Pentium III movie server

[adams828]

I have an old PIII-833.. would it be possible to turn this into a movie server? I'm not planning on encoding the DVDs on this machine, just using it to store and do TV-output playback on it. Or would it be too slow? Would using some variant of Linux (hopefully one with a user-friendly GUI) help speed things up?

Thanks!

 

[Looney]

Nope, 833 will be fine for that.

And have you ever set up Linux before? Because setting up Linux as an HTPC is going to be quite a task for a newbie. I know i tried, and it was a pain to get my tv-out and wireless network working.

 

[adams828]

I did do a linux on an old machine a few years back, but yea.. I'm somewhat concerned about getting the tv-out card working. Network would just be wired for nwo..

 

[Looney]

Go for it then... it's worth a shot. The PIII-833 is more than enough to run a basic HTPC... although if you want to do more PVR functions, you may have a problem.

 

[Atheus]

The bottleneck on my music/movie server is the old UDMA-33 drive controller, so if you use an old board like the P3 one make sure you do something about the i/o.

 

[adams828]

also.. any good linux user friendly GUI variants for this anyone can reccomend?

 

[CalvinHobbs]

i have just turned my piii into a player, with tv-out to tv, using xp pro on it
320megs sdram and it;s just fine

 

[adams828]

Originally posted by: calvinHobbs
i have just turned my piii into a player, with tv-out to tv, using xp pro on it
320megs sdram and it;s just fine

isn't it quite slow, especially with only 320 mb SDRAM?

 

[weeber]

I've got my old Athlon 900Mhz T-bird with 320megs of PC100 RAM doing HTPC duty just fine. I'm using WinXP with Sage2.0 for PVR duty. That, playng Divx movies, and MP3s does great. If you're going to do PVR, get a TV encoding card that does the work in hardware, like the Hauppauge 150. You'll find it doesn't take much power to do what you're asking; however power requirements climb when you you start asking it to do fancier things (like video post-processing).