Home Streaming Media Server

[BrianG]

A little update on this "project":

Well, after trying several solutions, it seems that either they don't offer exactly what I'm looking for, or seem to be cobbled-together workarounds and hacks. None of the solutions are wife-approved either (meaning: simple to use).

So, I've decided to just designate the "server" as a simple HTPC. On that note, I thought XBMC would be the ticket, but there are some gotchas that I didn't care for; 1) Using netflix is a bit of a pain (it simply calls up IE/silverlight but the browsing and usage isn't as user-friendly for family use), and 2) the whole interface isn't user-friendly enough for everyone. Sure, they could "get used to it", but that's not acceptable IMO.

So, I ended up tinkering with Windows Media Center and once I added a couple plug-ins to auto-mount ISO video files and install the netflix and internet TV plugins, it works swimmingly. The interface is fairly "pretty" and couldn't be easier to use, which should satisfy everyone (including my 3 year old).

And, I can still share the music folder and connect via SMB on my smartphone to listen to music where ever I want. I'll probably install IIS (web server) and MySQL (or SQL Express) on that box as well and use it for some home apps I want to build.

I started shopping around for the actual hardware, and figured on getting a base-system something like this, install Win7 Pro "system builders licence" ($140 for the full version), and slap in a TV Tuner Card (which includes a remote). I figure a quad-core ~3.0GHz CPU and 8GB DDD3 will have more than enough horsepower, and I'll partition a 1TB drive into ~100GB for the base OS and programs, and the other ~900GB for recorded DVR content. Later on, I may get a dedicated video card and install a couple of less taxing games on it as well - just to round it out.

And a bit later on, get a couple of 2TB drives, configure them as Raid1 (for data redundancy) and start ripping all the DVDs we have as ISO files, particularly the movies watched most often. I'll probably dump all the media (like pics and music) on there as well.