Building a Media Server @ Home
 

Fellow FTers,

Its been a while since I got my hands dirty with rebuilding a system and getting it to do crazy things. Its been six months since I got my new laptop and finally, having backed up all the personal data off my old one, I've been toying with the idea of converting the old box into a home media server. Here's what I intend to achieve.

- I will be connecting to this machine an external hard drive that sotres all the media
- Use this machine as a single point media server for all media in my home
- Connect this to a TV with an s-Video cable to eliminate the DVD Player.
- Have this machine accessible over the home network so I can connect to it remotely from any other room and either
a) stream the media to a macine I am using to connect to this and
b) Run programs on this server remotely so if I want to watch a show on TV, I just change the TV Input to the laptop and control that from my laptop.

- Probably also hook up a TV Tuner Card to this machine so all my home entertainment runs through this.

I was wondering if it is possible to do this using Windows XP Professional. I am aware that Linux might be a better choice but I haven't played around with Linux in ages and thus am not very confident.

The machines that I will be using to connect to this box are running Windows Vista Business and Windows XP Pro.

Any tips on how should I go about doing this using Windows XP PRo as my OS of Choice? Using Ubuntu?

Cheers

SQ421

If you have the option to go to XP Mediacenter edition it may make things a lot easier....otherwise its totally doable with XP Pro but you may be disapointed in the user interface. More than likely you'll have to cobble together something b/t the TV Tuner's propritary software and software to play back tunes, videos and DVDs (I prefer VLC from ww.videolan.org for movies and DVDs and streaming)

sounds like a great project

of course, I have to toss this out...mythbuntu
http://www.mythbuntu.org/
its a pretty painless way to get a linux meida box up and running :D

I've been quite happy with Vista Media Center (part of Vista ultimate and home premium) but have slowly started running into limitations. It doesn't support QAM digital cable (shouldn't be a problem for where you are). Sometimes it just "stalls" for a minute or so, and sometimes the shared network drives I get my media off vanish for an hour or so...

I'm in the process of testing SageTV, I'll report back with my experiences on it :D

My setup consists of an HP Mediasmart server (running Windows Home Server), 6Tb of drives hooked up to it with my media and 2 Vista media boxes (one in the bedroom, one in the living room).

I don't record TV with them as I really need digital cable, so I also have a Tivo Series 3. I watch TV on the Tivo if it's HD, and on the media center if it's regular content (I use Tivo Desktop to copy stuff off the Tivo to the media center).

Thanks SpaceBass..

The two users of this setup are yours truly - A Tech Consultant and the housemate - A jeans and flipflops wearing java programmer. Two species least concerned about the UI and be quite happy to drag and drop files in the Media Player to run it and view the same on TV.

Come to think of it, I might have a mediacenter disk lying around.

Is there somthing specific I should watch out for / pay attention to while doing this on Mediacenter / XPP ?

Cheers

SQ421

I also use the WHS / Vista MCE combination. Aside from delays when entering "My Recorded TV" when you have a large library of recordings, it works well. The native TV-guide's coverage varies depending on location but it works quite well.

I have previously used XP MCE, but it feels olds and also acts like it when you get a big library.

I might try out Sage as well, to get the benefit of beeing able to use two different kinds och tv-tuners (satellite/OTA).

Why not internal?

s-Video? Thats so '90s. Don't you have hdmi or at least component?

Search for some media center front end or go for a new media centric OS. (Vista Home Premium/Ultimate, Win MCE 2005 or a Linux distro).

Its an old laptop with 30GB internal drive. My housemate has an external hard drive which we use to store media on.

Not trying to build something flashy but just trying to put an old laptop thats lying around to good use. S-Video is all its got.

XP MCE seems like an option. Any idea if one can remote desktop to it from a vista machine?

What tv have you got? S-Video wont output HD so it's going to perform worse then a 100$ player on dvd upscaling (if you have a HD TV).

According to Microsoft remote desktop is included.

Don't have an HD TV. Just a SD.
I'd mainly be using this "server" to watch movies etc on the TV screen. Will add a TV Tuner to this gig purely because it can be done, and that means if I do feel like watching a TV Station, I can just do it without having to switch the inputs around.
Another option I am consiering is to do away with the TV altogether and hook up an LCD Widescreen monitor to this laptop and use that as a computer/ movie player / TV

I can certainly understand using "stuff just laying around".

The drawback with an external drive is that you may run into speed issues with the connection to the external drive. Playing HD video or even standard DVD will take a lot of bandwidth from the drive.

I experimented this wk-end with playing a standard (non HD) DVD that I had stored on a SAN (1TB, 1Gb/s but used in 100 Mb/s mode). The laptop is a newer Lenovo with Vista on it (no other choice... ) and it was 'just keeping up', bandwidth-wise.

I'm no pro at this but that's what I ran into.

JP

Java programmer, no wonder UI isn't a concern (rimshot!)
Kidding of course!

Dragging and dropping files works ... we do here here at Chez SpaceBass from time to time...but an interface like MCE or Apple's FrontRow makes a HUGE difference....one thats not easy to grasp until you use it.

That said, XP should work just fine then... I think you can get 75% of the way there with VLC alone ...

The caveats with XP MCE - and I'm out of date here - are the hardware requirements. They tend to be rather strict. USB Tuners, in particular, tend not to work.

I know I sound like a broken record (and it could be worse, I could say "buy a mac mini") but you may want to play with Mythbuntu ... its all-in-one, has a massive amount of hardware support, can play anything you throw at it...

My setup is just for photo slide shows. DVD playing is via an up-conversion player and a Sony PS3 when the kids are not using it (very rare).

The PC is an old IBM Thinkpad A31p. This model is old but has DVI output via a port replicator. Cable is a DVI-D to HDMI variety. I don't have XP MCE but found a TV/monitor driver that will work. PC output resolution is 1280x720 displayed on a HDTV with 1366x768 native resolution. So some portion is cut off.

Files are stored on a NAS with about 20Mb bandwidth. The connection is 54Mb 802.11g but soon I will try a 802.11n NIC in this computer.

I've been a user of SnapStream Media's Beyond TV for several years. I started out similarily, with a spare computer basically. Now, I've got a full-grown HTPC in a slick stereo-rack case that records in SD and HD, and is connected via HDMI to my 46" DLP TV. The great thing is, it will automatically compress the saved MPEG2 or HD transport stream to DivX or MPEG4 or WMA if I ask it to. I usually "stock up" my laptop with shows before leaving on a business trip. I also got hooked into their BTV Link product, which acts as a media extender to connect up to other TVs in the house, or even stream programming via the internet. Might check it out - free 21-day trial. All you need is a tuner card to get started!