It’s September, and that’s storage month on 1to10. This post is about using storage to serve both your backup and media needs. How do you watch movies and TV shows? Broadcast television? Cable television? Over-the-top (OTT) services like VUDU, Netflix, or Amazon Unbox? Yeah, me too. But on a scale from 1to10, my favorite thing to do is watch movies off my external hard disk drive (HDD) plugged into my XBOX 360.
That might be a little confusing – let me back up. I own an XBOX 360. In my opinion, it’s one of (if not the) very best home media devices ever made. I enjoy playing video games, but the XBOX Live has a lot of cool functions, including the very best implementation of Netflix I’ve ever see (blows the TIVO interface out of the water.) And one of the other things it lets you do is plug in external media.
Basically, here’s the deal. I rip all of my movies and TV series (from The Big Lebowski to Entourage) into digital files, generally MPEG 4 files (either .MP4 to .M4V) with AAC audio encoding. To do this I use either DVD Fab Platinum (a paid software available only for PC) or Handbrake (a free software that works best on the Mac, though it does have a PC version.) I then store these files in multiple locations (a future post on redundancy will elaborate on this point.) One of those locations is a Maxtor OneTouch HDD (pictured right) – I bought a 750 GB drive at Costco a while back. I transfer ripped movies and shows, and plug it into my XBOX. This gives me a backup of those files, and a medium to deliver them to my big screen. The files, ripped into 720p quality, play beautifully on my plasma. I have a large library of content, accessible through an awesome UI, and totally independent of things like an Internet connection or a solid WiFi signal.
Don’t get me wrong. I still watch DVDs. And I still stream shows through Netflix (30 Rock in HD is awesome.) But I am a hoarder (OK not that bad), and I like having the files themselves, locally, and the XBOX is perfect delivery device for watching those local shows. Now I can see each and every episode of Arrested Development as often as I like, on the big screen, right off my HDD. That makes me happy. 10 happy.
I’m a big fan of using an external HDD as both a storage device and a delivery mechanism. You’ll need to rip your DVD collection, but it’s satisfying to have it at your fingertips and not have to fuddle with disks. Yeah, I said fuddle. Sue me.
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