So Like most people i like to watch DVDs, youtube, and other internet media and i wanted to put all of this media in one place and stream it on to my TV.
So what did i do..
first of i sat down and thought about how i wanted the system to work and how to store all my media files and DVD so i could stream them to the DVD.
well i did some digging around the internet and found a web site LinkITX who do a lot of
geeky appliances, one is a computer style case with 4 drive bays, i instantly wanted this as the hart of my storage for the media content, I then needed to add a motherboard and memory.
FreeNAS..
On to the server I also wanted to have FreeNAS as the network attached storage software because of its built in ZFS file system, Which offers grater security and data integrity checking so it will never give you a corrupt file, perfect for media playback , I also wanted 4 drives in two mirrors 2 TB each total of 4 TB.
XBMC for Media Playback…
For getting the media content from the NAS and youtube and other media sources on the internet i wanted the Zotac Zbox ID34 which is a slim TV moutable mini Computer optimised for Media content.
on to this mini PC i had to install windows 7 due to lack of support for native playback of Blueray in ubuntu, i also installed power DVD and XBMC and configured it to pull media such as music, movies, pictures from the FreeNAS box, and now all the media is streamed to the TV, i also plan to rip my DVD collection with handbrake and put the DVDs away and keep a digital copy on the system for instant access to my media collection.
