Media Home

[Earl]

Hey, if I wanted to put a monitor and speakers in the bathroom, and same in kitchen.. and then play music from a central PC..

Would I have to like, make virtual OS's or something off the central pc? Or are there programs that will allow me to do this from just the single operating system running on the server?

Also, what sort of server spec am I looking at?
I'll be using remote controls or maybe touchscreens to change music etc..

I'd prefer to use Linux, but I can do Windows if it has to be..

edit: after looking at touchscreen prices it would seem its much more reasonable to go for the remote approach. No point wasting money heh.. (unless theres another way other than remotes)

 

[SheepCow]

Erm, you'd probably be looking at dumb terminals (I think that's the phrase). Basically have crappy computers that just run an OS to VNC/RDP to the server. Either than or have monitors actually connected to the server, I guess ..

 

[Yaka]

iirc some swedish bloke did build one like this, hub in his bed room with small 8" screens in the kitchen, gardden observertory thingie, and the bog. far as i can remember he used a shuttle as the hub with linux and mythtv. all the screens were thouch screen jobbies tho.

just one thing tho wtf do peeps who do this, watch while sat on the shitter?

 

[Lazarus]

https://forums.freddyshouse.com/showpost.php?p=2660084&postcount=10

not sure what your budget is but the link in the above would work - you can play different music in each room

 

[Earl]

Hmm interesting. I've been looking round at a few links too and it certainly seems doable.. which way I do it could dramaticly alter the cost though .

Anyway, lets start off this way.. my current server runs Gentoo.
I run apache and MySQL because I use torrentflux (torrent client in webbrowser) and samba.
I basicly want all my music/videos and things on my server so that I can access them from my pc or laptop, and then the other termnials later down the line.

Atm the spec goes like this (just bits I had left over):
AMD 2200+
512mb ram.. don't even know if its DDR or Standard
80Gig HD (Definatly needs updating to do what I want)

I've either setup gentoo wrong (heavy learning curve) or that spec can't handle say, me playing a dvd on my laptop over wireless, and the other pc writing large files from newsgroups to the server.

So... question is, what sort of spec do I upgrade to? I guess i'll have to go for the whole shebang but to what extent do I need it?