Sony DVD Media Changer Carosel

 

*PURCHASE!*

 

I started the editorial realizing that I didn’t have an article for the day.  I started thinking about my storage problem, and searched for jukeboxes, but couldn’t really find any that didn’t say “call for price” (i.e. over $10,000).

 

I’m glad something like this exists, but it doesn’t appear that these are as popular as they should be.  I’m going to get one and try it out.

I just bought this, so hopefully should be here in soon. Amazon is just down the street, so hopefully it should get here within a day or so (rather than the 5-9 day SuperSaver shipping). Once I get it in I’ll put a review up post-haste!

I got the Media Changer in, and am working on a review.

It works a little differently than I originally expected. When reading a “data” disc the drive spins up and is extremely loud. Playing a regular DVD (or or HD-WMV) it is quiet.

Does the drive think it’s not getting enough data and spins up because it thinks there’s a read error? I’m either going to have to not put Divx movies in the unit or locate it in a closet somewhere.

I haven’t tested if the unit can be shared, but I’m not optimistic. DRM probably won’t let DVD video stream across a network, and I probably won’t be able to change the discs remotely.

Speaking of which, is there a way to make a normal PC a “Media Center extender”? I have three full-blown Media Center PCs, but would use only one if I could make one a server and the others work like extenders. I’ve already looked into the Xbox 360 option, and it really isn’t an option because it doesn’t support Divx, Xvid, ffdshow, and all the other digital formats I have (yes, I know about the real-time transcoding add-ons but they are slow and don’t work very well). So… the only solution I have right now is to run several full-blown media center PCs and have them connect to either other.