The latest home theatre component a Media Tank

If you like watching movies, you probably have numerous movies. I have over 500 DVDs personally. For holidays and my birthday friends and family often gift me with movies. I watch and rewatch the movies in my collection. Although my system has a 5-disc player I would rather have all my movies in a central player system. I have owned lots of different player systems. Juke-boxes that hold hundreds of DVDs and albums to organize my collection.

Recently I have discovered the “Media Tank”. Manufactured by different companies Media Tanks use internal and external hard disc drives to store audio & video. These Media Tanks then display a menu of movies and music they contain for playback at your liesure. The screens are sortable and allow you to put your media files in easy to find folders.

These Media Tanks are sometimes called home media centers or media servers range from around $150 to as high as $500. In my case I was interested in archiving my extensive DVD collection. But DVDs come with menus and simply copying the main movie to a hard drive will lose the menus and special features. But I have found  “work-around” that will function to keep the entire menu and special features of each DVD. It is not all-together fully legal since it uses a program that has been litigated out of existence. Well, you can still find the program called “DVD Shrink” on Limewire. Not every DVD will convert, but I find most will.

The Media Tanks have the ability to play .ISO backups of DVDs created by DVD Shrink. These .ISO files are around 4 Gigs in size and maintain all the features of the original DVD.

Captions, alternate endings, picture angles and multiple languages all can be accessed from the .ISO file just as they would have on the original DVD.

It takes about 30 minutes to “shrink” a DVD to an .ISO file so it will take quite some time to put all my favorites into the Media Tank. But, then I don’t have to hunt for the DVD anymore. I can just pack them up and put them in storage. The resolution seems quite good. To my eye they seem just as good as the original even when played on my 65″ plasma. The Media Tanks have HDMI and other outputs for HD quality. They also have provision to add more external drives for storage.

 Another new cool feature is the ability to surf the internet. A basic web browser is built into the latest media tanks so you can view sites with video like youtube.com and others.  Genrally speaking, the media tank will fast become the “must have” device for techno-junkies like me. Shop around and buy one with no hard disc. By installing your own hard disc you usually save $200. As most people know the price of a 1TB hard drive has dropped to about $89-$90 and saving $200 by installing it yourself is worth the effort.

Find media tanks on eBay and froogle.com by typing in “home media player”, “home media center” or “home theatre player” in the search. Cheap versions cost $150 and you should expect to pay around $230 for a well optioned system with web browser. Be sure to check the player resolution to allow for full HD quality of 1920 X 1080 in either progressive scan (1080p) or 1080i. The system should have the ability to add on external hard drive storage, browse the web, HDMI connctions and digital audio. Some also function as digital video recorders.

The media tank is cool, so start looking now. A little research will pay off and get a system that will have every feature you want. 

This entry was posted on March 8, 2009 at 21:11 and is filed under Computer Tech Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print