Finding no prebuilt solution to what my needs are I wated to bring the question up to the Linux people.


First off the Xbox Media Center project XMBC is pretty cool and offers a lot of features given that you want to mod your xbox. Problem is questionable legality and the startup costs for a peice of hardware that could handle. Stock setups are not adequate to handle anything beyond 720p. (Funny becuase I believe the games with the HDTV adapter can do 1080i)

I would like to reduce my growing collection of DVD's to a few boxes in a closet but before putting them in storage I want to copy them to a networked hard drive array (Raid based and easily built) yet I do not see any concrete way to reduce dvd's to a few gigs on a drive that could be played back in full sound via networked player(s).


I'd like to find a set top box sized linux PC that's powerful enough to handle the following tasks..

DVD Playback (Disc based) software that would upconvert the 480 line dvd to 720p (Minimum) possibly 1080i

Network playback of DVD's and the ability to play it back with full Digital sound up to 7.1 channel preferred Dolby Digital DTS type stuff.

Web ability (Trivial)

Music Playback (Trivial)


So does anyone know of any setups or things one could collect to build such a thing?

I would recode the DVD (which is MPEG-2) to MPEG-4. This reduces file size (and network load) drastically. 5-10 times, depending on bitrate used. I personally prefer XviD, libavcodec is very good too. Knowledge in video formats and encoder tuning is recommended for perfect result.
Here is a dedicated Linux distro for playback: http://www.geexbox.org/en/
You may resize 480 pix video in recoding process (frankly I don't see any good reason to do this, may require some clever filtering and results in bigger file), configure the Geexbox output for higher resolution or let your HDTV do it for you.