Hello


I have recently inherited a server from work and working on setting it up with opensuse 11.  I would like to use this as a media backend.  I am talking about getting all of my dvd's on it so I can watch a movie from any room or remotely without having to find the dvd.  I plan on adding a tuner or 3 to setup a myth backend as well.  However I am having some trouble deciding the codec to use for these plans.

After doing some reading I am leaning towards the confused side.  I would appreciate any help on this matter.  Let me give you some more details. 

What I want to accomplish:

1) Be able to watch my media in any room from any device.  eg.. tv, computer, phone, xbox MCE, etc..  (I thought I read somewhere that if you made the video too high quality that it has trouble/choppiness playing on older devices.)
2) Have a high quality video file that won't need to be replaced with a better quality one next month.
3) I do not want any blotching or fading.  (sorry don't know the technical term for it, but when the screen goes black and you have the off colored blacks.  ran into that a lot with divx)
4) Would like to save storage space, but video quality outweighs the storage space on my scale.

Currently I am using clonedvdmobile and using the VOB passthrough option.  My understanding is that this is basically just removing the menu's.  I don't think this is compressed in any way either, but not sure.  This is the only way I have been able to have constant positive results with playback on all my devices.  So, if the VOB passthrough is indeed not compressed, that is probably the reason it plays better with everything.  Usually when I play other types of video through the xbox with xboxMCE is when the video looks its worse, but with the vob passthrough it looks fine.  So maybe the xbox is just to slow to play the files well. 

I have read over several articles about the H.264 and it sounds like that might be the way to go??


Here is a little info about the server.

Dual xeon 2.8 Ghz
2TB disk space
2GB ram.  probably need more ram for everything I will want to do, but at the moment it runs $100 for 1GB of the "certified" ram and only gets further out of range with the higher capacity sticks that I need. 

All the other pc's are at least p4's and the straggler out of the hardware would be the xbox. 


The other thing that I have concerns about is the tuner selection.  After finding the right codec, is there any thoughts about tv tuner capabilities, that might create extra work or conflicts getting to the desired quality video? 

So if someone would like to guide me in the right direction I would appreciate it.  thanks in advance. 

I think you are talking about something like the video streaming technology, which is not in this area of forum I'm afraid. You may looking at some kind of real media server, but I'm not sure. Sorry man~