I’ve used an older Apple PowerBook laptop as an iTunes jukebox connected to my home theater for stereo music for over three years now. No music is actually on the PowerBook. It connects wirelessly to my main computer in the office, which houses my complete music library. Using iTunes on a laptop is perhaps one of the best ways to serve music in my opinion as having a full working iTunes application means that I can easily search and scroll through playlists and thousands of songs with ease.

The benefits of this setup are just as those of an iPod except with better sound quality. Selecting music on the fly without the need of swapping out CD empowers you to easily listen to any song at any time and mix up your playlists for quick jam session of your favorites. Songs are just simply more accessible with this setup, so what about doing the same for video?

What is Needed?
The iTunes store has been offering movies for a while now, but those movies are not in HD and are nowhere near DVD quality. Also, since most consumers aren’t willing to repurchase their entire movie collection from iTunes, you need to rip the movies you own to your computer so it can serve you the movies.

To use iTunes or a third party jukebox and still have DVD quality video you need to get software that can make/convert your DVD to digital DVD quality back-ups that your video server software can read.

Whether you go the Apple or PC route is irrelevant at this point as there are many back-up/ripping programs on both sides to get the job done. For my research I chose an iTunes friendly format in case an Apple TV at some point becomes an addition to my home, or I get a video iPod.

File Size, Quality, and the Codec
Getting files size small enough to fit numerous movies requires compression, and there are numerous compression formats out there to get the jobs done. The top tier compressors are Apple’s QuickTime H.264 codec and Windows Media Player VC-1. Both are capable of creating multiple resolutions including high-definition and both offer high quality video.

Since I want iTunes/iPod compatibility I chose the Apple codec, but if you choose the Windows Media route similar results should be attainable. The trick with finding out what settings to use when making copies of your DVD movies is to select a single chapter in a movie, make a copy of the track, then play the same chapter from both the DVD and your recently created copy simultaneously to compare the quality. From there you can adjust settings to reach a quality level your satisfied with.

As a test I purchased a movie from the iTunes store that I had on DVD to test out the quality level compared to DVD. This served as a base to see how low I could go with the compression. In comparison, the iTunes version of the movie simply wasn’t of acceptable quality for a home theater enthusiast. The DVD version looked like high-definition video in comparison to the muddy and blurry video from the iTunes store. I definitely won’t purchase any more movies from iTunes unless the quality matches or surpasses DVD quality.

The downside to the comparison is that it showed that the compression for the video server would have to be done at a much higher quality to attain an acceptable picture. That means a much larger file size than the 1.6GB size of the iTunes movie would be required to reach acceptable quality.

By testing out different compression settings I was able to get a near DVD quality backup of my movie at around 5GB for a 1 hour 45 minute movie. With different settings and compression techniques you may be able to get slightly lower file sizes. Also, you can dramatically reduce file size if you can live with a little less video quality.

Other Options
If you don’t care about iTunes/iPod compatibility there are programs that will read the actual DVD data that can be copied to your computer. The downside to this method is simply file size; with many movies using the full 8.5GB of dual layer storage offered on DVD. The plus side is that you’re simply playing back the full DVD quality video instead of recompressing an already compressed DVD source.

The Numbers Issue
Then it came to me. To get the desired quality of indistinguishable from DVD, the files size of each movie could easily be 4-6 GB per movie. For consumers collecting 100 or more movies is relatively easy, and too serve100 movies on the video server would require 400-600 GB of hard drive based storage. Anyone, like myself, with a 300+ DVD movie collection would be in for some serious hard drive storage management to get a hard drive storage solution big enough to store that amount of data.

Throw HD-DVD and Blu-Ray into the mix, of which each movie can take up 15-50GB of storage, and the likelihood of a video server being a long-term solution goes out the window. Not to mention it’s not possible to copy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray reliably. So while your standard DVDs could be on a video server, you’ll need to manually load HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs.

Active versus Archive Storage
One of the biggest factors to pull me away from the idea of a video server was storage alone. All the effort of ripping the movies, getting large enough hard drives, maintaining the system, and backing it all up is just too intensive without providing an actual gain in viewing experience.

Hard drives are “active storage” systems that can go bad, and need to be backed up. Archival disc based storage such as DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray won’t go bad until the glue that holds the disc together degrades (Laser-Rot) which can be anywhere from 20-50 years depending on storage and manufacturing quality.

Throw the Disc In
All my research came to a sudden stop when I re-evaluated why I was doing this. All this effort in making copies and thinking about managing enough storage capacity was simply so I could have a snazzy menu system from which to choose movies that offers either the same or less quality than the original DVD.  Add HD-DVD and Blu-Ray into the mix and it was easy for me to decide a video server is just not for me.  I’ll just throw the disc in the player and be done with it.

Disc swapping is simply not that cumbersome when it comes to movies. With music you may throw in a CD just to listen to one three-minute song and then need to change CDs again. With movies you put one in, and watch it for the next few hours.

Conclusion
For those willing to venture into the dominion of video server technology, there are great articles out there from the HTguys Podcast that discusses turning a Mac Mini into a video server solution.

A video server is definitely an interesting prospect and if someone can perfect the picture quality (think HD) and file size/hard drive limitations then it may be a viable long-term solution. No matter what it’s definitely an interesting idea nonetheless. It’s just not primetime for me yet.

If the PowerBook I’m using ever went bad I would pick up an Apple TV just to perform music serving duties. From there, just playing with the video options presented by the Apple TV would induce me to play with some video serving.