Setting Up A Media Server on a Second PC. Questions/Advice/Help

My Revo is attached to a Lite-On BD-ROM by USB I bought from Newegg.ca during Black Friday for $70. It runs Windows 7 Pro and uses PowerDVD 9.

So you use your Revo as your Blu-Ray Drive as well?

In theory. I only tried it once and prefer my PS3.

Heh, I was probably gonna get a PS3 as well for a Blu-Ray Player. ^_~

The dell is pretty big by comparison. I’d definitely go with one of the dual core atom ions for less stress.

295 from buy.com’s eBay store with xp for the revo (look for atom 330) vs 350-450 for an asrock which still looks pretty swank for a ht console.

Upgrading the ram isn’t worth it though.

I’m actually looking at that Revo, and would get another HD for it to hook up externally. I don’t need an optical drive on it, and I like how little it is. Plus it’s cheaper. ^_^

you can either replace the inside hd or augument the storage with say a wd passport.

Hmmmmmmm, I was thinking of augmenting it with an external as you suggested. A WD passport is a good’un? Oh, and what would be the best way to hook this up to a TV? VGA cable?

Well what I plan on doing is using my media server to hold everything and just use the gigabit lan port that it has to stream everything. That should be more then enough bandwith for what I need.

VGA or HDMI for the hook up depending on what your TV had available.

Hmmmm, does that mean it would have to have a wired connection. Given the setup of my apartment, I was hoping to keep it wireless, would that still work?

If it’s an apartment, cabling it should be easier than a mansion–you definitely want all the bandwidth if you can do it–hd content is an ugly choppy mess on wireless, even wireless n but low-def/standard def content might be doable.

Ugh, the problem is the router is nowhere near the TV (it’s right next to the bar in the kitchen, which is an awful design that I hate), and wiring it would be tricky…I wonder if I could get it under the rug…or maybe another phone jack for the DSL…

One nice thing about those Dells is that most of them were almost completely silent. I really liked that aspect of those systems, particularly for media center type installations.

You also might want to think about Windows Media Center if you want to use it as a DVR, too. It’s pretty slick, particularly in Windows 7, and it allows you to record TV (something I don’t think XBMC does, IIRC).

We have a Windows Media Center PC down in the basement, and use the Xbox 360 as an extender on the main TV. It means we don’t have a PC on all the time in the living room, which is nice.

XBMC doesn’t have DVR capabilities; I believe most people use Media Center or MythTV for that if they’re doing it on a PC.

Those little Acer boxes are pretty neat, but for the amount of money, building your own HTPC is a pretty fun project. I put one together a few months ago for just under $500, but it’s got a lot more oomph than the Revo. It could play most modern games pretty well, if I were so inclined. Something to keep in mind.

I’m sorry, but what’s an HTPC? And what did you do to build one?

Home Theater PC. The term generally refers to smallish PCs that look kind of like stereo equipment (mine uses this case). Rather than going for maximum power, most people build them to look nice, run well, and not make very much noise. As always with building your own machine, you can usually get a lot more performance for your dollar. As I said, I built mine for a little under $500, and it’s got a 3.1 ghz dual-core AMD processor, a 1GB Radeon 4350 graphics card, 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive (although I would have put in more if I didn’t already have a few terabytes of external hard drive sitting around). Could have had something even cheaper if I went with less power, but I wanted to leave open the possibility of dual-booting Windows on it for gaming (as it is, it’s just running Ubuntu). And it’s fun to build.

htpc are dead, at least to me. wasn’t a viable project in between xmbc and wdtv for me at least.

Sinfony, oohhh, I see. I don’t wanna game on it, I just wanna watch stuff on it, but this gives me ideas, thanks.

Rei, what’cha mean?

Maximum PC just did an article on setting up a FreeNAS box with an old PC.

I don’t know about that Dell, but my 2.8GHz P4 MB has two SATA ports. I wouldn’t bother with DDR1 or IDE anymore, either.

This Dell only has IDE, so hmmmmm. Might not be as suitable as I had hoped, then.

Also, a friend mentioned that, since I plan to get a PS3, just to stream media through that rather than get a whole separate media center. Does that sound like a viable option?