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94
WHERE
DO I PUT MY
STUFF?
As far as storage is concerned, get
as much as you can afford. Even
conventional DVD video takes up a
lot of space and HD video takes even
more.
This allows your media library to be
independent of your PC, so if you
change machines you can easily move
to another machine or if the machine
goes down, you still have access to
your content. This external drive could
be Firewire or USB 2.0, both of which
are fast enough for HD video playback,
but the optimal configuration is NAS
(Network Attached Storage) which
allows you to place your content on
your network.
By putting your content
drives directly on your network, you
will have the ability to directly access
content from multiple PCs in multiple
rooms. Installing a NAS device is quite
simple. You just plug it in to your
network and it appears as a shared
storage device or server. Simply click
on the network access function of your
OS and you will see the devices listed
there with access to its content. Of
course, you could do this with Firewire
or USB 2.0 drives attached to a single
computer by sharing the devices, but
then that computer would always have
to be on, since it would be providing
media sharing services to the network.
To avoid the pain of reconstructing
your media library due to a drive
failure,
it's a good idea to purchase
two external storage drives and
mirror your content on both devices.
This way, if one drive fails, you are
still in business. No matter what, it
is highly recommended you always
keep your irreplaceable digital photos
duplicated on more than one drive.
Another option for storage is to
purchase one of the new media servers
that are now becoming available on
the market. A good example is the HP
MediaSmart Server EX470 or EX475.
These come with a half a terabyte or a
full terabyte of storage, which would
hold approximately 250,000/500,000
digital photos or 150,000/300,000
MP3 files respectively, and they
provide a user-friendly interface to
your media either at home or over the
Internet which allows you to share
your pictures with friends and family.
They also include extra drive bays for
expansion so you can add additional
storage capacity.
Storing all of your media
on an external hard drive
is a good idea.
Finally, there is the question of storage format.
If you
download media, such as AAC or MP3 formatted music, you
should obviously store it in its original format.
For video, always store it in its original format as any change
to the format will cause a significant amount of loss to the
quality of the video and its accompanying audio.
If you rip music from a CD, however, you have a number of
options. Ripping with the Windows® Media Player naturally
uses WMA (Windows® Media Audio) formats. However the
highest compressed bit rate you can select is 192Kbps, so
for the best quality, you may want to choose a lossless format,
such as Windows Media Lossless or Apple Lossless. There
are also a number of third party lossless formats that you
can use if you really get into it, such as FLAC (Free Lossless
Audio Codec).
Lossless formats don't achieve the high
compression ratios of AAC, WMA, or MP3, but when the
music is decompressed, it comes back exactly as it was
put in. In other words, true "CD quality."
Any re-compression or transcoding will
seriously degrade quality.
Storage of media on your hard drives,
though extremely convenient and easy to
do using Windows Media Player, iTunes, or
third party applications like Music Match
(now Yahoo Music Jukebox), inevitably
brings up legal issues. It can be strongly
argued that the "fair use" provision of the
copyright and trademark act applies if you
retain the original media after you rip it
to your hard drive. However, if you return
the media or share the ripped content, you
would definitely be in violation and the RIAA
(Recording Industry Association of America)
and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of
America) would not be happy at all.
KEEP
IN MIND...
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