The high level view of your very own video on demand system

Hi folks. In the VOD series we have skipped around a bit in describing the system because posts were motivated by timeliness of the changes. In this article you will get the big picture on how you can have a kick-ass video on demand (VOD) system for peanuts. This is exactly the system we run here at Casa Cobb and would not go back to a normal system unless forced to. Depending on your skill level and hardware laying around the house, you could put together a system that would shame any Hilton or Marriott for less than $500 (maybe a lot less) and you can basically become your own personal private cable channel for less than $2500.

First some key concepts. The diagram below illustrates what you need to make this work. Later on I will describe exactly how to make each piece on the cheap or alternatively solve the problem with money and be done quickly with little real skill. That is the cool thing about this: it grows with both your abilities and budget but even the entry-level one is great. So check this out:

What we have here and what it’s job is:

• NAS. Stands for Network Attached Storage, a hundred-dollar term for a hard drive with an ethernet connection. There can and usually is a lot more to it than this (file and print sharing, other things that an office might need) but for our purposes, that is all this needs to be, a hard drive with an IP address. Speaking of which:
• Any decent 100Mbs router. Probably want 8 ports on it.  This device basically links or networks all of your devices together.
• Video Display Device. The job of this device is to map the NAS-exposed filesystem into an easy to use menu system. Upon selection, the device should stream the video to your TV and optionally the audio to a stereo system. In some configurations this also provides IR remote abilities as well.
• Video Processing Workstation. This is where you convert video and content from other sources to the internal format used by the VOD system.
• TV or other monitor.
• Stereo. Completely optional, it makes sense in our front room, little in the back so we just pipe the audio to the television.

How to build it:

NAS:

• Cheap/”do it yourself”: Any old PC with a hard drive and a network card will do nicely. The point is to expose some storage space to your internal network. Obviously a bigger hard drive is better but these days, a chassis, 500 gig drive, cdrom and an ethernet card would set you back 200 dollars, less if you catch this on-sale. Once you get this, burn any recent Ubuntu CD, then install to this system. The actual installation procedure is documented all over the Internet but if anyone wants to see exactly how to set this up, drop me a mail or comment. When done, create a folder to share (I did /home/jeff/video in a fit of originality) and then NFS share it.
• Expensive/”just get it done”: Buy one of these for $2000: Buffalo 4 Terabyte NAS.

Router:

• Cheap: Probably you already have one but even if not, they are around fifty dollars new from any superstore; linksys works well for us, 8 ports @100M.
• Expensive: There really isn’t a need for an expensive option here.

Video Display Device:

• Cheap/”tweakers heaven”: Any old PC with a sound card and an old cheap nVidia card with S-Video out. We has an old raggedy 32-bit box that ran around the clock for 5 years. You piece this bit together with the above specs, then burn it with Ubuntu, mount the NAS shares to a local directory via NFS, then go here to learn about, download and install Freevo. While Freevo is initially something to use for acting like a DVR, we never used it as such. It does however act as a wonderful front-end to your NAS shares providing not just video playback but also an MP3 jukebox, picture album viewer, web news viewer, games and more. However don’t let all this ability to overwhelm you. Once you have installed it, all you really have to do is set your display to 800×600, configure /home/yourname/.freevo/localconf.py with your network shares and run the app. As a further cost-saving if you are still getting started, this device and the NAS can be the same box, just put the larger hard drive into this one in addition to the smaller main HD with the OS. You still want to share the drive via NFS though; just point to the drive directly in the Freevo conf file if you do so, obviously.
• Expensive: Anymore this is not really the expensive option but it can be the faster/less technical option. Buy one of the MVix units. This is what we have right now. The key things this brings to the table is, it is smaller, runs linux, can handle network shares and more. I was hoping it would be fanless but no such luck. Anyhow, with the default settings all it could see are Windows shares (bite me) so I found this on the web: MVix NFS-enabled firmware. I applied this and within a reboot I had our NAS units displaying nicely. Cost was around $400 and came with a remote.

Video Processing Workstation:

• Cheap: you can either use your existing computer as long as it is connected to your network, has a DVD drive and isn’t a complete piece of crap. For reasons like Handbrake (see the EZ Rip articles) more CPU the better and that goes for RAM too. However most boxes are either AMD or Intel dual-code these days and are relatively cheap. I run 2 gigs of ram in my laptop but for this basic toolset a gig will do. On the software side, just set up Handbrake and EZRip, then install a wonderful video editor called Avidemux. The point of Avidemux is if you: Get video from a strange source and need to transcode it, you have video captured from normal TV and you need to quickly and easily strip out the commercials (we haven’t seen a commercial in years) or sometimes you need to correct audio sync or levels.
• There is no expensive option needed. Depending on resources, this box can also share duties with the NAS. For the longest time these were just old hand-me-down boxes no longer powerful enough for anything else (except the video editor, that was and is my current day-to-day box).

Notes:

• Unmentioned are cables; you will need at a minimum a few ethernet cables to hook stuff up, an S-Video cable to hook the display device to your television and a 8th inch jack to RCA jack converter for hooking the output of the sound card to either the TV or a stereo amplifier.
• As you can see you can start completely small if you already have a box with at least the minimum specs and the drive for storage is at least a few hundred gigs. Or you can gradually extend your system to what we have now, which is two 2 TB NAS units and the MVix unit.
• For most things you can get away with a wireless network but if you start getting audio sync issues when you know the actual file is OK (it plays on your computer) this is the first place to look. Speaking of which a related cause can be if you don’t have decent buffers set up on your NFS connections (Etch default to a lame state) so check your mount settings.

At this point we have a basic or perhaps not-so-basic system up. Now we need content but as this is going long, I will continue this next time.

JeffC