My New TV

I wanted a bit bigger TV in the salon of my 466. It came with a 30" lcd, but my vision isn't what it used to be. We watch movies in the early and late part of the year, and sometimes when on a long trip and we're just too tired to do anything else.

I looked around for a TV that would fit into the spot, and found a Panasonic 37" that just about fits. It needed some customized mounting, and the frame needed a bit of trimming to make it work, but the result is fantastic.

This new TV looks more factory installed than the original!

I've upgraded all the entertainment equipment also. The old Sony receiver is gone, and there's a nice Pioneer Elite unit. I've also removed the DVD player, and replaced it with Windows Media Centre PC's in each cabin with 40TB of movies (which took months and months to rip from DVD to hard disk).
There's also the satellite that was always there.

The TV is 3D, too! I wasn't looking for 3D but it was the only one that fit. So I have 3D and 5.1 surround sound in the salon

The Media Centre screen saver is a picture of the boat in a nice bay with the boat's name overlaid. It looks pretty cool.

I've also run a NMEA 2000 backbone throughout the boat to support Fusion's new IP700 stereo. This unit will support up to 4 zones, works with an iPod, and has an iPhone app to control it.
The coolest part is that the wired remote that will be installed on the transom will act as a nmea2000 repeater. Since my depth and temp are nmea2000, I will be able to see those readings from the Fusion stereo control on the transom (as well as any other nmea2000 capable display).

I had the Windows media centre on my last boat, so this isn't new for me. If anybody is interested, it's actually pretty easy to do.

It was an evolution about 5 years ago for me. We had a small TV in the salon and each cabin. Each had their own DVD player, but I had small kids so there were DVD's all over the place. The kids would lose them, or the DVD's would be destroyed by the time I wanted to watch something.

I like to watch some TV when I go to bed. It takes me weeks to get to the end of one episode of TV sometimes, but it helps me sleep.

I had created media centre computers at home so it wasn't a huge stretch for me. My first attempt was made up of 2 computers loaded with hard drives. This worked okay. My next attempt was the same computers, but the hard drives in an 8 bay has unit (Drobo). It was a better idea but the Drobo sucked.

I finally bought a few 4 bay Synology Nas units (DS411+) and this was the best answer. They startup and shutdown at preselected times. The computers could then sleep when not in use (saving power).

I upgraded the computers last year to the smallest chassis I could get and used SSD hard drives. It boots faster and uses less hard disk space. They draw very little power.

I have one of these in my cabin and in the salon. I've put Western Digital Live HD TV units in the kids cabins. It doesn't have quite the nice interface but the kids know how to use it and don't care for the cosmetics.

Now there are no DVD's. I have over 2000 movies and TV shows to select. I can watch anything I want in any cabin. I have 5 TV's and each can watch something different at the same time.

We've started playing music concerts on the bridge TV while entertaining. It's cool, people like it.

If anybody is interested in doing this, I'd be happy to explain how to do it.

It's just the thing for your old Hatteras!

Easy to do and gives you all the movies or tv you want.

An even easier alternative if you buy your stuff online is to get an apple tv and just buy or rent your movies and tv.

discokachina,

The wireless is the first thing that I've had issues with. I've had tons and tons of problems with wireless. My solution is used wire whenever possible. For Blueray movies, wired is the only way to make it work. for DVD's, SD movies, and even some MKV files, a good wireless will work.
I've tried Cisco, Dlink, TP-Link, and Netgear routers (and a few others). The higher end Netgear routers are the only ones worth anything. I've got their dual channel super, do everything router for multimedia. I have one at home and another on the boat. They were a little more expensive ($160 vs $100 for the cheap junk that didn't work at all). The Netgear doesn't drop or cause me any issues outside of it's absolute limit.
The wireless card in the PC is also a limiting factor. On one PC I have a dual channel Linksys wireless card and it works pretty well on everything except the most intense blue ray movies.

You can certainly use the HP server to host your movies. Organize them in folders such as:

Movies
Star Wars
Rambo
TV
NCIS
Season 1
Season 2
The Unit
Season 1

If you have lots of movies, you may want to break them down instead of just a movies folder, put them in Drama, Action, etc. or BlueRay, HD, SD, DVD.

One movie per folder.
One TV show per folder, with season folders under.

There are some great tools out there that will collect metadata for you (the posters, backgrounds, info, actors, etc. I use Media Center Master. It's a good tool, but there are others. This one is free for this functionality but has some other functions that are paid (it's cheap)

I use a Windows Media Center plug in called Media Browser. It's very easy to use, has lots of different skins to customize the look. It's totally free and very well supported.

For Blueray playback you'll need an external player. The 2 best are Arcsoft's Total Media Theatre and Cyberlink's PowerDVD. Many prefer Arcsoft and it works well. I've not been able to get it to play 3D properly so I switched to PowerDVD. If you don't care about 3D, use Arcsoft. These applications are about $100 each.

As for ripping the DVD's, there are a ton of tools out there. The easiest to use is AnyDVD. It will rip Blueray, and regular DVD's.
That same company that sells AnyDVD, Slysoft, sells some applications that will rip the movies to other formats too. For TV, I hate the DVD format. I rip the show into individual episodes in MKV format. This lets me pick each episode from Media Browser instead of going through the DVD menu (which is something that just annoys the heck out of me).

For ripping, I have an old Sony 100 disk DVD changer with a Firewire connection. I wrote software to load them, then rip them to disk. I then created another script to convert them. It took months.
During the rip process, you choose what you want to retain. I usually retain only the English audio (it's the only language I speak so why take up hard disk space with other stuff?), I also take just the main track. I don't rip the extra's, intro's, etc. It can save a ton of space.

Make sure to test your first bunch of rips. I had to redo them a few times because the settings weren't quite right. Test on your media centre machine using media browser or whatever you're going to use to watch the movies on your TV.

What my brother does, which I think works just as well, is connect 6 or so USB DVD drives. He then load up an entire season of TV (or 6 movies) and then rips them all at the same time. It takes him about 15 minutes to do a whole season. Longer if it's Bluray.

One thing to note: The faster the computer, the faster the rip, especially with Bluray. BD disks can sometimes take an hour to rip using AnyDVD (which is the only way I know to do it).

If this is for your boat - run the ethernet! It's not that hard to do on a boat, way easier than a house!

Also, there are some tiny PC's out there. I haven't tried the newer Zotac PCs but they are about the size of a hardcover book and fast enough to be a media centre. With an SSD hard disk they would sip power! I haven't tried it because I'm in Canada and Zotac doesn't ship here. I'm getting my brother to send me one from the US.

I recommend HDMI to watch the movies. It transmits sound and video and does HD sound. It's easier to configure.
Intel chips seem to be the more reliable choice over AMD (I do have an AMD machine and it works, but it was a pain to get it working). I'd recommend an i5 or above, although I've got a couple i3 that play BD movies just fine. I also now recommend 64bit Windows 7, and 8GB of ram. 4 will work just fine until your collection gets big. I find the 4GB is slow to load all the cover art when the media browser starts. 8GB runs it instantly.

Hopefully this is enough to get started, but as you start you'll likely end up with more questions than answers. Feel free to ask anything, it takes a bit to get up to speed with it.

PS, we don't watch TV directly anymore. I have my TV shows record on media centre and automatically edit the commercials. I haven't watched cable directly in 2 years. When you get this going, you'd never go back.