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Searching for a Media Hub Solution


Spacey
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Hiyas,

 

I'm currently looking for a solution for my living-room-multimdia-chaos :unsure:

 

Situation earlier: My IT-room was next to our living room. I had cables (S-VHS & Audio) running through the wall to our TV, Beamer & HiFi - worked well.

 

Situation now: We moved. My IT-room is now directly 1 floor below our living room which makes the earlier solution lot harder, I could drill through the floor and put cables somewhere throgh but that's not a nice solution, additionally the location of the equipment is directly on the other side of the rooms so the cables would get long.

 

So I'm looking for a new solution to play my digital music, video & photo from my PCs (Win & Macs) to TV, Beamer & HiFi.

 

So far I used to play movies & stuff from a XP-PC with VLC and so on.... Now I've got a spare-machine (AMD XP2000 SSE (no SSE2 & 3 afaik)) which could be used as some kind of media hub directly in the living room - connected via WLAN for example.

 

My intentional idea was to put some kind of media management software pice like AppleTV on it, but then I read some threads here and from what I know so far such a solution would need at least SSE2 (or 3) for an OSX86 install followed by that whole front-backrow stuff. Correct? So no chance for me to put that on my AMD XP, eh? -> Now it would get OT from OSX86 -> What else good solutions (PC soft) for such media hub pc would fit? Experiences?

 

I once tried some kind of DVB-T software with integrated media management which was kinda scary....

 

Any ideas or suggestions for *good* software - manageable via TV (maybe with seperated remote or whatever)....

 

The "worst case" will be that I simply use my MBP, copy the wanted stuff on it and then just put it somewhere on the floor and connecting it to my TV & HiFi equipment... but that'd be no "permanent" solution, only on demand... hmmmm

 

Or other general ideas what you "constructed" here for these situations? :)

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  • 1 month later...

One of the best media systems out there is an original modded xbox 1 with XBMC on it, an old xbox is about 50.00 these days, an executor3 modchip and a big hd of your choice - excellent system.

 

Next is Mythtv, there are a few iterations of it, such as knoppmyth, mythbuntu and one based on fedora core 7 i can't remember the name of.

 

Next in line is a windows media center 2005 or vista home/premium/ultimate server connected to an xbox 360 as a media center extender, this is really simple to setup, and gives you a lot of flexibility.

 

I have not touched an apple tv, but it won't play xvids out of the box unless you tear it open and mod it up via appletvhacks.net - but since you're here on insanelymac, you're probably used to dismantling systems.

 

:)

does that help, or steer you in the right direction? for info on modding an xbox, check out www.x-scene.org

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