Laptop as a low power media server?

[old.user4556]

Hi all,

On my ongoing pursuits for an "always on" low power media centre, I was going to go down the road of:

Acer Veriton N260G Desktop PC - Desktops at Ebuyer - £182

or:

IBM ThinkPad T42 1.7GHz 512MB 40GB LAPTOP WiFi on eBay (end time 28-Jan-10 20:04:57 GMT) - £170

The role of this is to replace my hot, noisy, wattage leeching AMD Athlon 3200+ with it's 300w PSU with a simple, low noise, low heat, compact unit as a media server. Before anyone says "zomg, not fast enough" it will purely run as a server running PS3 Media Server or TVersity and transcoding my lossless FLAC / WMA for the PS3 in the main room. These music files will be stored on a redundant NAS unit, such as:

Western Digital My Book World Edition II 2TB Gigabit Ethernet Network Attached Storage (WDH2NC20000E) [] External Hard Drives Network Attached Storage (NAS)

This will allow the server and drives to be independent of each other so that I can upgrade the server down the line without worrying about ripping out drives or anything of that shite.

My question is, what's better - the Atom unit or the laptop (in terms of horsepower), which would you recommend? Are there other options?

 

[soze]

I am running a Acer Revo which looks similar to that Veriton but it has a Dual Core Atom and Ion Graphics. This was about £170 and i have been impressed so far running xbmc it plays 1080p mkv files no problem. I should imagine it will have the firepower for what you want it is also very quiet and as yet has never seemed too hot.

 

[old.user4556]

Interesting Soze, in terms of reliability I suppose a brand new unit will be better than an old laptop.

I'll check out the Revo unit.

 

[old.user4556]

Anyone got best prices for the Atom dual core unit with either no OS or Linux?

 

[Cyradix]

I just build one myself.... real easy! Get any ion board, a HTPC case, a HD and you're set...
http://www.xcase.co.uk/ has some nice options

 

[old.user4556]

Acer 92.NVEYZ.UNN

£250 with Windows 7 and a 250 GB drive - that'll actually do the trick nicely as I needed a legit OS for my media PC anyway and that drive size will store my music with a reasonable amount spare. It'll fill the gap until I get the NAS drives.

 

[soze]

If you have never seen it try XBMC i would advise giving it a look. It has a Libary mode which makes large amounts of media lots of fun. Takes your films to IMDB ect you get a poster and a plot massive improvement over streaming to the ps3 imo.

 

[Zenith.UK]

Okay, press PAUSE and backtrack a little.

I've been using an old broken laptop as a file and media server for a while now. The screen cracked so I just removed it and now have a thin PC hooked up to a monitor. It's a Celeron 1.6Ghz, 1GB, 120GB HDD with Intel GMA950 integrated graphics and sucks in 75W. It can transcode almost everything using PS3 Media Server and the only thing that causes any problem is FullHD video. 720P video transcodes okay. I've got an external 500GB Seagate drive connected by USB and the whole thing is always on.

My daughter has an Atom chipset netbook and it is SERIOUSLY underpowered for media playback. It can play video at normal resolutions okay, but anything HD is just a slideshow. I don't know if the Nvidia ION ones are better, but they should be based on their spec.

 

[Cyradix]

That's the beauty of the nvidia ION... you offload the decoding on the GPU. My CPU is at 7-10% while playing 1080p mkv on my asus ion board....

 

[old.user4556]

That's the thing, that ION based dual core Atom systems seem meaty enough based on what you've said Cyradix and will do me just nicely if I ever decide to go down 1080p avenues.

Seems worth spending the extra £70 over the refurbed lappy I think.

 

[Cyradix]

You just need to make sure you are using the proper codecs if you plan on using windows to get DXVA decoding . MP-HC is great for that.
I installed Ubuntu though and use XBMC. It supports VDPAU out of the box....
The windows version of XBMC doesn't support hardware decoding (yet) so if you want to use that you'll have to call an external player from within XBMC (by editing the XML files)

 

[soze]

[WINDOWS] DSPlayer GPU assisted video decoding - XBMC Community Forum

How To on doing just that

 

[Cyradix]

[WINDOWS] DSPlayer GPU assisted video decoding - XBMC Community Forum

How To on doing just that

Yeah, I know.... been trying it, but several things are still broken

 

[Bodhi]

FFS for the last time lamers, do not transcode. Remuxing (i.e presenting the PS3 with an mkv file with a .avi extension) is the way of kings. You can play 1080p content off an old P4 if you want. I only know this because I did

 

[TdC]

nother vote for the ION here. this an awesome chip

 

[Bodhi]

Main issue I see with the ION is that nVIDIA are doing the drivers. After the 9600GS M in my laptop, frankly, I'd rather have cancer again.

 

[Ch3tan]

FFS for the last time lamers, do not transcode. Remuxing (i.e presenting the PS3 with an mkv file with a .avi extension) is the way of kings. You can play 1080p content off an old P4 if you want. I only know this because I did

i do whatever ps3 media server does by default. I thought it was transcoding. Please don't hurt me

 

[inactionman]

I use an asrock 330 myself. Just got a dinovo mini bluetooth keyboard for it as well. Will be doing a full re-install shortly with the latest versions of ubuntu and xbmc.

Previously it worked very well, just that I had a shite windows media center remote.

 

[soze]

I use one of these currently, i want to get a IR receiver than will work with my harmony remote but for now this works. I had to add some custom key mappings and i think now the remote acts like a keyboard so you can map nearly all the functions.

 

[Kryten]

PLenty of good advice above, so I don't need to add to that - but I'll just add a warning about the WD Mybooks - the network versions are hunks of junk with some major firmware problems with the file and permissions systems. I'd hope they've been sorted out but it'd be wise to keep options open.

 

[old.user4556]

Thanks Kryt, good advice all, think i'll go for the dual core Atom nettop affair with Windows 7 and the 250 GB drive and think about NAS drives later.

 

[caLLous]

Yeah don't bother with the WD NAS drives, they are also

- slow as hell (only 6-7mb/s for me on the 1tb one), which is ok for streaming HD but takes an age to put the files on in the first place. It took 8 hours for Truecrypt to format a 200gb container. It always takes too long to open large files over the network (only 5 or so seconds but it's long enough to get annoying).

- locked to WD drives (ie you can't just throw any old drive in if it goes wrong)

 

[old.user4556]

On that note, recommend some NAS devices? I don't need anything too fancy (bit torrent, DLNA etc) since I'll have the nettop with TVersity or PS3 Media Server.

 

[soze]

I'm still a massive fan of the DLink DNS323 Torrent Client ect but also has a Twonky Installer so as long as they are playable files you can stream direct to the PS3 from the NAS.

 

[old.user4556]

Ultimately that's my problem though, my files are all WMA lossless and FLAC files, so I need another layer to transcode them for the PS3 since it won't play them natively. I see that NAS drive has twonky related gubbins on it - will that allow transcoding from WMA lossless to a format the PS3 will accept?

I'm still going for the nettop, I've tested TVersity exhaustively and it works exactly as I want it to.

 

[soze]

I do not think Twonky will transcode like the others ut if you are running the Ion machine would a USB Drive with windows shares not do you and be much cheaper? I am getting one of these to connect to mine as it turns on and off with the machine.