Hi,

I plan to soon begin building a new PC to use as a media centre, and would like to ask for some advice.

After changing my mind a few times, I'm thinking that it may be nice to go for a server approach. My ideas are somewhat hazy, but I'm thinking of just having a box running as a server, with a couple of large hard drives holding all the media. This could then be streamed to any device.

To accomplish this, it should all be streamable through a web browser, and after doing a little research, Flumotion looks good for this. So, any device running a web browser and Totem would be able to stream media. Now, I don't know where to start with this, I have no experience with anything like this, so I'd like some advice on where to start, and what I need to learn to be able to put it off.

The important thing is for media to be streamable on the network, but would this potentially make it streamable over the internet? I don't see any reason it wouldn't be, and that would be superb.

It would be nice to have this all happening through a nice AJAX-powered site, but that's not important until after everything else is set up.

It would be nice to be able to access media via other programs, which shouldn't be too hard to setup, i.e. get Rhythmbox to read its library from a different PC, and similar for other programs.

Any administration-type-stuff that needs to be done could be done via remote desktop (or plug in a monitor if the situation calls for it).

So, any advice on where to start, any other comments or advice, pointers towards useful programs, feature ideas are all really appreciated.

Although I have not tried to build one myself, this Home Theater PC HOWTO guide seems very throrough, detailed, and complete. Good luck with it

Look into gnump3d
http://gnump3d.sourceforge.net/

I had this working a while ago, basically it runs a very basic web server (pretty sure it doens't require apache as i never set it up) with a frontend load of PHP that lists your music/video (video side needed work back then, didn't seem to support many formats). You setup your shares of your media on the server (through an easy to understand config file) where gnump3d resides (NFS shares would work i imagine). Then browse to that machineort via your web broswer and you can stream your media to any client, pretty nifty, and definatly simple to setup.

For admin you could use SSH (with x forwarding for any GUI config you need to do)

Whilst not a step by step guide it does give you a start point and some references to check out on google

good luck.