Home Theater PC

[mawilson]

As we all should know, weight and space are always considerations when it come to RVs. It seems to me that this may be an ideal use case for a Home Theater PC (HTPC) instead of loading in a stack of disks.

For those who may not follow computer technology, HTPC uses a small PC to serve as a hub for an entertainment center. The HTPC uses the TV as a monitor and either a remote or wireless keyboard for input. A hard drive can store content (e.g. movies). A DVD holds about 4GB. A Blu-ray disk holds about 25GB. A 1TB hard drive can store 250 DVDs or 40 Blu-rays. A 4TB external HD can 1000 DVDs or 160 Blu-rays. Actually, if you only store the movie without all the extras using modern compression, the number goes up dramatically. There's probably room for several thousand MP3 files as well.

My thought is to use a Raspberry Pi ($35), a 4TB HD ($100), Bluetooth keyboard ($30) and Kodi (free). It should take the space of about 5 or 6 disks and weigh about the same.

There are other options such as mini ITX and mini ATX but, they often require a fan and cost $250 or more. SSDs in the 2TB range are ~$500 and up. The Pi/HDD wins hands down in the bang for buck department.

[sleepybadger]

How do you get all your dvds onto the media server since most have copyright protection on them.

[5picker]

There was some discussion on this a few weeks ago....
Better-Media-Files

[ependydad]

Originally Posted by sleepybadger

How do you get all your dvds onto the media server since most have copyright protection on them.

There is software that you can buy that decrypts the DVD. I wrote about it here:

http://learntorv.com/ripping-dvds-to...them-portable/

[lugoismad]

I'm using a raspberryPi running Kodi and a 1TB drive. Works just fine.

[TBKHomeworld]

I've done XMBC, Kodi, and now LibreElec on various flavors of machines, including the original Xbox. Of them all the Raspberry Pi is very low power consumption, weighs the least, and can easily handle 1080p movies with no issues. I have a synology at the house to store my data on, when we travel I move over the TV series and movies we want to watch on a 2.5" 4TB external hard drive that is designed to handle high-Gs from StoreJet. When I work I also carry it in my backpack on my motorcycle....so far it has held up pretty darn well. However, as SSDs come down in price I plan on moving my portal media to a 4-8TB SSD as there are no moving parts resulting in higher G rating and less power consumption. They just released 30TB SSDs a couple of weeks ago which are going to be stupidly high priced now, but eventually they will come down and I might get one of those. Amazon also has some very small keyboard/mice combos that you can use via RF or bluetooth which will complete the project in a nice tidy package. There are tons of solutions out there to get your DVD/BluRays ripped onto digital medium. On a side note, I also have a Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole for my home, does wonders keeping your network clean from bad domains. Pi-hole is a DNS tool that shuffles off 'bad' URLs to localhost.