Advice wanted on TV video server.

November 3, 2005 8:48 PM

I have an old Intel Celeron 501MHz PC sitting around collecting dust. I'm wondering whether it would be suitable as a video server for my television, assuming I upgrade it with WiFi and a TV card. I don't have/want cable, so I don't necessarily need TiVo-like capabilities, but it would be nice to have something that could access my WiFi network, grab my downloads (mostly fansubbed anime, foriegn shows, etc.), and play them on the home theatre system. Is it worthwhile to use such a system for this purpose? Is there a more elegant solution that I'm overlooking that doesn't involve burning a ton of DVDs?
posted by insomnia_lj to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I did this, using a very similar computer (probably even fewer Mhz). It's running linux, and I do all the video with Mplayer. I have it set up to rip DVDs into AVI files also, it plays music, and I have MAME set up so I can occaisonally play video games. I wrote the software myself but it's nothing fancy, just sort of a simple menuing system.

Instead of getting a fancy TV-out video card, I use a regular one and run it through a VGA-to-TV adaptor, about $50. Works quite well. Sound I have going through a pro-sumer sound card that I had around, that has a optical out. A regular stereo out would probably be fine.

It has a wifi card in it. I actually store most of my movies on a few hundred gigs in the box, with a lot more avis written to dvds. The box also servers as my bittorret downloader, ftp server, mail server, etc, etc.
posted by RustyBrooks at 9:14 PM on November 3, 2005

I currently do this with a Celeron 400Mhz.

The machine has an old GeForce MX videocard with TV out.

It's running Windows XP, and I use VLC as the player.

VLC has a slightly ugly but highly functional web interface, so any other computer on the network can add files to the playlist, fast forward, rewind, change sound level, play something, else, pause, etc etc etc.

VLC is happy to play media directly off shared drives and so on, so I don't need to wait for files to copy first.

It works great as far as I'm concerned.
posted by The Monkey at 9:20 PM on November 3, 2005

It is probably a little slow, depending on what you want to do with it.

It certainly has enough juice to be a file server. It can play most low resolution divx files and DVDs if you have some assistance from the video card, but I have some high definition 700mb episodes of Lost that my 1GHz PIII has a hard time with. It probably can't capture well, although that depends on how much effort you want to go to, people did do video capture with that speed CPU at one time.

Check what motherboard you have. It may be worth a $20 upgrade.
posted by Chuckles at 9:21 PM on November 3, 2005

If you get a hauppage pvr-150 then you wont have to worry about the cpu at all while decoding (recording) tv shows because it is all done on the card. That is what I would recommend doing. I have a hauppage pvr-500, which is two cards combined into one and only use 5% of my cpu when recording two shows.
posted by meta87 at 6:42 AM on November 4, 2005

If you're going to use Linux, don't get the Hauppage pvr-150. It will work, using ivtv, but it's a pain in the ass to get it working. 250 or 350 are supposed to be much easier.
posted by stavrogin at 12:47 PM on November 4, 2005