I’m currently trying to come up with a strategy to go digital with my video collection. My big monitor on my Mac Mini crapped out, so I decided to hook up the computer to the living room TV via a DVI to HDMI cable. The sound is running through a Sony mini system. I downloaded the first episode of the new season of Mad Men from iTunes and it looked and sounded great. There is only one HDMI port on the back of the TV, so I had to get an HDMI splitter from Monoprice, which cost about $20. Of course I forgot to buy an extra HDMI cable so I can hook everything up without having to pull HDMI cables from the back of the set. The extra cable is coming from eBay in a couple days – there is no way I can buy a $20 cable from Best Buy if I can get one online for about $2. For hard drive space, I’ve got a 500MB Firewire drive from Micronet. I think this is somewhat of a short term solution since I’ll only be able to fit 80-120 movies at an acceptable level of compression on this drive, most likely a mix of NTSC and HD videos. I think the long term solution will be some kind of multi-terabyte raid array or something. Or perhaps something like a Drobo.
http://www.drobo.com/
A drobo would be nice. Actually, multiple drobos with multiple Mac Minis would be nice, so I can move the video collection around the house: videos in the living room, den, upstairs, or the digital home theater I’m planning to build in my basement next year. I can’t see streaming HD video in our home wireless bubble, but who knows.
So I’ll be copying my videos on to my hard drive for a while. And it looks like I’m going to skip a Blue Ray player altogether, unless of course I somehow come into possession of a PS3.
I heard that geeking-out triggers testosterone production, so my latest hobby is also causing my facial hair to grow faster.
