I am getting a hard drive dedicated to movies. The plan is to rip dvds and store full length movies in the hard drive and build a library, like a movie server.

I want to be able to view these movies at all tv's using media center extenders. I figure a wired network will work the best and plan saving the movies in .wmv format.

What extenders should I use to make this work the best?

Any extender will work, but the 360 is really the only model not discontinued and further that will work with h.264. So if you wanted to use it instead of wmv, it would be a good option. Plus they are cheap at $200, new. The only problem is the noise and the size.

As far as I know the D-Link DSM-750 hasn't been discontinued, either. So at this point if you want a quiet small extender you'll have to go with the DSM-750 unless you can still find Linksys or HP extenders. As for building your movie library, take a look at MyMovies. If you have a Windows Home Server, there's a version of MyMovies for WHS. That's what I'm using. You have a choice of clients. You can either use the MyMovies client, Media Browser or if you are running Windows 7 you can point the new Movie Library directly at the share with all the movies. MyMovies maintains the metadata needed for that to work. I don't know if the Windows 7 Movie Library works on Extenders, though, but I was pleasantly surprised about how easy it was to get my movies to show up in 7MC on my test machine. I haven’t hooked up an extender to my test machine yet, though.

I'm running MyMovies on WHS. I have a network share dedicated to movies and I rip my movies to the dvr-ms format (by far the best experience). I wouldn't do wmv. MyMovies on WHS runs a service in the background that automatically fetches the metadata including covers etc. All I have to do is create a new directory with the movie name and the year in parenthesis and drop the video file in that folder. MyMovies will instantly go out and retrieve the metadata. If it made a mistake I can start up the collection manager on any workstation and fix the metadata. On VMC, I'm using Media Browser as the client.

 

Excellent suggestions. I will look into MyMovies and WHS. Does dvr-ms format save space or run faster? I was told .wmv was the best format for networking. I will definitely look more into this option.

dvr-ms rips faster because the codec is MPEG2, same as a DVD, so the video doesn't have to be transcoded. It also properly supports fast-forward, rewind etc. While wmv supports fast-forward and rewind it does it very slowly. For some reason it can't fast-forward and rewind at the same 3 speeds as with dvr-ms.