In a world of chaos, wrinkle-free shirts keep me sane.

The last few years, media and all its different parts have gone in different directions. Until last month, I had a digital cable subscription with my local cable company. For 54 Euros a quarter, I received about sixty channels, both local and foreign. Of those sixty channels, I only watched four (13th Street/Sci-Fi/TCM/MGM) more often then not. However, the Dutch version of Sci-Fi was hopelessly behind the American version, weeks, but often even months. The local public and commercial stations, however, were continuing the trend of showing almost exclusively reality programs. After all, Big Brother, which started it all, was a Dutch producer's idea. If there's one thing I hate, it's reality TV. From someone who watched a lot of TV, almost eight hours a day, more if you count CNN/MSNBC at work, it dried up to about four hours a week, if that, in recent years.

OTOH, many of the shows I do watch/watched, aren't shown here on local TV, so one is forced to different means to acquire them. Some, especially older shows, you can get on DVD, if the owners deign to do so (eyes the row of DVD boxes on the shelves). Others, well....

Music, too, has changed and often, not for the better. Radio stations go for the easy money, not for the listener's pleasure. Just recently, the only Classic Rock/Jazz station combo declared bankruptcy, even after a major fundraiser to pay off their FM license. Just two weeks ago, their inventory was sold off. Reason being, not enough advertisers generating revenue. It was another reason for me to decide to get rid of my cable subscription, seeing as both my internet and telephone are being delivered by a single company. As an aside, I used to have a phone line with the local Telco but when the ISP began rolling out VOIP, I watched it for a while until they had implemented number porting. When that happened, I upgraded my account to include it, saving me another 10 Euros a month, at least. Currently, I'm thinking of doing away with the telephone component altogether, since I almost exclusively use my cell, even on vacation abroad. If I do, I can still get two free internet phone numbers, which are live for three months if I don't use them. Good for when I go on vacation and don't want to use the cell. Just plug in a USB phone, or change my cell to WIFI and log in to either of the numbers.

Another thing that's changed is the media themselves. We've got digital cameras, downloads of music and movies etc. Back in the day, we burned them to CD then to DVD. Having big Case logic disk bags was a requirement if you had a lot of stuff. Nowadays, it's a lot easier, what with falling prices of hard disks and related technology. That's what I want to talk about today.

I've amassed a lot of media files over the years, including music, pictures and video files. Music and video from ripping/downloading my CDs and DVDs, pictures from different sources, including my own camera. Everything was scattered around on different CDs and DVDs. Why, do you ask, did I rip my CDs and DVDs, just to put them back onto same? Well, as a backup, of course. I learned early on that a CD is a weak medium, it can break easily. Just a little scratch and you've lost a lot of data, necessitating you to buy the same source again. At the prices the local shops ask for a CD, that's really expensive. Another thing that really pissed me off was when it became public that Sony had put a root kit on their CDs, as a 'security measure' and what kind of havoc it could create. This post, however, isn't going to be about how the record companies are out to screw their customers or about outdated business practices. If you want to read about that, there are enough places on the net to do so.

No, what I'm going to write about, is about how I've redesigned my home media setup. Hopefully, I'll be able to make it a number of posts, covering most, if not all of what I've done and what kind of equipment I've used to do it. Hopefully too, it will give you an idea of what to do if you've been looking at a way to get your media clutter under control.

Last year, I was growing tired of the ever increasing number DVDs I was burning as well as the need to store them. Also the numerous times I've had to buy new, larger hard drives. All my data was scattered among different media in different places. Having a number of computers and laptops, finding a particular file meant going through external USB HDs, or feeding DVDs in one after another. Also, watching a downloaded show/movie often meant that I'd have to burn it to DVD/CD to watch it on my TV.  Windows Media Center was all the rage and I bought a new computer from a local manufacturer for a price that I couldn't have build myself. It worked well enough but I was still left with the whole scattered media situation. I started looking at server solutions, thinking I might go for a Linux-based system. I had a few old computer cases laying around and Ubuntu and FreeNAS were highly regarded. At this time, Windows came out with their Home Server software. While I did download the Beta, the problems that testers encountered, kept me from installing it. I decided I'd wait a bit until all problems were worked out and get either the OEM version and build my own setup, or get a ready-made system. The reason I leaned this way was because the last few years, I've become a bit lazy regarding setting up a system. I've run Linux for several years on several home systems, starting with Suse 9.1. However, I wasn't looking forward to go through all the steps needed to do what I wanted, so WHS seemed like an ideal solution.

However, a random wander through some tech blogs showed me something new, namely the NAS or Network Attached Storage. Now, in one of my earlier posts, I talked about the Freecom FSG-3 I had. I never used it, because setting it up was an exercise not for the faint of heart, thanks to it being both a router/modem/NAS. Also, I was plain lazy. Now a NAS is nothing more then a small case, holding from one hard drive up to eight in the newest iterations, that is connected to your network. I started reading reviews, explanations and tests of several systems, from manufacturers like Netgear, Linksys and QNap. While most had similar specs, performance varied widely, as did the software and capabilities packed into these little boxes.

Earlier, I wrote that a NAS is nothing more then a box holding disks, attached to your network. Well, it's not JUST a box. They're in fact, a small form-factor server, capable of hosting websites, FTP sites, being a media server for your home, print server etc. And that's just with the standard software install. A NAS has memory, a flash drive for the software (Linux OS) and added software. It's not intended for a big company but for the SoHo user, it's perfect.  Finally, I settled on the QNap TS-409 Pro as this had the best set of software, ease of use and user reviews. I also purchased 4 1 TB Hitachi hard drives, who'd just come out and were tested to be compatible with the system.

Getting all the parts together was easy. Putting it together even easier. The setup was no problem either. I decided to go for a RAID 5 config as that has, for me, the best combination of disk volume and security; if one disk dies, I pull it out and replace it with another, let the data protection disk repair the other three, without losing a single file. After connecting it to my network, it was easy to link my computers to it; Windows through the "Map Network Drive" while Linux (Ubuntu) sees it under the network link. After the setup was complete, it was time for the most time-consuming part of the job, namely the transfer of all my data to the NAS. It took me more then a week of almost continuous transfer, DVDs, CDs, hard drives. I had decided that I'd just throw everything in a single folder on the NAS, after which I'd go through and start to clean it up, throwing away what I didn't need anymore.

Now, if you've moved house recently, you'll know that somehow, by the time you start to pack your stuff, you realize how much stuff you have. This is no different. Even though I'm looking at a stack of about fifteen CDs which I've had problems with copying over and left till later, I still have about 143 GB of music files. When I had finished transferring all files from burned CDs/DVDs and USB hard drives, I was left with about 600 GB of space. My plan to rip all of my purchased DVDs into .iso images fell by the wayside because I did not have the space to do so. Which is why I'm currently waiting for prices to drop on the 2 TB hard drives coming onto the market now. Even with that slight problem, I'm quite happy because I now have a central repository for all of my files (in time). Currently, everything I have, with the small exception of a few burned but hard to copy CDs and purchased DVDs is on the NAS. I can access it from any of my two notebooks, my netbook and other network appliances. It took me three months of nightly going through my photos to clean it up, dump duplicates and get them organized. I needed about a week or two to check and re-tag my music files, add the appropriate album art and make playlists. I'm in the process of going through my movie folders and doing the same thing.

I can tell you that it's worth buying a NAS if you have a huge amount of media files. It doesn't have to be the model I have, it can be a single-disk model, though a hard drive failure there can cost you all your data. But the knowledge that I've got one central spot to link to from anywhere in the house? Priceless. This though, is just the first step to setting up a networked home and accessing your files from anywhere in the house (or even from abroad, if you set it up right).

In the beginning of this entry, I wrote about buying a media center pc. In my next post, I will not be talking about that, because I've used it only for a month and it's gathering dust in a corner, being used as a footstool by yours truly. Instead, I'll be talking about Networked Media Tanks. The post after that, will deal with Networked Sounds Systems.

So, in the immortal words of Porky the Pig, "Th-.. th-.. th.. .... Eh, See ya!!!