Home Media Server

[jbailey]

I'm been wrestling with the idea of a home media server for a bit. Our home computing needs are pretty light, they only thing either of us really do outside of a web browser these days is ssh (me) or nethack (Angie). Outside of the laptop we have a pretty standard non-connected house. The only case where I'd really like to change this is music

Comments

[aigarius]

Have you looked at the Popcorn Hour series devices? My brother has one, one has some caching issues with IPTV streaming, but otherwise he is pretty happy with it serving his kids.

[jbailey]

I hadn't seen the Popcorn Hour stuff before, but it seems to be primarily focussed on video stuff. My problem is the audio: I have a pile of places I want to listen to music, which means that centralising the music somewhere is a problem.

Neat to see that TV stuff is getting that far, though!

MSI Wind

[ext_207696]

I like the little atom based msi computers. I have one that I use as a NAS box and it works great.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856167032

Re: MSI Wind

[jbailey]

That looks like a nice little box. The biggest problem is that it still has a cooling fan. Passive cooling to me is important because we have cats, and anything with a fan will eventually get clogged with cat hair. I literally caused a G5 PSU to boil over because cat hair clogged the intake vents. =( (The repair shop said they'd never seen anything like it)

Thanks, though! I'll look to see if I can find a fanless version.

Atom System

[aptituz]

I'd recommend an Atom-based system, too. With a GSE-chipset the power usage is quiet low (I recently configured a system with a 2.5" disk drive which should total to about 15W maximum power consumption). You do not neccessarily need to buy a case with fans AFAIK. Given a good thermal design case it should be possible to run an atom system fanless.

Re: Atom System

[jbailey]

Ah, okay. The Atom systems I'd seen talked about noisy fans. I'll take another look. thanks!

PC Engines Alix

[ext_207731]

I use a PC Engines ALIX3c (now 3d). It's a Geode (x86) based system, with a very small form factor and fanless (the geode chip doesn't even need a heatsink). The only limitation I can see from your requirements, would be that there isn't a system with built in audio and PCI-express for wireless, (I am still using G, which is fast enough for me) although there are mini-PCI N cards available.

LinITX.com would give you a good indication of what is available.

I run absolutely everything on mine (running Debian), including a wireless access point, record live radio, audio stream, UPNP, bit of web-serving and backup. The only thing it is too slow for is video processing.

Re: PC Engines Alix

[jbailey]

Neal Walfield replied to me by email and recommended these, too. I'd played with Geode based-systems before. I was surprised to see these on the market, I thought I'd read the AMD had end-of-lifed the Geode.

This seems like the bet I'll likely make since I'm familiar with them.

Thanks!

anyremote

[ext_207731]

I can control the alix 3c with anyremote, via bluetooth (although I think it could work by wifi if my phone had it) mplayer.

Sorry about the ugly yahoo URL, only just enabled OpenID and can't work out how to change it.

Re: anyremote

[jbailey]

OpenID isn't that great with LJ yet. I'd ideally like it if I could change my auth to accept OpenID. Instead if I try, it seems to become a different account. =(

Thanks for the pointer to AnyRemote! That looks like what I want. I'll poke at this a bit and see if I can make it do the job.

Re: anyremote

[jbailey]

Actually, Fabian pointed out a perfect app further in this thread: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/android-tesla/

I'll try that first.