Need Advice on Media Servers and receivers

[jakegub]

Hello everyone,

I have 3 TVs in my house and I play a lot of media from my computer (mostly tv shows). My laptop has an HDMI port which is really nice for the 1 TV we have that supports HDMI, but I can no longer use my laptop to play video on other TVs because my new laptop doesn't have an S-video port anymore.

What I would like to do is host all of the files on my desktop upstairs and have some sort of small device attached to each TV that can access files on the "server" and play them on the TV. I can run a software-based server on the desktop, but I have to keep windows on it for gaming. Dual-booting is a possibility, but that kind of takes away the server always being available feature.

If you have suggestions on how to make something like this work (For as little money as possible), add your suggestions.

[KnightRid]

Been looking for the same.

So far I found out that media center extenders work ok, but only if you keep them wired or get a REAL good connection from wireless. If you do not have Wireless N, then you will probably only be able to feed 1 tv at a time if you are using the wireless g. You might be better off just putting a cheap pc at each tv (which is what I started to do) as long as you dont want the fancy interface, they work great! just set up shared folders and off you go.

I have been looking at the TIVX products also since they have hard drives in them or connectable through usb ports, it make them nice just to transfer the video to the drive and play it locally. They are not real cheap though, hence the problem I see with media extenders/players.

Mike

Best case scenario is if you have some xbox360's or even regular xbox's lying around...they make good media extenders and you would already have them

[Skippman]

I'm using a server/client setup. On my server I'm running TVersity. TVersisty is a freeware application that emulates the Windows Media Center extensions. It has the ability to transcode (convert) media on the fly if the processor is powerful enough. So you can play back virtually any format.

I use my PS3 and X-360 as my media playback centers. They attach to the TVersity server as if it were a Windows Media Center server. This lets me play back my MP3's, videos, and photo's on the devices.

[martini161]

look into myth tv, they use a front end/back end system which is exactly what your looking for

[hnzw_rui]

If all you require is simple media playback, I recommend the Popcorn Hour. It's relatively inexpensive and has fairly good format and codec support. No need to run any specialized software on the server PC, either. You just use simple Windows File Sharing to serve your files.

[jakegub]

Mike,

Are you saying that I could use my modded xbox (non-360) to stream files from my desktop, or would I need to put all the files onto the xbox? Do they make wireless adapters for the xbox? I have a modded xbox at my parents house that would be okay with the wife to sit by the tv somewhere.

Jake

Also guys, good suggestions! I didn't even know where to start!

Jake

[hnzw_rui]

Are you saying that I could use my modded xbox (non-360) to stream files from my desktop, or would I need to put all the files onto the xbox? Do they make wireless adapters for the xbox? I have a modded xbox at my parents house that would be okay with the wife to sit by the tv somewhere.

Well that's even better. Google XBMC. That should do the job quite nicely. You can get a wireless ethernet bridge for the Xbox. Kinda expensive, though.

[KnightRid]

Are you saying that I could use my modded xbox (non-360) to stream files from my desktop, or would I need to put all the files onto the xbox? Do they make wireless adapters for the xbox? I have a modded xbox at my parents house that would be okay with the wife to sit by the tv somewhere.

Well that's even better. Google XBMC. That should do the job quite nicely. You can get a wireless ethernet bridge for the Xbox. Kinda expensive, though.

umm, ditto

Mike

http://xbmc.org/