Oppo BD95 as a streamer

[Ali Tait]

EAC is free, dbPowerAmp is cheap ($38). I use dbPowerAmp and find it excellent.

Seconded. db is very good IMHO. EAC is also good but not the most user friendly, and it wouldn't run on my Win7 machine for some reason, so I went to poweramp and haven't looked back.

Mark, I just bought a cheap external cd rom to rip all my cd's with, more to save heavy use of the internal one in my Vaio than anything else. The internal one worked perfectly doing this.

[Ali Tait]

BTW, very interested in this Mark, please keep us up to date on how it goes.

[Reid Malenfant]

Right guys, I really want to go somewhere with this kind of like right now

I overdid things going out last Friday & then shopping on Sunday, so I had another few days on my back to calm things down. However, just before I did that I had BT Infinity installed, & I kind of had a look about for some music... I made sure the engineer left me more than enough cable, so I simply took everything except the hifi upstairs

Lets just say that I now have over 15Gb of FLAC albums & it's growing at a rapid rate

What's more is they sound stunning! I only tried one out & nearly crapped myself at the quality, that's using Winamp on my laptop & the V-Link. Listening to a few more now & I know I'm onto a winner, gotta be as none of the albums have cost me a penny

There must be thousands out there for free on FLAC, just type Netlable music into google... I still haven't finished downloading from the first one I came accross


So, looking at things the best bang on Tb for the buck appears to be a 2Tb drive... Western digital appear to be the dogs danglies, but the Caviar Black are damn expensive (5 year guarantee), though the Caviar Green are looking good price wise with a 3 year guarantee...

Any other suggestions for a 2Tb HDD? Seagate & Samsung are out of the window as they are now one & the same...

Oh, I guess I'll need two of them One as a backup...

Now I need some suggestions for a caddy, though it needs to have both an eSATA & USB2 port... One so I can load the data from my lappy, the other so I can plug it into the Oppo...

This doesn't look too bad, I have seen plastic ones at over £20... Again any suggestions more than welcome


Hopefully I can get stuff on the way here by early next week

[Ali Tait]

Not the cheapest, but I use and like the Drobo, and you can pick them up secondhand on the bay. Good thing with these is it automatically backs itself up between the four drives. You can hot swap the drives too, and use different makes/sizes. I still keep another backup though..

[Reid Malenfant]

Looks good, but no eSATA, so no good

[Reid Malenfant]

What I intend to do is use a single drive, but with one backup kept in a fire safe (loadsa steel round it). Whenever I have enough new albums to warrant putting them on the drives, I do them both at the same time & return the working drive to the Oppo & the other to the safe..

It can't really go wrong if it's not being used or spinning


I reckon with a 2Tb drive that's 4000+ albums of FLAC, that'll take me forever to download

[Ali Tait]

Yep that's what I do, keep a separate 2tb drive just for backup. Some of the Drobos have eSATA I believe Mark.

[Mark Grant]

looking at things the best bang on Tb for the buck appears to be a 2Tb drive... Western digital appear to be the dogs danglies, but the Caviar Black are damn expensive (5 year guarantee), though the Caviar Green are looking good price wise with a 3 year guarantee...

Any other suggestions for a 2Tb HDD? Seagate & Samsung are out of the window as they are now one & the same...

The Caviar black are fast but run warm and are more noisy than the slower 5400 rpm drives which are plenty fast enough even for streaming 1080P video to multiple devices at the same time so Flac no problem at all.

All you need for streaming audio are the slowest and cheapest hard drives you can find with the best value.

Nothing wrong with the samung 2tb
http://www.ebuyer.com/237908-samsung...-cache-hd204ui

If you decide to buy a NAS always check that the drives you are looking at are compatible as some have issues in a some makes of NAS.

[bobbasrah]

Nothing wrong with the samung 2tb
http://www.ebuyer.com/237908-samsung...-cache-hd204ui

If you decide to buy a NAS always check that the drives you are looking at are compatible as some have issues in a some makes of NAS.

Agreed on both points made by Mark.
Have 2 of the 204UI in the rack and they've not skipped a beat. Something sticks in my mind about the new generation format capability, but I forget now what the issue was for older v newer machines.

Another option in the same price range is the WD20EARS etc which have a 64Mb cache...

[slate]

bummer... now that Netflix have opened for streaming in UK+Irland and shortly opens up in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark; I asked OPPO support if they would add Netflix support the EU firmware as well? but alas

Our players are certified for and can run Netflix 2.0 which is used in the USA. This has only stereo audio and no subtitle support. Netflix Europe uses a completely incompatible application version 3.0 which supports 5.1 audio and subtitles. We are not able to support version 3.0 in current hardware.