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How-To: Building a Kaleidescape Like System for a Fraction of the Cost
Most that know me, know how much I love watching movies at home. One day I’ll have the land to build my own theater room – for now I make do with the best living room system I can conveniently afford. It’s nothing mind blowing, but dollar for dollar it blows most out of the water, and is indeed pretty high quality all around.
The highlight of the system in the last year has been the media storage. For the last 5+ years I had been accumulating shelf units, and sticking 128 DVDs per unit all around the house. After collecting over 1500 discs, I stopped buying shelf units, having no good place to put them, after they spilled in to the next room. So I resorted to putting the discs on spools, or the cases in large tubs, etc. At 2,500, it became very unpleasant to try and find anything. It was impossible to keep the collection organized – you can’t simply shift a section down to add another disc. So it got to the point where it would be 15-20 minutes of me and sometimes others, searching for a title when we wanted to see something in particular. This would no longer do.
A friend of mine works at B&O in Tampa, and I became very familiar with the eccentric setups they have down there in the showroom, including the highest-end media storage system called Kaleidescape. To those not familiar, it’s a big electronic jukebox for movies. You put in your disc, it rips it to it’s bank of RAID drives to store internally, adds the title to the database and it then shows you your entire collection on the screen to simply click and start playing.
Great system, no flaws. It’s entirely automated, so anyone can use it. It’s redundant, so your data is secure and safe. It even monitors and detects hard drive faults, send a message to the company and they send you a replacement automatically. Really.
So what’s the problem you might ask? I’ll give you 30,000+ guesses. Yup, it’s THAT expensive, and there are plenty of add-ons and extras to push it beyond $50k.
OK, so that’s WAY too rich for my blood. but DANG it’s sooo cool…ok, I can do this myself, it’s just a computer, and I AM a geek.
So step one – that way cool interface – where can I get something like that for the livingroom? Some common options are to connect a computer directly to your TV. These are called HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computers). The major drawback? Well, you have to build a whole new computer. It’s in your livingroom. I don’t want to see, hear or have to use a computer to see my movies. Next.
There are media devices such as the Playstation 3 and Xbox360 that can stream content. Drawbacks – they don’t have a slick interface, they are not made for cataloging thousands of movies. They are also loud (fans), hot, cost hundreds of dollars for features I don’t want (games) and don’t do anything but turn a stream into a picture. Next.
AppleTV. Ah, now that’s more like it! Slick very similar interface, made for big collections of movies. It’s broken down into genres, shows coverart, blurbs about the movies, etc. – just like Kaledescape! Only $220 – sold!
OK, now how to get content to the AppleTV. Well there are two ways. One, use the internal hard drive of the unit. That works fine for a few dozen movies. I have thousands. OK, you can stream from iTunes running on your wireless network. OK, I have my main computer on all the time, no problem there.
Storage? Well there are several options here as well. First and foremost, how to have enough space, period. Then what about protection? I have enough room inside my case, at 3TB for a lot of stuff. The problem is, it’s not all meant to be protected. Most of it is setup as RAID0 for maximum performance not reliability. If I’m going to spend the time and money to convert my collection to digital, it HAS to be safe like Kaleidescape.
Hello, Drobo! 3TB of useable storage space with four 1TB drives…good, that’s more than enough. RAID5 like protection against data and hardware corruption/failure…good, that’s perfect. Works over USB2, firewire or LAN. Any of them are more than enough to stream movies, sounds good.
OK now how to convert the DVDs. After many, many hours of research and experimentation, here is the ideal solution for top content quality at the minimum size needed. Rip the disc using DVDFAB, taking just the main movie file and the 5.1 DD sound track. Using Handbrake, encode the ripped directory to AppleTV format, 55% constant quality, using AC3. The average movie works out to 2.25GB when all is said and done.
Sit back, press your AppleTV remote and enjoy your new digital DVD collection!
Cost:
Drobo $500
(4) 1TB WD Green HDs ($80 ea.)
iTunes FREE
Computer to stream (use existing)
AppleTV $230
Total $1070, a TINY fraction of kaleidescape.
This is wonderful. I been looking for something like kaleidescape for a while and resorted to HTPC running visa media center and the free MyMovies plug-in. The advantage of MyMovies is that it keeps an exact copy of the disc (as VOB files or as ISO images).
I agree with the downsides you mentioned about HTPC. With this kind of apple tv setup, is there any way to keep the DVD format as is and avoid ripping.
No, the ATV does not use the native format, and I did consider that when planing my system. I came to the conclusion that I don’t at all need it. The M4V (MP4) ATV format is beyond the native DVD format at the setting I have chosen, and there is no loss of quality. The HUGE disadvantage to keeping the VOB or ISO files is the file size (4-5x greater than ripped/converted). Believe me, you WANT to convert them.
Any idea if this would work with Bluray discs?
It will, in limited capacity, fairly shortly. Currently the limitation is encoding the ripped disc to other formats, such as .mov or .m4v for Apple TV use.
Handbrake is my app of choice to encode, and Blue-Ray support is supposed to be included in an upcoming version.
Apple TV only supports 720P, so any 1080 sources would be downconverted for output.
It will still be far better than DVD resolution though! I expect the avg file size to go from 2.5GB to 8 or so, with the upgrade. The 2TB drive units should be out by then also, which would be needed by many for storage.
You say to do 2-pass encoding with a Turbo first pass, with a 70% constant framerate using Handbrake. But if you select “constant framerate” in Handbrake, you do not have the ability to choose 2-pass encoding. Am I missing something? (I am using Handbrake v0.9.3)
Looks like there’s a bug in the program. Do this – Set it to 70% and get everything else set, then add a new preset and set it to default. Close and reopen handbrake, set it to 2 pass and save the preset again. It looks like if you alter the constant rate slider it then locks out the 2 pass box until it’s reopened. I’m now under Vista and don’t remember it ever doing that under XP, although it may have and I just never noticed.
I tried what you suggested….but even after doing all that, and reopening without adjusting the frame rate slider, the two pass option is greyed out.
PS….I’m running Mas OS Leopard
I don’t know what to tell ya then…it works on a PC, sorry
I would forgo the 2 pass option, it provides the least benefit.
How long does it take to convert DVD’s?
I mean the total time you are actually sat down doing it.
Thanks, I like this system. I think I could sacrifice a few hours converting DVD’s in order to save the $$$ Kaleidescape would cost.
Hi buddy,
First off, your system and setup sounds awesome and exactly what I’m after. So I’m almost there, I have my Drobo / droboshare setup, I am attempting to get the droboapps running smoothly which is taking time…
That aside, I currently have a vista desktop which is used for the media center aspect, its awesome but I hate having the machine on all the time as its a bit of a monster and makes my room way too hot.
So that brings me onto the AppleTV, I am a complete Apple novice, so if you don’t mind give me a little intro, I plug it to my tv, connect it to the network where my drobo is, and is the apple tv installed with an OS like leapard? As in for the configuring of where the media files are stored on drobo, how is that handled? I have a lot of Mpegs and Avi files, can it handle these too?
Thanks so much in advance for your help, much appreciated.
Regards
Unfortunately you will still need a computer on, to access the drobo. AppleTV simply links with iTunes running on any computer on the network to stream the content – not directly to a storage device.
You might look at the Western Digital set top device, I believe that can use USB devices directly, if you wanted to put your drobo in the living room.
I have approximately 800 DVD’s. What kind of processing power are you using and how long to convert each disc – I have been doing this, and using iTunes directly on my computer connected via HDMI. It takes me an hour or more to RIP and Convert a movie, I want to know that I am doing the conversion the best and very importantly the fastest way possible.
That’s about right – It depends on the exact movie, but 1 hour to 2 hours for a DVD is average, for a current gen fast dual core or entry level quad. Most of the time the HD is the bottleneck anyway. Blurays take 2-3x as long.
Have you had any audio/lip sync issues resulting from using DVDFab to rip and then transcoding using Handbrake?
Never.
Has anyone ever used a Samsung hard drive? I’m checking out sites trying to get some input. I was going to get a Seagate as I know they have a good rep, but I found a great deal on a Samsung.
Hi. Firstly, I also was looking for a Kaleidescape-like system but could never have come up with this, so thanks very much for the tips.
I am encountering one problem though and was wondering if you could help. I was intending to take the full disc settings from DVDFab so that I could have the DVD menu on ATV. This works, but Handbrake, however, doesn’t support conversion of DVD menus. I’ve had a look for another product that does with no joy. To be honest I’m not even sure that ATV supports DVD menus as when you buy/rent films from iTunes they have none either.
The real advantage for me is that my wife is French and watches english films with english subtitles on. Handbrake gives you the option to add subtitles but it is digital – if oyu choose to have subtitles, you cannot switch them off. I didn’t really want to build a system in which every film has subtitles so thought I would see if a better solution could be found.
Given your research any ideas?
Love the summary. It looks like we have very similar setups. I have 2 AppleTVs (40GB) streaming media from an iTunes library that resides entirely on a drobo. I’ve got about 300GBs of music, 1.5TBs of movies, and 1.5TBs of TV Shows. This puts me at about 80% of capacity on my 4TBs of drobo space (4 x 1.5TB drives).
This was working excellent for me for a long time, but recently I’ve been having problems. Lately the drobo causes iTunes to hang on just about any action. Basically any time I have to read or write a file on the drobo the finder or the app playing the media throws me the rainbow pinwheel.
Only thing that has changed recently is that I went from a FW400 connection (via adapter) on a Mac Min to a FW800 connection on an i7 iMac. Things were ok for a while after switching to the iMac, but have deteriorated over the last month.
Have you experienced any problems now that you have been running this setup longer?
You had mentioned the interface is something important to you, but have you looked into XBMC? It has an incredible interface, and can even operate with smart phones (iPhones and Androids) as a remote control to command the whole library remotely from your hand. Plus you can install it on a Linux or Windows based PC and use it as the main shell and have seamless and incredible looking setup!
Plus, by using a small net-top like device (Atom Dual Core, with an nvidia ION video chip) you could stream and render full HD videos for just a little more than the AppleTV, and the best part is it would allow you to drop out the middle-man computer! You can even connect it directly to external drive or interface with it on the network.