Music, Movies and TV shows...

Posted by Jag Bhachu on 17/10/2011 11:32:40

With the advent of media streaming services on the rise (LoveFilm and Netflix) and everyone having a decent broadband connection, is physical media on its way out? Some would be quick to say that it is. Personally, I don’t see streaming services streaming a Blu-Ray equivalent with DTS HD audio and 1080p picture without stuttering anytime soon, due to the constraints of the bandwidth. But at the same time it’s an evolution we cannot ignore.

In that vein, I started to look at digitising all my media from vinyl, CD, DVD and Blu-Ray discs... a very daunting task. A lot of prep work is involved from storage, file structures, media players, codecs, networking and backing up. But, once everything is in place you can clearly see the benefits from picking a TV show, movie or a track with a click of a button, having all the information at the touch of your finger tips such as actors, synopsis, IMDB rating and being able to stream to mobile based devices.

MP3

The first task was to actually find suitable software that would allow me to easily aggregate my entire collection for all the media. With Windows being the main OS of choice in my household choices in open source and paid software were quite vast. With MP3 I stuck with Apples iTunes. Reasons why:

1. My partner and I both own iPhones and various iPods, we even use one in the car.

2. All our purchases as of late have been done via iTunes or various other online music stores.

3. Apple's Airplay for streaming to hardware that is compatible with this technology.

DVD & Blu-Ray backup

DVDs and Blu-Rays are a bit trickier due to the options available. Personally, I only retain the main movie due to space saved and compression, but this is a personal choice as a whole disc with menus and extra can be retained, but quality and disk space is the cost. There are numerous methods to convert disc based media to a single file or disc structure.

I've followed the latter with keeping the disc structure. This allows me to actually burn a physical copy if I ever needed to, without going through a process of remuxing or converting it back. I will not be going into the process of how to backup your DVDs and Blu-Rays as there is plenty of articles on the subject online. However, the problem lies with what media players support in terms of file/container formats. The most popular file/container formats include DivX, AVI, MKV, MP4. The usual suspects came to mind, with VLC player being able to play anything you throw at it. But I needed something that allowed me, or any other user, to see the collection in a visual and informative manner.

Media Aggregators

After a few hours of searching and doing a bit of research on the matter I started to look at media aggregators. XBMC was highly recommended by Audio/Visual enthusiasts. XBMC is available on multiple platforms, Macs, PC, and Linux. First impressions from screen grabs and YouTube videos looked great. XBMC allowed me to view all my movies and TV shows in a very rich and informative way. All very promising, though a few themes caused it unusable unless you owned a dedicated remote control for your PC, an issue raised by some forum members and users. However XBMC has a very strong following and has plenty of plugins to expand its usability.

I also looked into another very popular media aggregator in the form of a plugin for Windows Media Centre 7 (WMC7). MediaBrowser, like XBMC, showcased the entire movie and TV collection with all the bells whistles but natively sitting in Microsoft’s popular WMC7. The plugin works seamlessly with WMC7 and has a very native feel and look. Like XBMC, MediaBrowser supports plugins and themes to enhance the viewing pleasure and experience including bringing in the social networking angle in the form of a plugin called Trakt (Tweet/Facebook what you are watching).

Having installed both aggregators, a quick test was performed using a few sample video clips. Both worked extremely well and impressed with the way the information was displayed on the screen. UX and UI in both were intuitive and rich in experience. I finally decided to go with MediaBrowser for one simple reason of it being developed with WMC7 in mind.

With MP3s I let iTunes do all the work with sorting out my albums, artists and folder structure, but for movies and TV shows a folder structure, set by the developers of MediaBrowser had to be adhered to. Thankfully it’s not a labyrinth of folders, but a simple case of naming the folder with the title of the TV show or Movie with or without the year. With all DVDs and Blu-Rays backed up over four 2TB hard drives, the next stage was to generate all the metadata.

Metadata

Metadata consists of movie posters, actors, directors, synopsis, ratings, trailers, media info and ratings. This information is pulled in from popular sites like IMDB and The Movie DB. Two tools that were highly recommended that will retrieve this information with ease came in the form of <meta>browser and Peter Souzas Media Centre Master.

The metadata generated is stored in a simple XML file within a TV show or movies folder, MediaBrowser will populate all the information from the file and display this data in a very rich informative way, as you can see from the screen grabs below.

With implementing a system like this there are always going to pros and cons dependent on size of your media collection. So listed below are a few from my experience of going down this route.

Pros

1. Space saved if your collection is very large like mine.

2. Rich details of movie and TV shows which have been aggregated by The IMDB/The MovieDB site

3. No need to insert/remove physical media

4. Continue where you left off

5. View media in more than one room at the same time (NAS based storage).

6. No damage or loss of physical media (scratched discs, finger prints).

7. Parental control.

8. Stream media to mobile based devices.

Cons

1. Storage space for all media (My personal collection has hit 7TB)

2. Backing up media. Though having a NAS on RAID 5 or any other configuration may solve this, but won’t protect you from fires or theft.

3. Time consuming if you plan to start for large collections.

4. Loss of physical and tactile space.

I’ve mainly focused on Windows based machines, but Mac and Linux users have plenty of alternatives. As mentioned earlier in this post, XBMC is available on the most popular platforms and has a very strong following and great forum for support. Mac users can look at Plex which is based on XBMC and has a great iPhone & iPad app.