I am fairly new to this world, but I am very old in the digital world (I am 70+ years; started in the digital Hardware/Software game in 1960)

 

I run a high end Home Theater which has been my hobby for several years now. The main A/V processor is an Anthem AVM 50v feeding a JVC RS2 projector onto a 10 foot wide screen in a dedicated theater room. The sound array is a full 7.1 system at 200 watts per channel and much more for the sub.

 

The Theater is controlled by a dedicated PC with the user interface being a Pronto 9800. If I get the urge I will do the work to replace the Pronto with an iPAD. The Wow factor would be amazing! The control system has a complete movie librarian spanning over 500 titles (BR and DVD) based on the DVD Profiler system.

 

The theater has two media players, a Dune Base  unit which is excellent. The only disk that gives it an issue is Avatar and that should be resolved this month. It properly handles True HD and Master Audio feeding them out over HDMI along with the video. The Dune player is as close to an appliance movie player as I have seen. The Theater now has the XBMC as a second player and I can set which player I want to use just prior to selecting the movie to play. Eventually one of the players will move to the master bedroom, or to my grandson.

 

Media storage is on an unRaid system (obviously) that I built. It has room for 12 hot swap drives, and 6 are in place. I use 2 TB Hitachi's as the drive. The unraid server connects to the theater over a 100 mbit LAN. So far it has given me no problems other than some start up jitters relating to the Format bug.  When the theater is turned on it spins up all the drives on the unraid array, and then spins them down when I turn the theater off.

 

Bluray disks are ripped to the same format as a BR disk with the trailers and dire warnings removed. similarly for the DVD's but to the standard DVDformat.  No transcoding is performed so the rips are bit images. All music is ripped to FLAC.

 

Support on this forum has been exemplary. No question has gone unanswered. Since both the unRaid system and the XBMC are linux based I am climbing the linux learning curve at a reasonable rate.

 

 

 

 

It's nice to hear I'm not the only one who chose Dune over PCH.  I've got a Prime and a Base 3.0, and I love the plug and play aspect of these things.  Plus they just look "right" in your AV stack.  The only real downside in my opinion is the lack of a management system like YAMJ.  I use yaDIS right now, and I'm hoping something matures to the point where Tom will feel the need to write some customization for Dune like he did for PCH.  I've had no issues with stutter except under ridiculous situations, like writing to the array during playback, etc.  What case did you decide on for your unRAID box?

My raid box is described in the pimp thread.  I went with a slightly overpriced but industrial quality server case from Rackmount PRO, in particular the Chenbro 3012.  This has the necessary backplanes, mid case fans (very quiet ones) and all fans and drives are hot swapable except for the internal drives (it has 12 external HS bays and two internal trays for IDE or sata drives, Plus a slim line cd/dvd tray.  I had them put in a dual redundent PSU that is also hot swapable.

 

Bluray disks are ripped to the same format as a BR disk with the trailers and dire warnings removed. similarly for the DVD's but to the standard DVDformat.  No transcoding is performed so the rips are bit images. All music is ripped to FLAC.

 

 

Do you mind if I ask what software you use for your BR/Dvd's to do this?

 

Cheers

FIrst thing is that Anydvd HD is always running to decrypt the disk transparently to the applications doing the ripping.  AnyDVD is not free but is worth the money.  It is updated automatically by Slysoft and just does its thing quietly in the background.

 

For BR disks I use ClownBD which is a nice workflow manager for EAC3TO, tsmuxer and an image burner which I do not use.  When you download the ClownBD system it points you to all of the other tools for downloading.  ClownBD and all of the tools it coordinates are free. ClownBD is nice in that it handles True HD and Master Audio, providing of course that your player is capable of playing those streams

 

For DVD's I use either CloneDVD or MakeMKV depending if I want folder structure or a single mkv file.

 

I use Boilsoft Video Joiner to combine two mkv files (e.g. Part 1 and Part 2 of Pearl Harbor)  into a single mkv formatted stream for two sided or multi disk items that I want to view as a single entity.

 

I generally rip to a folder on the machine doing the ripping and when I go to bed I just start a file move from that system to the unraid for all the Rips I did that day.  In that way I get much faster overall rip times as the network is not in the loop, and when I am asleep the copy/moves take place across the network when I do not care about the time penalty.

 

Also, I keep all of my BR/DVD Disks (I just ordered a rack with 450 positions as the boxes are getting out of hand, It will go in my electronics closet.) and do not loan them out so I am never in violation of the "Intent/Spirit" of the Digital Rights Management crapola.

 

Aiden,  Take a look at "My Movies".  A jukebox system that IIRC can deal with the Dune players formats.

Did they fix "HD" audio on XMBC yet?  I'm hoping they will sort Plex out soonish but I might give up and move to XBMC

What's wrong with HD audio on XBMC?  I use audio over HDMI through my HTPC (see link in my sig for details).  You just have to tell it to do audio over HDMI in the settings because it defaults to the analog audio outputs.

It is not fully sorted out for DTS HD or Master Audio.  In general if you rip the BR disk (which are the only disks that have those audio streams AFAIK) using a method that converts the audio to an 8 channel flac stream then the DTS HD and MAster audio do play properly.  The XBMC forum does have info on how to do this.

 

I built my theater many years ago and included a very sophisticated movie librarian of my own design. I just updated it to incorporate backgrounds of the movie currently under consideration.  For that reason I have not used XBMC that much as most of its feature laden GUI has to do with its internal librarian.  I use the Dune player now which has unfortunatly a very poor GUI but does an excellent job of rendering audio and video including 1080p @ 24 fps and @ 60 fps. It does True HD (DTS HD) and Master Audio with no issues as long as the core audio stream has been ripped properly.  I have also found some very interesting programs that can be used as very complete collection managers.  I use "DVD Profiler" which exports an XML data base that can be used to drive players (Some code required) and "My Movies" which will either scan a library in storage (e.g. on a NAS organized by titles), or take the output of DVD profiler and retrieve all of the data related to that movie; including cover art, Cast/crew/overview and backdrops.  I have a version of my Librarian that runs on the Pronto PRO remote control line that I am looking into providing.  It would utilize a helper (server) app that currently runs on a PC and which I would convert to run on the unraid slackware distro, but I am not that fluent in C or Linux develpment so I have a learning curve problem.  The helper app is used because of the need to deal with the vast amount of data a large (1000+ titles) movie library contains and the Pronto's limited storage.  The Pronto does not do SAMBA or NTFS.  

 

For those interested I have attached a Photo (I am not that good a photographer) of what the librarian displays on the Theaters screen (10 foot wide) when browsing through the library. The left 1/3 is the collection list which can be filtered by genre, or sorted by title or release date.  The pronto allows for high speed browsing or cursor based navigation.  If TV Shows are selected the collection list is split with the top 1/3 showing the TV Show name and season, and the bottom 2/3 showing the episodes for that shows season.

 

OK Thanks,  excellent post.

barrygordon - your home theater sounds wonderful!  I am very envious indeed - a 10 foot screen would be tremendous!

 

I do have a question for you (if I read your post correctly) - Can your HTPC handle Blu-Ray playback as well?  The reason I ask is because I am just starting off on my home theater journey.  I purchased a Sony PS3 for Blu-Ray playback (and games for my son) and it does a fine job.  However, I am planning on building an HTPC for XBMC and was wondering if the video quality is comparable to a standalone/PS3 Blu-Ray setup?

 

I currently run PS3Media server which works great for DVD rips, but am thinking a setup may be the direction I want to go.

 

Thank you - any chance on seeing some photos of your setup?

 

 

I am not sure of your question.  The PC that controls the theater just does that.  It does not even have a permanent CD/DVD/BD drive, but rather a bootable CD USB drive. 

 

The Librarian is on that PC as part of the control system, but video rendering for movies/concerts/TV-Shows (BR and/or DVD) is done by a Dune player or XBMC, both work. BR disks are rendered at 1080p @ 24 or 60 fps with full multichannel audio including DTS-HD and Master Audio using the Dune.  The PC also runs Slide shows, but I am doing work in that area to really improve them.  The PC has dual monitor output and can drive the Projector at 1920x1080 but not full motion.  Fine for the Librarian and slide shows.

 

The XBMC runs on the Asrock 330 PRO which is just about made for XBMC.

 

I have an article on the theater with pictures but it is about 9 meg total size as a Word 2007 doc (docx).  I need to just go over it and place it on my web site. I will probably get to that this weekend.

I too rip my Blu Rays using AnyDVD HD plus over to Multichannel FLAC to playback in XBMC. Its the best thing out there I think.

 

For XBMC fans, here is how to rip Blu Ray to mkv with FLAC:

 

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17002

 

Here is how to get the playback to work in XBMC Linux:

 

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=74778&highlight=judder+free

 

And as a bonus how to get perfect autodetecting 24p and 60p support in Linux:

 

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=70068&highlight=judder+free

 

 

My apologies for my confusing post!  I misunderstood and thought your HTPC had a blu-ray drive and could playback from disc.  I am thinking about building an HTPC with a blu-ray drive but am not certain how the quality will compare to my Sony PS3.

 

Your system sounds great - I look forward to the photos when you post them.  Thanks again!

 

poofyhairguy - thanks for the links!  These will be a great help for sure!

I have posted on my web site two new items for download. One is an update to the Documentation on my Home Theater for those who have an interest.

 

The second is a complete test and demo program for controlling the Sony BDP-CX7000ES BluRay mega changer over IP.

 

Depending on my schedule I am thinking of writing a complete system for the Pronto Pro Wi-Fi based remote control which would include a librarian (Which is basically done, but requires "Helper application", as a server on a PC which I need to port to unRaid) , Control for three players; the Sony BDP-CX7000ES, The Dune Base 3.0, and the XBMC all over IP with no IR or RS232 involved. I have all the code to do this running in my theater but on a PC and just need to port it to the Pronto PRO. In essence you end up with a Kalaidascape like system that fits in your hand.

 

You all know how to reach me. My profile contains that info who don't. Then again just post on this thread