Know It Or Blow It

Darn you Boxee… You’re costing me quite a lot of money:

• To enable wireless streaming of DVDs I hasd to upgrade my network to the Draft n, so I added a Dlink 655 wireless router
• To be able to store all my ripped DVDs, I just bought a QNAP TS-509 Pro together with 5x the Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda (in a RAID 5 setup), giving me 5495.47 GB of storage space.

I’m now hacking my QNAP to support extraction of .iso images (so I can also download backup copies of my movies). This was a bit harder than I initially tought (mount -t iso9660 was not supported), so, in short:

For the last couple of years, I’ve been buying quite a few DVD’s. However, I’m buying less and less lately, partly because I don’t know where to store them anymore and partly because I want to have them available when I want (like the On Demand features), and not wanting to physically search for them.

After our appartment has been redesigned, I decided not to have a DVD player in the room anymore, especially when I discovered Boxee, an open, connected, social media centre, which was now available for AppleTV as well.

So now I’m ripping all my DVD’s in full format to disk, playing them via Boxee on my AppleTV. I think this might become the perfect alternative for Kaleidescape, the $15.000 home entertainment system on which I’ve been drooling for a while.

It’s currently in Alpha state, on invitation only, for Mac, Linux & AppleTV. Got any of these and want to try it out ? Let me know in the comments.

After 4 weeks, the reconstruction of our apartment is ALMOST done. Lot’s of new colors, corners, cabinet, kitchen and, most importantly, gadgets (Like our Elica Twin kitchenhood and our Busch-Jaeger Touchpanel).

Final details are most likely done next week, but we can live in our house again!

Design by SuperDutch and Bas!

Was visiting the MediaMarkt today, and noticed that they had exactly ONE HD-DVD left (it was on sale!), compared to hundreds of blu-ray’s. Was witnessing HD-DVD’s final hours, almost felt compelled to buy that last one. Was King Kong though…

For “full” description, see http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/TorrentFlux-b4rt
Download my transmissioncli 1.10 build here