Describe Your Media Setup

[heatvent]

Hi, I know a lot of you have either media servers on your HS server or separate. I am looking to see how people are managing their media to see what the best practices are. I have flopped back and forth trying to find the ideal setup. My specific issues are:

Music - nice to have streamed from a server, however, managing new music, syncing to iPod, etc., as far as I know, need to be done on the remote machine and can't be done over network. Does anyone have a solution for this.

Home Video - I keep raw footage on my main PC for editing and try to save the finished product on the server.

Photos - they are on the home server, but I probably need to have in two spots. I have a lot of raw pictures that are not fit for slideshows so I keep the raw pictures in one spot and only share/stream the finished ones.

Please post any ideas suggestions on how you organize/manage/access these types of media or others like movies, TV, email, phone, voicemail, etc.

[mrhappy]

I have a relatively low end setup for media, but it works for me...I designed wildly extravagent setups but decided the KISS approach would work just as good.

On my HS PC I have two drives, an 80Gb HD and a 250Gb Removeable HD. The 80gb is partioned 10/20/40/10 (OS/Pictures/Music/Backups)...the 250Gb just contains video either movies/series (most of the old stuff is backed up to DVD and then deleted). On the HS server the albums/pictures are all shared, and I also run windows media connect for uPnP.

On my XP MCE PC I just have the OS installed (going to get a microdrive installed soon), using TweakUI I have changed the default 'My Music', 'My Pictures' and My Videos locations to the network shares, so to MCE it sees them as no different to being on local drives.

I don't do any TV recording really (not much I like to watch and record) but I have a FreeSat box set up which supports recording directly to a USB drive which I have an old 80Gb HD connected to, no PC is involved in the process...if I do later want to record to PC I can just swap the HD USB cables over.

I then have a 2nd media centre running GeeXbox off a CF card, which also steals everything from the network drives. Xbox 360 runs uPnP and gets everything from the server, also the same for my Nokia N95 and my Phillips Streamium alarm clock that also plays MP3's.

On a monthly basis I copy all my pictures/albums onto a seperate 120gb HD just for backups sake and then this gets disconnected and stored away (so as to minimise its use).

To keep my ID3 tags in an order I run Tag&Rename, which also supports over the network updating...just takes a slight bit longer to update however. I don't use iTunes (run iShuffle on my shuffle which eliminates the proces completely) but am sure there are hacks about.