Linux Media Extender & Lightest Distro Required
 

I've been looking but haven't been able to find any type of media extender for Linux. I have Windows Media Center running on my main PC where all of my movies/music is stored. I have another PC that I currently have Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop running on, but it's a little slow. It's running an Intel 1.3Ghz Celeron, 2Gig RAM and a 25Gig hard drive. I have an older Hauppauge 3700 series (??) TV card installed for connecting to TV. Anyways, does such an extender exist that will run on Linux? If no, any other alternatives besides just connecting the Ubuntu box to the TV as a monitor, connecting to my Windows PC via home LAN and watching the move over LAN via a built-in Linux movie player? Either way, I think I will need something MUCH lighter than Ubuntu to run on the Celeron machine as it's very slow. Any ideas on maybe a command line started media extender that opens up the program to a GUI? Thanks....

Have you tried running XBMC live on Linux? It's as bare bones as it comes to being a stripped down Linux media distro. It has samba as well to run in mixed environments.

I am currently running XBMC (full) on Ubuntu 10.04 on my HTPC and it works flawlessly. The team at XBMC has put out an incredible product in this newest release. I used to run XBMC on Ubuntu 9.04 (which was the same XBMC version) and it had so many bugs... I have not had a crash since they released the new version earlier this year.

Check out the wiki - http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=XBMC_Live

Hope this helps!

I think it is possible to run some things without a window manager. Might look at mplayer on command line or maybe it was vlc.??

I have used XBMC before and I agree it is an awesome app and works great! I even tried it on the Ubuntu machine and, albeit slow, the app still ran with no probs. The only thing is that XBMC acts as a media server, which I already have on my Windows machine that's running Windows Media Center. What I am looking for is some sort of media extender that runs on Linux that works with WMC. I guess, which I didn't think of until now, I could just point the library for XBMC to the folders on the Windows machine via a mapped network drive? That way I could still watch movies on my Xbox via WMC from the Windows machine and also be able to watch movies on the television (in another room) from the Linux box with XBMC. Sounds like a viable solution if I can get the mapped network drive part to work through XMBC and/or Linux. Thanks for the replies!

You can use any distro on your machine, if you go for a lightweight environment like LXDE or XFCE. You can share your video folder on your Windows machine and watch your videos with any video-player on your Linux machine, if you mount the share in Linux (which is as complicated as adding one line to your /etc/fstab). No need for a media-server. Only thing is that your machine may not be able to play HD-video, because of the slow processor.

Yeah... that is sort of along the lines of what I was thinking I would have to do. My only other option is to put Windows on the currently Linux box and just use WMC for watching movies. One question though.... If I stick with the Linux route and just mount the Windows share is there a suggested media remote control type setup that will work with Linux instead of having to use a wireless mouse/keyb setup? I'm thinking that even if there is, it probably wouldn't work the way I would want it to. The reason I say this is because I would be pretty much using the TV as a monitor and would have to at least have a mouse hooked up to click the Windows share folder and to also click on what movie I wanted to watch. At this route I think I'm just staring down a long, narrow pipe dream! LOL I just wanted something simple with as less clutter as possible (wife's only stipulation) for the family to watch movies and Netflix on. Thanks to you all for your replies and suggestions!