I have a relatively large collection of ripped DVDs at home, in XviD format, which I play back using the excellent Xbox Media Center.
I used to have this stored on the Xbox hard drive itself (which I had upgraded to 200GB). However, it was a royal pain to get media onto the Xbox, since it wasn’t connected to my home network at the time, and I wanted to consolidate the location that my media was stored (having recently purchased an Xbox 360, which also has some streaming capabilities).
Having had enough of preparing the files on my desktop, copying them to my laptop, and then FTP‘ing them onto the Xbox using FTP and a cross-over cable, I decided to take some action.
I bought a 10m ethernet cable to hook the Xbox into the switch, then I settled on the Synology DS101j as the storage unit, as it met my criteria:
- Affordable
- Supports both internal IDE disks and USB attached disks
- No drive size limitation
After purchasing the DS101j, I was quite pleased to discover that it is running some form of Debian Linux on an Intel XScale processor, should I ever wish to extend its capabilities in the future, its nice to know that possibility is open to me.
The hard drive I put inside is a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM unit, I don’t need it to be particularly fast, just fast enough for streaming at ~3000 kbits/sec, which this is obviously more than capable of doing. At the time of purchase 500GB was at around the $/GB sweet spot.
The only slightly annoying part of the whole setup experience was that it required Windows to do the initialization of the disk, but once initialized, it doesn’t need Windows any more. This was no problem, since I have Windows Vista & XP both available, just something to note for people who run purely Linux or some other free operating system. Presumably you could initialize it yourself, if you knew what it expected on-disk.
Once setup, it works pretty much as you’d expect – Acquires IP via DHCP (or static, your choice), and shares files via SMB. The default access rights are that everyone can write to the device, which is fine for me, since its on my home network. There is the capability to restrict writing to particular users though. Since XBMC supports SMB out of the box, it is trivial to add a new media source that refers to the DS101j instead of local disk, and there you have it, seamless playback from centralized location.
In the next installment, I’ll investigate what the streaming options are when using an Xbox 360 instead of the first generation Xbox.
Since the DS101j supports uPNP, I’m hoping this means the integration with Xbox 360 will be painless. However, I suspect some form of transcoding may be required, as the information I’ve been able to gather up till now points at the Xbox 360 only supporting WMA/WMV.
