“Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy” Jimmy Swaggart

So admittedly my use of my NAS (Network Access Storage) has been more of a solution looking for a problem than anything else. My first thought was to store my MP3 collection on it so that I could run iTunes from any of my computers without having to have multiple copies of the same songs. I really wanted to have my macbookpro be the main iTunes server with the MP3 stored on the NAS, but the laptop’s wireless connection to the network slowed iTunes down to a ridiculous crawl (it took over 15 minutes for iTunes to sync with my iPod in this configuration). Then after watching GeekBrief.TV’s Cali Lewis talk about storing her DVD collection to their massive NAS I thought that that would be a great idea.

I’d already ripped a bunch of my DVDs so that I could put them on my 5th Gen iPod video. Why not move my whole collection. I mean, the damn thing is 400GBs. I moved a bunch of anime movies, started ripping the first seasons of the three StarTrek series, added the matrix series (including the Animatrix) and started ripping the Lord of the Rings movies… and then I ran out of space! Huh? Damn. Looking for a solution I wrote the following question to my buds at DL.TV:

I started ripping my DVD collection to my 400GB SimpleShare NAS and soon discovered that 400GB doesn’t go very far when the media is left in it’s original MPEG2 format. What do you suggest encoding these video at? Obviously making things iPod compatible would be cool, but I want them to not look bad on a standard TV and later when I upgrade to something approaching HD…. any suggestions? JBB

Imagine my surprise when, the next time I viewed their video podcast, Pat & Robert answered my question… OMG!

Before jumping to a commercial, 18 minutes and 40 seconds into the video podcast, Patrick Norton teased about “storing video files on your NAS, apparently uncompressed video files take up a lot of space.” Huh? Cool. Then, 21 minutes into the video, Patrick read my email and said my name, on a national podcast!!! Yeah. Of course, it quickly went downhill from there.

When the question, what do you suggest encoding the videos at, was tossed to DL.TV’s video expert, Robert Herron quipped, “Nothing, Get more harddrives, you cheapskate!” Ouch. He basically said It’s going to take a long time to encode/compress the DVDs, and some day in the future I’ll want to redo that and wonder why I spent so much time in the first place when getting more hard drive space is so much easier.

Patrick was kinder. He suggested compressing the DVDs 50% using MPEG 4 formatting and seeing whether the compression was noticeable. I think I’ll go with Patrick’s suggestion. I sent the same question to Cali Lewis. I wonder if she’ll berate me on her national video podcast too? One can only hope (after all, she is a hottie!!). JBB