Daily Blog - John E. Johnson, Jr. - March 8, 2008: HIGH END VIDEO COMING TO MOTHERBOARDS.
A couple of days ago, the news reported that AMD is finishing a chip for computers that will replace the high end video cards (except for the absolute extreme cards) that will be able to handle all of the things that the high end cards do, including fast 3D computations. The news was meant for gamers, but I see it as a step towards less expensive media servers where movies (film) can be input as 24 fps, and interpolated to at least 72 fps with two frames calculated in between each of the native frames. We are already beginning to see this in outboard video processors and at least one flat panel HDTV, but having it in an on-board single chipset in media servers would be a big step forward in bringing media serving to the masses at very affordable prices.
This is especially so now that 1 TB hard drives are relatively inexpensive (about $330). A 1 TB drive will hold about 20 HD movies (25 GB each), 30 SD movies, and your entire CD collection. So, a home built media server would be $100 for the case, $50 for the power supply, $150 for the motherboard, $200 for the RAM, $300 for the drive, and $200 for the operating system. Using the eventual HDMI output jack that will appear on new motherboards, away you go for $1,000. The critical factor will be the user interface. There are some out there now, but they are not very user friendly. Wanna be billionaires should get started writing the world’s greatest media server user interface today.
March 9th, 2008 at 8:31 am
JJ:
Realistically if you value the time and effort that went in to ripping the content to your hard drive you are going to want to at least mirror the drives. So double the cost of the hard drive part of the equation. As “overkill” as it sounds, a pair of 250GB drives for the OS and programs and a pair of TB drives for content are really a better solution than letting it all hang out on a single drive.
Alternatively, you could purchase a NAS product such as the Drobo or the ReadyNAS products and create network attached shares which are then pulled in by various media players. These are RAID protected subsystems. You could buy a Drobo + four 500GB drives for 1.5TB usable and still be out less than $1G.
This approach would allow you to minimize the storage footprint and potentially go to a Solid State Drive for the OS for the various media players in the house. SSDs have no mechanical parts which means that they will likely survive for the anticipated lifetime of the media player.
It’s the right way to do the job.
Cheers,
March 9th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Yes, having a backup plan is a good thing, either just an extra drive that you back up all your movies and music to, or have several drives in RAID configuration. My media server has four 1 TB drives in RAID 5. So, basically, I have 3 TB of usable space. If a drive fails, I put in another one and let the system rebuild.