look nearly as nice. And there's no flipping front panel cover! How lame is that?

[kitamesume]

wait what, no front panel cover? o.o

[Freedom Kira]

Flipping front panel cover. Take a closer look at the images in my link. Specifically, close to the bottom of the case's front. It's pretty slick.

[kitamesume]

ah, well yeah, although the price isn't pretty XD although its still quite cheap considering some other awkward brands like lian-li had those types of case at over 100$.

[Chaosbreaker]

As a PC builder, I actually like Lian Li as a brand, as their cases are absolutely awesome to work with. They're way too expensive for regular Joe though. My current PC build is housed in a Silverstone Raven RV01-B, and I couldn't be happier. Silverstone as a manufacturer earned some serious creds in my book, so when building a HTPC, I'll definitely be looking at them for a potential case.

Also, I would like to comment on the Media Player I've recently bought, and shine some light on how it handles 8bit .MKV files.

The Media Player I bought is a Western Digital Elements Play 1TB (EDIT: some info here: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=400). It's nothing fancy, it's "just" a HDD Media Player with Composite and HDMI output. You can put stuff on it via the included USB 2.0 cable. I guess it would have been even more awesome if it was a USB 3.0 port on there, especially for bigger files, but it gets the job done.

It plays .MKV files like a charm. No problem with hiragana/katakana/kanji subtitles whatsoever. Another nifty feature is the ability to actively enlargen or shrink the subtitles, which is especially useful when some longer sentences sometimes fall offscreen with some subs.

The real make-or-break is, however, how it handles .MKV files that were originally encoded hi10p h264, reencoded to 8bit (there are, as I write this, no players that can actually handle hi10p encoded .MKV files due to sheer hardware limitations) and I can say it handles them just as good as original 8bit encoded .MKV files. I have had no glitches, sub errors- or missynchronisation, or files refusing to play.

I was originally aiming at the same product, with a 2TB storage capacity, but it was nowhere in stock, so I opted for the 1TB instead. It's actually available with up to 3TB of internal storage as I've seen in multiple online stores but oddly cannot find that model on the site. If that ain't enough for some serious archiving, I don't know what is.

I have the 1TB, which I'm currently filling up quite nicely, and there's always an USB port that you can use to read files from an external USB HDD. I'm not sure if it's possible to exchange the internal 1TB HDD with a larger specimen, but then again, I'm not sure I'll really have to with other expansion options readily available.

I'm still in the market for building my own HTPC, but for the time being, this will do the job just great, and as far as Media Players go, I can honestly recommend this one.
Thank you guys for taking the time for some very helpful advice!

[kitamesume]

1TB is enough for a light torrent'er, although once you've stepped into 1080p archiving even having 4TB isn't enough (i got 2x500GB 3x1TB, i recently bought another 1TB and its starting to fill up now). simply put, each 24episode 1080p series usually reaches over 30GB(lets not get into coalgirl's encodes), if you think about it bigshots like naruto and bleach has theirs at over 100episodes which puts them at a class of over 100GB series, big movies like redline or majority of ghibli releases(at 1080p) reaches over 10GB each, compiling them all would reach a little over 100GB.
so lets just say they pile up quite fast.

if you look into it, some aggressive archive'r usually has a NAS handing their storage needs, they opt for a RAID array or JBOD array going over 6TB of total harddrive space.

i'd assume it that the ideal HTPC then is a hybrid of NAS and media player, although the domain of software decoding needs some real muscles so you're stuck on looking at going for no less than an i3.

[Bob2004]

"each 24episode 1080p series usually reaches over 30GB(lets not get into coalgirl's encodes)"? That's a little off the mark. Of all the 1080p 24-episode series I have, only one of them seems to be over 30GB, and that's a Coalgirls encode. All the others, including more Coalgirls encodes, range from ~8GB - ~18GB at the most. Films vary between ~6GB to ~13GB, mainly. So no, most 1080p encodes are not quite as large as you claim. I archive everything, and over a year and a half of mainly downloading 720p series as they air, I've accumulated around 1.2TB of video. 1TB should be plenty for most people, especially since using an HTPC you can usually remotely access any video stored on other computers/NAS as well, though obviously more space is better.

That's all I came to say - I don't have any actual useful input, sorry.

[kitamesume]

maybe i just struck lucky(or maybe the opposite) that most of what i grabbed were that large?
i didn't claim every film, i said the big films reaches over 10GB each, like how redline did.

edit: nvm, seems like the things i got that had over 30GB had around 30-40episodes, i mistook it since i grabbed them per season.

no wait, theres quite a few of them that are over 30GB at 24-28episodes, berserk, Kidou Senshi Gundam 00 2nd Season, dennou coil, basquash, guin saga. and a few bits thats slightly under 30GB like fate/zero season1, xam'd.
the only coalgirls among them was dennou coil 26ep at 43GB, taking out two episodes still hits the over 30GB mark.

so i may not be that far off the mark.

[Bob2004]

Meh, I only have 10 or so 24-episode series in 1080p, of which one is 30GB+. The rest I have are 10-14 episodes, so can't really be used to directly compare (and would still weigh in at well under 30GB anyway).

[kitamesume]

although it makes me wonder, how the heck did i fill these TBs of hdd since i haven't stepped much outside of the things i like and i've been holding back on some bigshot series since they're either simply too large or not worth the archive.

if i start touching series like card captor or initial-D i'd run out of hdd space in no time, although my bandwidth would be the only limiting factor of how fast it'll fill up.