Just getting Started Need advice

I am just starting to get my HTPC project going and need some advice on the hardware I have lying around. I know the minimum process requirement listed is 1.4 GHz. I have a server case with dual P3 1.13s 1 Gig of Ram and a SCSI-3 160 back plane that will take 5 hotswap drives. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this set up with the proper capture cards and so on will work or if the 1.13s won't be fast enough. I'm sure a few of you are already starting to think to yourselves about the size of the case and you are absolutely right it is enormous. But with redundant power and cooling and so on it would make a great back end. Which is my second question, has anyone found a way to serve content to a remote front end either with a COTS product such as Netgear's wireless digital media player, or with another solution.

Thanks for your help

[jdiffend]

I'm sure a few of you are already starting to think to yourselves about the size of the case and you are absolutely right it is enormous. But with redundant power and cooling and so on it would make a great back end. Which is my second question, has anyone found a way to serve content to a remote front end either with a COTS product such as Netgear's wireless digital media player, or with another solution.

As long as that box is in a closet or has it's own wing of the house or something I'm sure it will be fine. ;-) People have been running Media Portal on lesser machines than that but don't count on that remaining the case in the future. Watching TV on it is what seems to need the most CPU power. Make sure the TV tuner cards have MPEG2 hardware.


A hacked XBOX costs a little over $200 (give or take) and could serve as a front end if you run XBMC. http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/
Just don't expect anything but a partially working beta version for some time. I just think it's more usefull than one of those dedicated media players. And the authors are even nice enough to post a link to the Media Portal website on theirs. So nice to see the open source community supporting each other. :roll: