Anybody using a DVD/HDD video recorder as a music jukebox?

[jdm56]

There aren't many affordable options other than the Yamaha CD/HDD recorders, but they of course don't do video, so it would be cool to have one machine do it all: video recorder and hard disk drive juke box. My main concern is sound quality of the Dolby Digital 2.0 being limited to what, 244kbps? Would that sound as good as CD?

[Cal Blacksmith]

I use a PC as a source for my HT. I could easily use it for music storage and it does video as well. This is an option you might think about.

[earthaziel]

I have my apartment set up in just the way you want to, only we have everything distributed over the network. The way we do it on the tv's that are not near a computer is with modded X-Boxes. There are many media player programs that could be set up on it. Plus it is really inexpensive. An X-box would be about a hundred bucks used and the mod chip is about 50. If you wanted to use the X-box as storage for MP3s you could add an internal hard drive, but at my place we just use it as a media extender, taking MP3s and movies off of the hard drive of our networked computers.

Matthew

Modded X-boxes FTW

[JJkizak]

I use the MY-HD 120 computer video card with remote control on a 36 ft cable. You can have a juke box file as big as your hard drives will allow. It is also 5.1 optical and can record at 40 megs per second bit rate. It uses about 8.6 gigs per hour of recording. for High Def stuff.

JJK

[jdm56]

I'd considered a Squeeze Box, but they seem a bit flakey, according to some reports. So I dunno...I think I'll wait a bit and see if I can catch a Yamaha CDR-HD1500 on ebay --200G hard drive and a CD burner. The only drawback, if you would call it that is that it does not do any compressed audio files. It's CD audio only. But with 200G of storage, that's still a lot of tunes.