Suggestions: Linux Media Box
 

Hey Guys

I'm posting here for some advice on what software/setups would be the best for a media centre

I have a spare Slackware box at home, and have been trying to find something to do with it, I have lots of mp3s/movies etc so thought a media centre would be nice

I only have 1 monitor (using a kvm) so I'd like to be able to playback the files on my main PC (winXP), I'm sure windows media player can pick up networked pcs?

Anyways, I've spent some time trawling the net, and these forums for ideas, but there are so many different options out there I don't know where to start!

Please, any advice would be greatly appreciated

Regards

J

take a look at mythtv?

I've got a few around the house all running slackware.

Well, yes, there are quite a few possibilities. You could use NIS since you won't be leaving your local network (NIS is not very secure otherwise) or SAMBA. Both are fairly easy to set up and make the partitions on one pc visible to another one, as though it is all one thing. If you feel more experimental, you could even set up a server and access your media as if you were visiting any outside media site. Personally, I use my secondary pc mainly for back-ups. That's more secure than backing up on the same pc that has the original data.

Since you won't be playing movies on the 'Media pc' as you call it. You'll only need it to actually PLAY music, the Movie part will just be a share where you can access the files to view on your XP machine. Samba is great for that, simple, fast and elegant, i use it for a similar purpose myself.

You could also setup SSH on the Linux box and Putty on windows to connect to it for any admin/file moving etc. you needed doing. You could also use it for playing music via the CLI.

If you don't want the putty/SSH route for playing music, you could look at MPD and a web front-end (the one i used to use escapes me at the moment but i'm sure Google will help).

It's not a how to by any means but it gives yo uideas on how to achieve things, and what to start looking into.

http://www.ssma.us/debian_media.html

a bit out of date, but does kind of what you are looking for.