building a video server.. have question about OS

[robphelan]

i'm building an inexpensive server so I can stream video (Divx & MPEG4) to my modded xboxes. I want to store them in a central location instead of on the xbox itself.

what OS would be best to use? does it even matter for my purposes?

I have an MSDN account so I have licenses for just about any Microsoft OS (XP, MCE, Server 2003). I was trying to stay away from MCE because of hardware incompatibilities (my ATI TV tuner won't work - needs to be Elite model)

hardware will be:
AMD mobile barton 2500
Abit NF7-S
512 Mb PC3200 RAM
Radeon 9600
2 x 160Gb HD

thanks,
rob.

 

[Nothinman]

Personally, I would run Debian.

 

[drag]

I have a ATI Wonder VE. Works fine in Debian/Mythtv. (that was.. until it crapped out)

AIW cards won't work unless they are older ones that are supported under the Gatos project.

For streaming the actual media there are several options.

Icecast can stream Ogg Theora video.. VLC can stream from tv tuners, dvds, divx, whatever. Mythtv can stream from a back-end to a seperate front-end... That's what I use. I can handle many multiple cards, backends and frontends. Mix and match (as long as the card is supported under Linux).

And there are a few others. Hell even Helix DNA from Realnetworks. (they've improved quite a bit. Don't even ask for e-mail addresses from Linux users anymore)

see some stuff:
http://www.exploits.org/v4l/
http://www.videolan.org/
http://sound.condorow.net/
http://mpeg4ip.sourceforge.net/

and you can find more probably:
http://freshmeat.net/

That's some stuff I know for Debian/Linux. For windows I don't know so much. I like to use mencoder for transcoding stuff, btw.

 

[robphelan]

thanks for the info... but it's probably not as involved as all that.

basically, i'm just going to have my vids reside on a PC. The xboxes will access those files over the network from the source PC and display them on my TV.

i guess it's not technically streaming.. but i dont' know what else to call it.

 

[Away]

I would run Windows 2000. It doesn't tie up your hardware and it is very stable. Perfect for any server in my eyes.

 

[oog]

it sounds like all you're looking to do is set up this machine as a file server, without true video streaming. in that case, it doesn't really matter what you use as the file server. i tend to set up linux for this purpose though.

 

[gwag]

anything new will handle that.

 

[robphelan]

thanks for the input.. just a file server as mentioned above. will prob use XP since my main PC & laptop are running it already.

thanks again.

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: robphelan
thanks for the input.. just a file server as mentioned above. will prob use XP since my main PC & laptop are running it already.

thanks again.

Sounds good then, same platform is easier to deal with

 

[nweaver]

but it's $$ for licensing...also, you can use lower end hardware for a linux server, as you don't have to support a bloated GUI that you never see.