Building A Unified Media Collection
Written by William on November 20, 2008 at 6:29 PM20 Nov
Nadia and I have a lot of media around the house. Some of it is in disc format, and some of it is in digital format. Since we each have a computer, we both handle the storage of media differently.
Photos
Nadia’s 25GB collection of photos lives on an external 125GB Maxtor connected to her desktop. She uses Picasa 2 to manage her library.
My 9GB photo gallery lives on the hp MediaSmart Server, and I interact with it using Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
Music
Nadia’s 44GB DRM-free music library is stored on an external 150GB Western Digital hard drive connected to her desktop. She uses Windows Media Player 11 to manage her music collection, and syncs her library to a 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M.
My 20GB music library is stored on my desktop’s 320GB hard drive. I use Zune to manage it and to download new tracks. Since I subscribe to Zune Pass, the majority of my music is DRMed.
Video
Aside from the handful of ripped movies on our desktop hard drives, our movies are all in VHS, DVD and HD DVD format, scattered in boxes all over the living room.
Our television shows are in DVD boxed sets, purchased from Amazon Unbox or iTunes Store, trapped on our Motorola DVR provided by Baja Cable, or on our desktops (both have Media Center installed). Nadia’s PC can record two shows at once, while mine can only record one at a time.
The Goal
I want to find a way to bring all this media together in a way to make it easily accessible from any device we currently own, excluding obvious incompatibilities (like getting my Zune Pass music onto Nadia’s Zen). Regardless of the computer used, I want to see the same music library and playlists. I want to stream all of my movies to the 360 in the living room, and I want the same files to work on our portable media players. When Nadia imports new photos, I want to see them in my library. When one of us wants to get to our media collection when we are out of the house, I want to be able to do so (assuming an internet connection is available, of course).
This is a pretty tall order. As I work my way toward a solution, I will document everything I learn here. Feel free to throw in your suggestions.
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4 Responses for "Building A Unified Media Collection"
I do all of this with the Zune software. I access all my photos, music and stream all my movies, netflix, and dumped DVDs - I use dvdfab and handbreak (h.246 mp4).
Photos are placed in one location and added to both our zune profiles.
Only draw back with the zune software, multiple users, and media sharing; only one profile can share to the 360’s. My wife has her own profile and her own Zune - we keep our music separate (she’s a little country - I’m a little rock-n-roll)… so if she wants to stream her music over the 360… she can’t. Only work around would be to create a playlist on my profile with her music but not to add it to my library - or use Media player to stream hers.
So it’s possible.
I wanted to use Media Center in Vista but the way I have my 360’s wirelessly bridge… MC won’t work - plus it won’t stream MP4 video. Zune does it all.
I was afraid that I would have to cut MC out of it. I much prefer that interface to the 360’s (for video playback, at least), but it that’s what I need to do then that’s what I’ll do.
Question: can the old Zune 30 playback h.246 content?
Yoe seem to have your hands full. But when you do figure it out let me know. Can you simple network all the hd’s and Cpu to pull this off. About Streaming to teh 360, I’m a lost sheep on that.
@Free
I have a server that should be part of this whole plan. It has a pair of internal and a pair of external drives; in total, 2TB of space. It’s already networked with the other PCs, so this is an integral piece of the solution.
Streaming music to the 360 is really easy, luckily. Video is a little more challenging, but as Captain Betty said, if I use the Zune software it’ll facilitate the process.
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