Right now I'm kinda in a holding pattern with this project. I picked up a Mac from a local cat that builds what he calls a Hackintosh. He takes MAC compatible PC components and cobbles 'em together then loads the Mac OS and sells 'em. I decided to rework the machine he sold me and pretty much replaced everything in it but the HD. I added a new MoBo, dual core cpu, 4 gigs of DDR2 RAM, a 1gig video card (way overkill I know), built it all into an old Gateway Dimension case I had layin around and then found out the Mac OS wouldn't interface with the new hardware. This really sux since I had already loaded up all my music on it before I rebuilt it and now it dudn even work!

Anyway, he's tellin me he'll have their most recent OS ready to load up pretty soon and since it's sposta do blue rays I'm gonna head that way with my HTPC machine. I think waitin and usin the Mac to rip and encode the DVDs might be the most prudent move. I'd really be upset to use my hot rod Ubuntu i7 machine to do all the heavy liftin and then find out the Mac wouldn't play 'em after they were already loaded. I'm gonna hafta do all the rippin as an ongoing process, but speakin of which, any recommendations for software to rip/encode with that's Mac compatible?

I really like the simplicity of the Mac for an entertainment center machine but it sure leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to customization compared to what I'm used to with Ubuntu.

I expect to wind up needin at least 3 of these 2Tb drives by the time I'm finished. I've thought about buildin a separate box with just drives set up in a RAID but really have no idea if that's workable, much less feasible with that kinda HD space or how I would link it to the HTPC machine. Anyone have any ideas about how to get this done?

As usual, another project with more questions than answers