I still haven't found a frontend that I like better than Mediaportal. XBMC possibly with a clean HTPC skin, but personally nothing touches MP. I actually prefer the MP frontend on Windows as it allows for decoder choices and hardware acceleration. But for server duty, Windows XP/Vista doesn't cut it. Nor does W2k3 and it's not even officially supported in MP. I'd like to use LVM/XFS to build a RAID5 array to store all my recordings and media. W2K3 software RAID5 sucks big time and the lower end hardware RAID5 controllers don't offer the features of linux software RAID5 I require. So my current path is virtualization using Intel VT-d which allows hiding PCI/PCIe devices from the host OS and allowing direct access to the guest OS. Only Xen and Parallels beta Server currently support it. |