Building a Home Media Server

The Background

The plan is to set up a media server on a small quiet PC suitable for use in the living room. It would serve music files (ogg/mp3), video clips images from the digital camera, play CD/DVD and also do the job of a PVR (personal video recorder, like Tivo). Quite a challenge.

The Details

Silence is the key here. Probably using a mini-itx motherboard with embedded processor in a sleek discrete enclosure. These are just big enough to hold a hard disc, optical drive and a single PCI card, which in this case would have to be the TV tuner/decoder card.

All other features are onboard (sound, ethernet, video/tvout, usb). The TV decoder card would probably be the Hauppauge PVR250 or 350, since they feature a hardware mpeg decoder (and an encoder in the 350) which would take a load off the processor when it comes to time-slip TV for example.

To control the thing, there is a serial infrared receiver available which can be programmed with lirc under Linux to use virtually any remote control that you happen to have. This should be enough to control the system, if a suitable menu is programmed.

Hook it up to the broadband internet via the cable STB, and connect up a set of surround speakers (5.1) and that's about it in terms of hardware.

For software, it would of course be running Linux OS, together with either MythTV or Freevo for the interface. LIRC controls the remote and XmlTv can serve up TV listings. One of the drawbacks of using the Hauppauge PVR cards is that the Linux driver is reverse engineered, but reports are that it is stable enough.

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If you find any of this useful, or if you are building a media server of your own, I'd like to hear about it - drop me a line at info@psys.co.uk. Thanks.