Not too many years ago the idea of a Home Theater PC became the current nerd thing. Me being a nerd, I became very interested in this idea.

There's alot of interesting HTPC setups out there, but I was never satisfied with any of them. Almost all of them involve actual full bore PC plugged in to a TV running one of the various popular software packages. My main problem with this idea was that PC's are loud. Even quiet PC's are loud with their spinning drive and spinning fans, and most HTPC cases are designed with pretty in mind, not quiet. Also it seems that people were either ripping their DVD collections or downloading content. Neither of these ideas appealed to me.

From what I can tell, I've taken a fairly unique approach to the HTPC setup. My setup uses a Pioneer DRM-7000, PS3 Media Server, PS3, Linux runningSCST ISCSI Target, my TV, and a whole pile of custom scripts to control everything.

What nonsense is this; DRM-7000, ISCSI, Linux?!??

This beast is a modular DVD changer. Apparently this could be aquired in a number of different configurations with multiple DVD drives and capacity for up to 720 discs. It seems these were marketed to businesses for near line archival. Because of their age and the cost of alternative storage solutions these beasts can be aquired fairly cheaply from auction sites. I aquired mine from a medical supply liquidator. Mine is setup with 3 DVD ROM drives and has capacity for 670 DVDs in it. This uses a standard 50 pin SCSI 2 centrex connector to connect to a PC. It seems to have a reasonable implementation of the standard SCSI changer command set and I've encountered no problems using a generic tool such as MTX to control it. Because it would be unsightly to have this beast sitting next to my TV it's parked in my garage. The garage is a convenient place for this as I already had a Linux based file server setup that I could plug this in to.

Once I had this bad boy hooked up and powered up I needed to find a way to 'it' some place else. Specificly the problem was exporting the DVD's. DVD's employ several useless methods of copy protection. I say useless because any one with google and 30 seconds can discover how to break this or just copy the whole disc, protection intact, to a new disc. So, the only purpose for this protection is to be annoying to people who've purchased DVD's but want to use them in a method other than envisioned by narrow-minded executives. Simply mounting the disc and sharing the files on them proved to be troublesome due to this protection, and also it didn't quite achive the results I wanted. Enter the idea of ISCSI. ISCSI is an implementation of SCSI that works over TCP/IP (the internet). It's much more complicated than that but that's the short & quick answer. Using SCST ISCSI implementation I found that I was able to export the DVD ROM drive as block devices to other machines. With this ISCSI magic the DVD ROM drive in garage that's plugged in to the Linux server now appears on my PC in my family room. As far as the PC is concerned it's a real drive; region coding, dvd keys, etc... all work.

Ok, so how do you get the pips on the screen?

Sure, I have no problems using obscure commands to move around and mount/unmount discs, but who else knows how to do that? Also, when I need to quickly find my Teknoman disc how do I do that? Things like Windows Media Center, Myth TV, My Movies, have no concept of a changer. They are dead to me. Besides most implemented features I didn't want, and didn't implement features I really liked. So it was left up to me to write my own method of indexing, cataloging, and displaying my DVDs.

Initially I developed a simple control interface that allowed me to index the slots in the DRM-7000 and shift discs around. This initial interface slowly morphed in to a backend control system. It's used for indexing discs, uploading cover images, and setting genre etc... I decided to implement a more friendly and mature interface for the front end. Titles are displayed using cover images. Descriptions, genre, actors, directors, etc... are all derived from a number of sources including IMDB. For conveinence this is all done as a web page. Why a web page? Simple, because everything has a web browser. I can control it through my PC, or PS3, or a smart phone.

My main goal was to have a simple easy system where I can sit down on the couch. Fire up the 'stuff'. Look at some pretty pictures to see what I want to watch. Click some buttons and zone out staring at the flickering lights. We'll that's pretty much the state it's in right now.

Bringing the magic together.

PS3 Media Server is the main magic that I use. This handy lightweight piece of software that can serve up the contents of the DVDs using DLNA protocols. There's a lot of different DLNA servers out there, but the ones I tried always seemed to want to assert ownership control of your entire media library. I didn't need that. PS3 Media Server is simple enough to politely share the VOB's on the DVD's and it has options where it will attach subtitles and you can tell it what language trac to use. It's also lightweight enough that I can leave it running minimized on my PC and not notice it. It is coded in Java so I could run it on the server in the garage where the changer is attached too, but it's not powerful enough to do on the fly transcoding.

I dunno believe you, let me see it!!

Here are some quick pics I snapped of the interface as view from the PS3 web browser on my TV. Please forgive the poor camera quality.

This is the main interface where you can view all of the DVDs

A view of a specific title which shows alternate names, ratings, actor & director names, and a plot summary.

I really like the DVD cover art so I've included a view of the front cover.

Also view of the full cover. Inlays and other material are able to be viewed as well (provided I have scans).

The DRM-7000 is on the right and that thing on the left is a Sun StorEdge tape back up library. Yeah, don't you have a DLT libray in your garage?

The inside of the front of the DRM-7000.

The scary computer that all this stuff connects too. I'm guessing it's going to die one of these days.