SOLVED Repurposing Old Mac as Media Server

[Allen Davis]

I want to repurpose an older Mac I have for use as a media server. My only concern is storage space.

I'd really appreciate an estimate, close approximation, etc., of how much storage space I might need.

I already have an 8TB hard drive for storing movies and music, and I'm sure that won't be enough.

About how many hours of video alone does anyone think I might be able to store at 720p on an 8TB hard drive?

Any estimates of 1080p would be nice as well.

I'm going to be ripping mostly older movies from DVDs I own and that weren't shot in HD, and 720p is adequate quality-wise. I think.

Buying more hard drives isn't a problem, I'll buy however many I need once I have an idea. I'm assuming that 5,400 rpm HDs at 3G speeds should serve well enough.

I've never contemplated doing this before, but considering that I've already done it years ago with my hundreds of music CDs, I'm surprised this hasn't occurred to me before. I'll be hooking the Mac up physically via Ethernet to my cable modem/router and want to be able to access all my movies and such from any TV in the house as well as my iPhone. And being able to watch movies on my iMac in my home office would be great, too.

I really appreciate any advice or other information. I'm sure I'm late to the party on this, but better late than never!

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

The resolution of a DVD is 720x480 (NTSC 60 Hz) SD, which is actually 480p (progressive mode). Simply ripping DVDs at 720p won't actually improve the picture, and will actually increase the file size, so I would use a 480p setting.

At the 480p setting, most DVDs will average a file size of around 1.25 GB. So, an 8 TB drive would hold approximately 6400 movies at 1.25 GB. 1920x1080p HD files average around 4.5 GB, so an 8 TB would hold approximately 1775 movies.

Of course, those figures are averages, and are dependent on video length, and settings used during ripping for things like multiple audio tracks, multichannel audio, bit rate, etc.

Hope that helps a bit.

C