Awesome setup. I have a concern though, are any of those hard drives mirrored or are you doing tape backups or something?….Would hate to see you lose some of that media in a disk crash…how much of a risk that is all depends on how hard you’re pushing those disks I suppose though.

hmm i think this is way too nerdy and doesn’t even look good =)

Taking shots at someone’s setup makes you look small.

Just letting you know kinda like a friend telling you that’s there’s a bit of broccoli stuck in your teeth so you don’t embarrass yourself.

Micah needs to learn how to dust.

Nice setup but clean the dust before you take pictures man!!

Now i just gotta get mine submitted =)

me :
or he lives in holland, since downloading for personal use, no matter what the source is, is legal here.

Uhmm.. I’m pretty sure it is NOT legal.

But seriously, I would not “advertise” having 1500 movies without being prepared to show proof of license purchase (blue ray, etc..). By having this guy’s setup on its front page, does XBMC.org endorse his “setup” including his acquisition of 1500 movies? … Oh wait.. I get it. It’s “the don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. Then it must be ok :(.

me :
or he lives in holland, since downloading for personal use, no matter what the source is, is legal here.

Uhmm.. I’m pretty sure it is NOT legal.

But seriously, I would not “advertise” having 1500 movies without being prepared to show proof of license purchase (blue ray, etc..). By having this guy’s setup on its front page, does XBMC.org endorse his “setup” including his acquisition of 1500 movies? … Oh wait.. I get it. It’s “the don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. Then it must be ok :(.

@Jackaroo
Haters gonna hate eh?

Jackaroo :

me :
or he lives in holland, since downloading for personal use, no matter what the source is, is legal here.

Uhmm.. I’m pretty sure it is NOT legal.

Also coming from the Netherlands I’m more than pretty sure downloading of copyrighted music and movies (not software) is legal even if the source is illegal, though only (as already mentioned) if it’s for personal use. Uploading of that same material is not legal. As a compensation for the industry a fee is paid on each purchased data carrier (e.g. CD-R/DVD-R, but so far not on HDDs and mp3 players AFAIK). Whether those fees are properly paid out is a different matter.
On-topic: Nice setup, I especially envy the consoles :).

Do you have any other TVs in your house? I have 2 TVs with different XBMC computer’s attached, both connecting via Samba to the server in the office. I’d love to have the XBMC metadata on the server too, so that when I watch an episode upstairs, I’ll see that it’s been watched downstairs. Or if I go through the trouble to identify my media on one, I’d like to be able to see the fan-art on the other.

Any way to set things up that way? Sort of with a database or something?

Dush :
@rcrh I don’t know why people have expensive RAID setups for their media server. With hard-drive prices going down every month it’s far cheaper to just fill up the largest drive with chapest £ per GB, wait till you fill that and buy another since it’ll be cheaper. If you buy, say, all 10tb of storage up front it’ll cost more.
I guess it’s about bandwidth. I have a 50mbit connection that’s truly unlimited so if I loose a 2tb I can just redownload. The last 3-4 years of usenet is my redundancy. That’s why I also delete stuff. If I want to rewatch I can redownload most things within 20 minutes.

there is no such thing as truly unlimited, especially with virgin!!

Why would XBMC leave this feature up when the person profiled is openly admitting in the comments that he pirated his entire media collection … No shortage of stupidity on either end it seems.

Micah :
Download media? Who does that? But say hypothetically one had unlimited bandwidth through their cable modem and the Astraweb unlimited speed/bandwidth package for $11 per month. I would say that is a very efficient and cost effective way of filling up huge drives :) Hypothetically of course….

Very nice setup! Thanks for sharing it!

@Marc
You could mount your userdata folder as a symbolic link (if you’re using a unix/live installation) to a shared directory, and if you stick this on your samba server, then you should be able to share the configs…however, not sure how well it would play if two machines updated the config/library at once, perhaps have only one master xbmc with write enabled that updates the config and the rest are only allowed read access? HTH

Marc :
Do you have any other TVs in your house? I have 2 TVs with different XBMC computer’s attached, both connecting via Samba to the server in the office. I’d love to have the XBMC metadata on the server too, so that when I watch an episode upstairs, I’ll see that it’s been watched downstairs. Or if I go through the trouble to identify my media on one, I’d like to be able to see the fan-art on the other.
Any way to set things up that way? Sort of with a database or something?

@Marc
You could mount your userdata folder as a symbolic link (if you’re using a unix/live installation) to a shared directory, and if you stick this on your samba server, then you should be able to share the configs…however, not sure how well it would play if two machines updated the config/library at once, perhaps have only one master xbmc with write enabled that updates the config and the rest are only allowed read access? HTH

If you have UPC in the Netherlands there is:) I have a 120mbit connection which gives me a download speed of around 10mb p/s.. Which i used to fill my Xtreamer Pro (yes they are asswipes, but for me everything works) with 4TB, my Xtreamer Ultra 1TB, my 5 WD books of aproximately 6TB:) The WD’s are filled with (90%) dvdrips and 10% Tv Rips for rare shows (Series from when I was young and new).

The Xtreamer’s are filled with 550+ full HD films and growing almost daily.. And this is just my downloaded crap:) Which was all downloaded legally. And besides this collection I also buy dvd’s and blurays legally:)

And i’m not showing off, just never shared nu crap setup:)

Nathan :

Dush :
@rcrh I don’t know why people have expensive RAID setups for their media server. With hard-drive prices going down every month it’s far cheaper to just fill up the largest drive with chapest £ per GB, wait till you fill that and buy another since it’ll be cheaper. If you buy, say, all 10tb of storage up front it’ll cost more.
I guess it’s about bandwidth. I have a 50mbit connection that’s truly unlimited so if I loose a 2tb I can just redownload. The last 3-4 years of usenet is my redundancy. That’s why I also delete stuff. If I want to rewatch I can redownload most things within 20 minutes.

there is no such thing as truly unlimited, especially with virgin!!

@n2burns
In my job I’ve seen all kinds of data-losses and I’m well educated when it comes to RAID systems. First of all, RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Originally it was Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, however you should not take the word inexpensive in the literal sense that you can simply cram in consumer grade drives and expect things to be all fine. Most hardware raid controllers have a time-limit on when a drive should respond to reads or writes. If the drive does not respond within that timeframe (usually around 7 to 8 seconds) then the raid controller removes the drive from the array because it deems it to be toast. Consumer drives will do their upmost best to still read or write a possibly bad sector and will take longer than 7 to 8 seconds to do so. Have this happen to two drives in your setup and gone is your raid5 set. Have this happen to three drives in your setup and gone is even your raid6. With 12 drives, such a scenario is not unthinkable. I’ve seen quite a few consumer drive setups being completely lost because of this. And personally I’d rather loose 1 drive of movies/serie than all data in an entire array. Especially things like movies/series, which I think is data that can be restored quite easily. Would this be photo’s or important documents, then of course, I’d use a raid 1 setup, and yes you can safely use consumer drives on a raid 1 as nothing is striped anyway and thus you will always have the data. I’d even go a step further and use offsite backups. My home-setup for important data is RAID1’s that I rsync on a nightly basis to my server in a datacenter in amsterdam. I’m very keen on keeping my valuable data as protected as possible but I just don’t think that media such as movies and tv series is data that is THAT important. It’s data you can restore when you lose it.

@Jackaroo
I wouldn’t be so pretty sure and quick with your statement that illegal in Holland. It IS legal in Holland to download copyrighted material for personal use with the exception of software. Uploading copyrighted material is illegal.

@Mr_Roberto
My penis is not threatened by his ram in any way. In fact, if his setup was given to me for free I’d hand out the ram in parts of 4gigs to friends and family or whoever could use it. I simply think it’s unnecessary overkill to have that much RAM in a gamers pc. Unless it’s a very heavy duty database server, it’s useless to put more than 4 to 6 gigs of ram in a consumers pc.

In Europe private copies are allowed in many countries, even if they are from an illegal source. So NO: These copies ARE NOT illegal. Now what?

@Anonymous

Last time I checked it was innocent until proven guilty. It’s not a matter of “dont ask, don’t tell”. It’s just a case of not assuming someone is breaking the law. Based on how much money this guy has spent on his setup, it is that hard to believe that he’s spent that much on Blu-rays and such like? My friend has a 21″ LCD and spends nearly $800 a month on buying movies so what more someone like this?

Marc :
Do you have any other TVs in your house? I have 2 TVs with different XBMC computer’s attached, both connecting via Samba to the server in the office. I’d love to have the XBMC metadata on the server too, so that when I watch an episode upstairs, I’ll see that it’s been watched downstairs. Or if I go through the trouble to identify my media on one, I’d like to be able to see the fan-art on the other.
Any way to set things up that way? Sort of with a database or something?

You can always try Lifehacker’s suggestion to this http://tinyurl.com/2vp2myr – I can’t say how well it works as I’ve not got around to doing it myself yet so good luck to you if you try it.

@tzevel
Fully agreed!!!!!

@Ronner
Would you be able to give me some more information/references? I can’t find any verification of that on my own and if I’m going to proven wrong, I want to learn from it. ;)
I’m also curious, does this problem plague software RAIDs as well? I ask because I doubt a consumer sees much benefit in using a hardware RAID, especially with media files.
I think our opinion on reacquiring media probably differs because of where we live. I’m in Canada where a 15Mbps/1Mbps Cable connection is about the fastest residential connection you can get. I was not joking when I said it took nearly 6 months to reobtain less than a TB.

@n2burns

Google on terms such as TLER or ERC or CCTL. HDD vendors have given different names to pretty much the same technology.

I’m not sure if the same problem applies to software raid or perhaps certain software raids. I can imagine that a linux software raid would not have this problem with consumer drives, but for instance a cheap Sata RAID controller (which is also software raid through it’s drivers) could possibly still suffer from the same problem. It would all depend on the software that handles the raid.

I’m on 120mbit so reacquiring lost media such as movies and tvseries isn’t an issue for me.

@scokem

scokem :

Marc :
Do you have any other TVs in your house? I have 2 TVs with different XBMC computer’s attached, both connecting via Samba to the server in the office. I’d love to have the XBMC metadata on the server too, so that when I watch an episode upstairs, I’ll see that it’s been watched downstairs. Or if I go through the trouble to identify my media on one, I’d like to be able to see the fan-art on the other.
Any way to set things up that way? Sort of with a database or something?

You can always try Lifehacker’s suggestion to this http://tinyurl.com/2vp2myr – I can’t say how well it works as I’ve not got around to doing it myself yet so good luck to you if you try it.

Marc,

Once I get my library metadata all squared away (correct titles, etc), I export my database to the samba source (my FreeNAS server). It’ll dump all the metadata into each tv show, movie, and album folder. Once that’s done, I re-scrape everything on the other machines. It doesn’t tell me if Ive seen an episode already, but it standardizes the libraries on the different machines.

@Marc
I use Ember Media Manager to collect metadata, fanart etc so it gets stored within the same dir as the movie itself and I have two xbmc installs, one upstairs and one downstairs. The one upstairs is the one with all the media storage (server on the attic connected to the tv one floor down) and I have a symlink from the xbmc downstairs to the xbmc database, thumbnail folder etc to the server upstairs so it looks at the same data and database. Whenever I have watched something upstairs it will also show that it’s watched downstairs and vice versa. It’s not that hard to set up and there are numerous tutorials on how to do that on the xbmc forums

** SIGH **

boring…

@Marc, the best way is to have a mysql backend to handle the database and to share the thumbs directory between machines.
I have a win 7 server with 12TB (raid 5) where my media is, on it, i also have a share containing the thumbs.
Then, on each install of xbmc (I’m using live on ion based micropcs), i just mapped the /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/ directory to a remote cifs share. every xbmc have rw rights, so i can update from anywhere, and my datas are always 100% synched.

Marc :
Do you have any other TVs in your house? I have 2 TVs with different XBMC computer’s attached, both connecting via Samba to the server in the office. I’d love to have the XBMC metadata on the server too, so that when I watch an episode upstairs, I’ll see that it’s been watched downstairs. Or if I go through the trouble to identify my media on one, I’d like to be able to see the fan-art on the other.
Any way to set things up that way? Sort of with a database or something?

Marc,
Not sure which versions of XBMC (live, windows,etc) but just check out the forums… use a mysql backend for your database and set up a share on your network for the Thumbnails folder out of your userdata folder with symbolic links on each of your xbmc machines.. Single machine updater and multiples, doesn’t really matter.. mysql handles everything on the backend.. keeps your library consistent across the network (metadata, thumbs, etc..) and yes, you can stop a show in one room and resume it in the other right where you left off..

Does anyone know how long he has this system running?
The reason i am asking is because his drives are rated at 10^^14 bits ure.
That means in theory that if he has 10^^14 bits of data that he will have a corrupted bit.
That in a raid will cause the hd with the corrupted bit to be marked as failed.By the way
10^14 is ~12TiB :|

Cool!!
Natethomas The KING!!

I have 16 Tera (1400 approx) of high-definition’s movies (720p/1080p) in a centralized media server (8 x 2TB WD Green Power)
In the living room and bedroom I put a Mini HTPC (ASROCK) with XBMC Live. Both read the 1080p films from the media server without any slowdown.

As soon as possible to publish some photos on the layout.

I love XBMC ….
XBMC 4 Ever!

Dude, what’s that that chair u using? seriously? :D

I have to say that this looks a pretty awesome setup.
I am a bit confused why he is running the storage on his gaming rig, seems very much overkill when it comes to processing power. I personally run (which is soon to be updated to the latest board) an original atom 230 mini-itx motherboard with a 4 port raid card. This runs win 2k8 server for remote desktops to keep the mrs happy (she even gets how to use uTorrent).
Soon to change to the latest atom with an 8 port raid card running freenas and a VM of 2k8 server. Even with 8×2tb drives at 14TB raid5 it will only consume about 60-80watts.
That tagged along with my soon to be 2 apple tv2’s and an asrock ion 330 will consume less power than just his htpc, which is able to serve out 2×720p screens and a 1080p screen with a theoretical 36TB based on maximum drives available now. no need to ever touch it for a good 4-5 years :)

Sorry but your setup isn’t anything that special you have tried flashing around amounts making out it’s good because it has high numbers.

Any person that knows there stuff would not be storring all them hard drives in a gaming PC they would have like myself a server.

Next your so called gaming pc spec doesn’t look that great anyway i7 950 old get sandbridge and gtx 470 is that suppose to be something special well it’s not also your ram amount is plain up stupid it has been proven that gamers don’t use much more then 4gb so if you had 8gb in your system running win7 that would be perfect another note no mention of ram or hard drive speeds so they could be slow as hell.

Last thing I looked at your pics and I see a silly so called htpc come on atleast put it in a proper case I bet that was your old rig right? Your desk setup is funny only 1 small monitor come on.