A little outside of our normal postings (if we can say that we have established such a thing this early on in our blog) but I would like to discuss a little about Monica and my "porn delivery system" or PDS that we have at our home.
Having a porn collection is something we all have and we all share the same challenges of hiding it, making it really useful and getting to it easily when we want it. Porn is not like your normal movie collection that you want sitting out on a shelf, unless, of course, you are Barney Stinson. So we came up with a solution.
Now before I go into specific details of how we set up our PDS, I just want to mention that I am not specifically endorsing theses particular products or suggesting that this is the only means by which to accomplish this goal. These are products that we like and work well for us and we can tell you that they work well together. I know people who have built similar systems using completely different components who have also met with good success.
Our PDS consists of two main components: our porn server and our viewing machines. For a porn server we chose the Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2. This is a low cost, high quality network storage device that you can get for around $280 without hard drives. I then added two large three terabyte hard drives to the unit (which is all that this model will hold) which are set up to be mirrored to make it rather unlikely that our porn will be lost. (For serious protection, get an external USB hard drive as well that you can connect to the device and use that to take a backup of the whole thing too.)
What makes the ReadyNAS Ultra 2 so nice for this purpose is that it is small, attractive, completely silent, uses little power and has a built in DLNA server. DLNA is the system that serves media files out to your home network. Since the ReadyNAS has this, and a ton of other features, built in it makes what used to be the tough part of this process very easy. Back when I first tried this I was building my own DLNA server using a variety of products and while it worked fine it was a lot of work and not for the casual user. The ReadyNAS changes that pretty dramatically. Now it is super easy to use.
The model that we have holds only two hard drives. For those ambitious enough to think that they need more porn storage than that can handle, Netgear makes the same unit in four and six drive models. The six drive model will provide you with as much as fifteen terabytes of porn storage. If that isn't enough for you you need to hire someone to help with your storage needs, and maybe someone to help you with your porn addiction as well.
Getting movies onto the ReadyNAS varies in difficulty. For us, we use DVDFab and Handbrake to take our DVD porn collection and convert the movies into small, high quality MP4 files which work great for our purposes. For real movies we convert the whole thing. For videos that are just a series of disconnected vignettes we convert each vignette individually so that we can watch just the ones that we want. This works great. We take things like the "ten dvd collection of young blondes giving head" which we convert into a thousand individual vignettes and no longer are we stuck starting at the beginning and missing the parts at the end and trying to remember which ones we liked and which ones we didn't. This is a big improvement in how we get to use our porn collection.
Converting the porn from DVD to MP4 does take some manual effort but I find that it is worth it. Videos that we have on DVD are never watched. Ones on the ReadyNAS are used regularly.
Videos that we find online, like on YouPorn, have a handy download button. We just download and copy to the ReadyNAS. Easy as can be.
Alternatively, if you don't want a nice device like the ReadyNAS and you have a Windows desktop that is up to the task get MediaMall's PlayOn product, it works great too for more casual users.
Now that we have our videos being served onto our home network (you do have your house networked, right?) we can hook up a device to watch the videos and we will be good to go. For this, Monica and I have selected to use Sony PlayStation 3s. They work great. They find the ReadyNAS (or the PlayOn software) automatically and they "just work." Watching videos off of the ReadyNAS is as easy as can be.
Of course you can use more than just a PlayStation. You can use pretty much any computer, Apple TV, XBOX 360 or PlayStation 3. Plus companies like Netgear make DLNA video devices that are designed exactly for this purpose. These devices can be pretty inexpensive.
What is awesome about this set up is that with minimal effort you can reduce your porn collection down to something that looks nothing like porn, take all of your porn dvds and throw out the cases and just store the discs someplace (like the basement, attic or in a storage unit buried in the back) where they will never be found but you have them just in case. But now, your porn collection can be viewed anywhere in your home with a device that can connect to DLNA. For us, this means in the living room, in our bedroom, in either office, anywhere with a laptop, etc. The whole house, basically, has streaming porn on demand. The ability to use our collection is greatly increased.
Of course you can use this system for normal movies (not just porn), music and even photos (normal photos, porn photos, photos of Monica and I... whatever strikes your fancy) that you can now watch, view or listen to anywhere in your home. Trust me, it is a great system.
And that is how Monica and I watch porn.
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