DVD jukebox? With caching?

[leondz]

Hi,

As a sideline of my job, I manage a slowly-growing archive of around 300 DVDs, containing data. As these DVDs are expensive and hard to replace, they are never loaned out, instead copying them to a network share for others to access. This works OK but is a labour-intensive solution, and leads to delays when I'm not around or don't have time to spend 1-2h copying data.

It seems like a big jukebox that holds maybe 400-1000 DVDs would be a better solution, that could be browsed over the network, perhaps with an option to install a hard drive for caching.

I've found plenty of hardware that works like this for DVD (or Blu-ray) video playback, but very little for data access via a network share. Is there anything out there? Some sort of smallish DVD silo?

 

[mwroobel]

Hi,

As a sideline of my job, I manage a slowly-growing archive of around 300 DVDs, containing data. As these DVDs are expensive and hard to replace, they are never loaned out, instead copying them to a network share for others to access. This works OK but is a labour-intensive solution, and leads to delays when I'm not around or don't have time to spend 1-2h copying data.

It seems like a big jukebox that holds maybe 400-1000 DVDs would be a better solution, that could be browsed over the network, perhaps with an option to install a hard drive for caching.

I've found plenty of hardware that works like this for DVD (or Blu-ray) video playback, but very little for data access via a network share. Is there anything out there? Some sort of smallish DVD silo?

DVD jukeboxes are pretty much obsolete for many reasons, not the least of them only having 1 available at a time. You would be much better setting up a system that just copies newly inserted discs to a directory and then shares them out as is, or if you have specific needs for exact directory structure shared via a local drive letter, then image them to mountable .iso files and install some virtual mounter like daemon tools on the clients.

 

[leondz]

Yeah, one at a time sucks - hence the caching. I like the idea of your system Is there any hardware to simplify the copying job that crops up every time we get a new batch of discs in, or for the initial copy?

 

[midnkight]

Yeah, one at a time sucks - hence the caching. I like the idea of your system Is there any hardware to simplify the copying job that crops up every time we get a new batch of discs in, or for the initial copy?

When I was still using DVD, I would use myMovie, to create the database, I believe they should have a feature to copy them into an iso.

One nice feature was that mymovie could be attach to window media center, and if you use a program that mount a virtual Driver, the movie could be use and played from WMC. There are also other players that could just take those ISO and play them.