Re: DVD ISO Server

Luc The Perverse wrote:
Question - if I host DVD ISOs on a remote Linux machine (still in my house) can I play the DVD's using Xine with the DVD decoder from Videolan site anywhere in my house?

Not sure about VLC stuff with Xine, but you can get Xine to support quite many different streams and it's no problem as long as you have a connection between the client and the server.


Will 100 base T network be sufficient for spooling, or will I need gigabit ethernet? (I'm leaning towards gigabit anyway, especially since there are intelligent switches which are tolerant of 100 Mb/sec connections)

Yes, it will be enough if you don't have 10 users who at the same time tries to watch a movie.


You see, now that 500 GB drives are reasonably priced I want to make a Raid 5 array of 5 of them and put them in a Linux server to have 2 TB storage for media. This much room is useless though, if I am not able to put videos on it. Even FLAC audio would take thousands of CDs to fill it up.

If you use Raid, I would recommend you to use a proper raid card and not softraid.


I realize it is off topic, but I'm also curious if a Windows Box can play a mounted DVD ISO.

There are some software that allows you to mount an image on microsoft too.


What kind of memory, CPU would I require in a box (conservative - I don't want any fool ups) to support up to 4 DVD streams, and 4 Flac streams. Are we talking Dual core opteron 2.6 Ghz with 4 Gb of ram, or am I blowing this out of proportion? (Or - scary thought, am I underestimating the need) I wish to use hardware which takes as much strain off the processor as possible for Disk and Network I/O.

I would pick a network file system, NFS is my favorite at the moment. NFS3 is supported by most distros out of the box, NFS4 is a bit experimental still but don't use as much CPU all the time.

If you have a dedicated fileserver, you can manage quite well with a AMD Duron 700MHz machine that has ATA100 and 512MB ram (more ram bigger buffers, more speed). If you want that the CPU to be as much idle as possible, then ditch IDE (PATA/SATA) and go for SCSI, but then you pay a lot more per GiB.


I did make a bit experimenting with a AMD Athlon 1000MHz as fileserver (NFS) and a PegasosII PowerPC G3/600MHz running Freevo, it's just like you have all the harddrives on the mediaplaying computer (Pegasos), you don't notice any difference, you browse between your songs and movies and start play what you want to see/hear without any delay. At the same time my desktop computers access the NFS share of /home without any delay.

When I did study some computer science we had a couple of hundred machines accessing /home over NFS without any problems in those days when 100Mbit was considered to be really fast. (fileserver was a SparcStation 20).


//Aho
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