Building a HTPC cloud for home

[yukit]

As a HTPC enthusiast, I have a bunch of PCs, NASes & networking gears in my home. My current project is to upgrade the connection speed between my home office (work/gaming PCs) & living room (HTPC) so I can transfer/stream data faster than a typical wireless 11g connection.

While I was researching how I want to reconfigure my servers & storage devices to synch data between two nodes so I have access to all media files easily & quickly, it dawned on me that what I need is an infrastructure that knows about the media sources, storage & consuming endpoints such that my iTunes music, Tivo video, DVD movies & misc media files can be easily accessed regardless of where they are located. So I am stealing "HTPC cloud" as the popular nomenclature used for cloud computing since data storage & synchronization are crucial components.

Actually, the main motivation for this idea is for my spouse. While I know exactly where & how to get the data I want, my spouse is usually limited to data immediately available to iPods & Tivos she has access to. She does not know about all the "Sex in the City" recordings that are sitting on NAS offloaded from Tivo (she bought the DVDs). She can play music with Squeezebox on the home theater, but she won't know how to get that song on her iPod since the CDs have been ripped to flac.

I would probably have to quit my day job to figure all this out on my own. I don't have unlimited resources like billg, Ellison or goog millionaires. Anyone tried something like this? Any pointers? I think Microsoft's Media Center does have some of these ingredients, but they still have a long way to go.

 

[thiggins]

This is another example of slow evolution of standards and the resulting proprietary solutions. Data source indexing and presentation are part of the services that UPnP AV / DLNA is supposed to provide. But that requires compliant devices on both ends, i.e. data repositories and players.

iPods and Tivos, in particular don't do UPnP AV / DLNA, so can't take advantage of the discovery services.

When you add to that different media encodings that aren't supported on all players, you complicate the problem even more.

In the end, if you want your "cloud" to be dead simple, then you need to limit the media formats and devices used.

 

[scotty]

In the end, if you want your "cloud" to be dead simple, then you need to limit the media formats and devices used.

That's pretty much hitting the nail on the head. I've struggled with this over the years and all you can really do is find the lowest common denominator file format and work from there. Even then, you'll have some rogue device that does something really well, but its really hard to get it to play nicely with everyone else. Things like MythTV and even Media Center help a bit becuase typically they can play almost anything you can throw a codec at. Crap like Tivo and various proprietary cableco recievers just make it all the more messy.

 

[vnangia]

Audio is easy - MP3 all around, makes the world go round.

I'm curious if someone has a recommend video format.

One of the more interesting problems I've run into is that there is no universal format that plays on everything. For example, while I might be able to convince my PS3 to playback a certain video file, video in h.264, audio in AAC, in a MP4 container, the iPod rejects it. And that file will definitely not playback on the Xbox, and will bring a reasonably powerful desktop to its knees. So in our relatively small network of devices (two iPods, two Windows machines, a Mac, a Linux machine, a PS3, an Xbox, a Wii, assorted wireless gadgets), we have to encode every file in three formats, at least.