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I am sick of thousands of CD's and DVD's lieing about so i'm thinking about putting the all on a HD and connecting all the home computers together.

Basement Gamer computer

Ground floor Internet box and computer

1st floor Wifes computer with printer

What I would like is that all the computers can use the printer, and a connected HD for music and films.

1. Where the internet and printer are far away a normal hub system wouldn't work?

2. What's the best quickest way to save all music and DVD's on to a HD - could I buy or rent any form of super quick DVD reader?

3. What format would be best for saving music and/or DVD's?

4. ATM the internet is shared via the houses electricity network - which much to my shock has worked faultlessly for a year now.

Alot of newer routers have a USB Port. This would allow you to connect the printer and share it either as a network printer or a tunneled USB device (depending on the routers capabilities).
Maybe you can even connect a USB hub and attach the HDD using USB. This ofcourse would make the HDD quite slow.
Every computer which has accesses to the router would then be able to use the devices.

What you actually might be looking for is maybe a "Media Center PC"/"Home Theater PC" Home theater PC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or a Network Attached Storage PC (NAS).

PLODDITHANLEY wrote: 1. Where the internet and printer are far away a normal hub system wouldn't work?

I don't understand this question. What is "far away"? Esp. if you are using your power grid as a network.

PLODDITHANLEY wrote:4. ATM the internet is shared via the houses electricity network - which much to my shock has worked faultlessly for a year now.

Are you sure you are not just using your e-network as LAN cables to connect to the router and then to the internet?

PLODDITHANLEY wrote: 3. What format would be best for saving music and/or DVD's?

I recon:
Music: MP3 (lossy), WAV (lossless)
Videos: the native Format (or MPEG4/H.264) if your not too much into quality preservation you might also go with (XVID or DIVX).

OK something to be getting on with thx as normal sniping coward.

Glad I can help, post back what you went for if you feel like it.