As I have mentioned before I have built my own "Kalaidascape system" for a fraction of the real ones cost.

The NAS I built is industrial grade and can handle up to 12 2 (or next year 3) terabyte drives. More storage than I forsee I will need. I could have built it for half the price if I went consumer grade. By industrial grade I mean it is designed to run unattended 24/7/52.

With regard to players I bought the Dune player and put together a full XBMC player on an Asrock ION-330 as I always like to play around.

I am controlling both players over HTTP, although the Http firmware for the Dune player is not yet officially released, and I am doing beta testing for them. The Dune plays everything I throw at it, with the only problem being some slight audio drop out on the Avatar disk. It plays True HD and DTS MA with no issues. Picture and sound is the same as the original disk.

The XBMC has a superb graphical interface which incorporates Music, Movies, TV shows, Slide shows... XBMC currently can not play (AFAIK) True HD nor DTS MA, although sWords has given me a ripping process to try which he feels will solve that issue.

Now why put this on this forum? Although I have interjected a PC between the Pronto Pro and the media players, there was no need to do so. The pronto can easily CONTROL either player over TCPIP as well as the unraid NAS. Feed back is weak, that is, the status/state is on the main TV screen for both players. XBMC is fully skinable and is a very graphically rich interface. The Dune player is more utilitarian but does allow for some "dressing up". Feedback from the players is basically that the http command has been accepted and if not why not. The people that make Dune are "Kiosk" people so Dune is very very reliable.

Cost wise a Dune player is $350-$399 and looks just like an A/V component. XBMC is free (I use XBMClive v9.11) and the Asrock ION-330 costs $349. the ION-330 is a small box with no controls other than power. The NAS is an unraid controlled unit(Linux base) built on a machine I assembled. Costs for a basic unraid NAS will vary based mostly on the case size (how many drives) and the size/cost of each drive. Excluding drives, you can probably build the NAS for about $500-$600 in a nicely expandable case with 2TB drives going for about $120-$140.

The unRaid design requires N+1 drives for N drives worth of storage so is much more efficient than mirroring, and has the advantage that the loss/failure of two drives does not destroy the array as is the case with Raid-5 architectures. It uses a single drive to store recovery information (Parity) and no data striping. Any given file is always stored completely on a single drive. SMB is built in so windows has no issues seeing the NAS data.

Ripping software is either free or fairly inexpensive. I use Clown_BD, AnyDVD HD and CloneDVD2. With regard to ripping in general, I do not rip disks I do not own and posess. I do not loan out disks I have ripped nor do I provide any one (gandkids included) with the rip files. I feel the law is self contradicting (DCMA vs Right to use) so I choose to follow the intent as I believe it. I will take a disk I have ripped to a friends house to watch it there, but it never stays there. As a person who develops and charges for software I understand why the film industry wants to protect its product, I just don't agree with how they are implementing that protection.

The Theater now controls the unraid NAS, the players and has always had it's own librarian. The librarian was rewritten using many of the ideas from XBMC. The Librarian displays on the main screen, but there is a version that displays on the Pronto PRO. The main screen version puts the library up as a scrollable list on the left 1/3 of the mainscreen, and as a disk is selected it places all the pertinent info about that disk on the right side including coverart, overview, cast, etc.

The librarian is driven from output files of the DVD Profiler application ($29.95). You put your DVD/CD/BR disk in your reader and tell the profiler it is there and you are done. For a new disk you can just enter its UPC numeric code and you are done. All of the searching and data retrieval is done by the profiler. As time goes on and more info about a disk is entered (think Wiki) you can automatically refresh all the information for your personal collection. The output of the profiler is an xml formatted file (Which the Pronto PRO could read) and all of the cover images stored in a well known location in well known format (jpg) named with the disk's ID which is in the XML file. My librarian running on a PC reads the XML file and builds three simple flat text files containing only what I want from the XML file for each disk. One sorted by title, one sorted by age in collection and one for TV show episodes by title. The Pronto could do the same thing with a little server app to feed it the XML file and place the text files in global storage. I actually have the server app or at least the basics of one to do just that.

In the Theater, when a disk is selected it starts to play in under 10 seconds, and is playing the main feature not the trailers or dire warnings. That is more a function of how I do the rips.

If you take the time to learn Prontoscript you will be amazed at what you can do in todays A/V world using the Pronto PRO and TCP/IP sockets. It really pays to learn Prontoscript, TCPIP, and how do deal with HTTP based servers. Almost all A/V devices use the Http protocol for IP control.