Portable Media Centre

December 16, 2008 2:46 AM

I've just bought an external hard drive for carrying around my music, movies, and pictures. Is there a portable media centre program I could also put on it?

At home I use XBMC, and I love it!

However, when I'm playing movies etc. on someone else's computer, I don't want to have to install XBMC on their computer to get the same functionality.

Is there a program designed to be lightweight, portable (and preferably open source) which I could store on my external drive and just run it when playing back movies on someone's computer?

posted by edbyford to computers & internet (7 comments total)

GeeXboX sounds like it might be the thing.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 2:51 AM on December 16, 2008

There seems to be a portable version of vlc, (windows) (mac), which'll probably play everything.
posted by pompomtom at 3:17 AM on December 16, 2008

Don't you have to boot from GeeXboX in order to get it to work? That might be problematic. (Having to fiddle around in BIOS to get it to boot, and then I'd have to partition my hard drive etc.)

I was looking for something I could just run within Windows.
posted by edbyford at 3:19 AM on December 16, 2008

VLC is fine, but I was looking for media centre functionality.
posted by edbyford at 3:20 AM on December 16, 2008

Regular old XMBC runs fine from any volume, will browse whatever's on that volume, and it doesn't need to be the boot volume. I just copied to a thumb drive to check. It 'forgets' the custom playlists, so I have to choose Volumes > Thumb Drive > Vids once it runs, but other than that it works same as always.

That's OSX, though. It's probably more complicated in Windows. You don't say if "someone's computer" is Windows or Mac.
posted by rokusan at 5:36 AM on December 16, 2008

As far as I can tell there are no static builds of any DLNA servers for Windows. There are apparently ways to do this under Linux (and so possibly OS X by extension) with either GeeXbox or Mediatomb, but that won't really help if you have to worry about it. You may indeed have to install something on the host machine.
posted by rhizome at 9:54 AM on December 16, 2008

(Doh, missed the clarification, sorry.)
posted by rokusan at 10:12 AM on December 16, 2008