Hiyas,

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

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?

Media Portal , Nero Home , search on google media center software and you should find what you need.

Back from my abstinence...
Thanks for these 2 names!

Yes of course I could google *anything* but I looked some *good* suggestions

Thanks anyway

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