[mythtv-users] DVD jukebox?

[jedi]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 05:00:31PM -0400, Matt Emmott wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:54 PM, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
> 
> >
> > Ignacio Valdes
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I work in a mental hospital. We frequently have very agitated, upset
> > > people in the hospital that sometimes have to wait for what can be a
> > > lengthy admissions process. We have had great success in calming
> > > things down with good G-rated type DVD movies on a Panasonic 5 disc
> > > DVD player. The problem is that it is semi-automatic, you still have
> > > to press change DVD and the play button several times to get past the
> > > main menu and other stuff. When things are really hopping, it is a
> > > pain to tend the machine.
> > >
> > > 1) Is there a player such as MythTV that we could simply load our
> > > 10-15 original store bought DVD's and play them without intervention
> > > for days at a time?
> > > 2) Is this something that MythTV or others that can handle this in a
> > > fully-automatic way?
> > > 3) Does someone have something like this for sale so that I don't have
> > > to configure much? If so, where?
> >
> > Build a box with a pile of USB DVD players.  Since you play one at a time,
> > you could hang 4 from a hub with no problems.
> >
> >
> That's too expensive, power hungry, and complicated to build. I have a
> Windows 2003 server with a shared 750GB disc loaded with ISO rips of  DVDs.
> I rip all my movies in Windows using either DVD Decrypter, DVD Shrink or
> Ripit4me.
> 
> I play the DVDs over Samba using XBMC for Linux (still pre-alpha) and XBMC
> for Xbox, MythTV's Video Manager, as well as VLC media player in Windows.
> XBMC enables you to build playlists that you could then loop. I have XBMC
> for Linux installed on my MythTV box, so if you're already running Myth
> there's no reason to buy more hardware.
> 
> You don't need a separate server to hold your DVD images, just a big enough
> disk in the computer you plan on playing the DVDs on.

    You could easily do this with a decent low profile PC like 
the Aopen or a minimac. It could be completely self-contained
and with compression of the DVD's you could get quite a bit of
stuff on the 80GB disk that comes with the current lowend mini.

    It doesn't have to be running myth although the "integration"
for that is already done with something like MythBuntu. The looping
DVD player could be nothing more than a shell script running mplayer
in a loop from .xinitrc.

    I'm really surprised that there isn't some 5 disc carosel that
already plays in a perpetual loop already. This really isn't the 
sort of thing that should require a guy to build a media server.