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[johnnyboy]

Quick question I'm hoping one of you might have the answer to.

I was gonna build a mini-itx system for my bedroom so I could set it up in there for streaming movies, music, etc and then wire it into a touch screen to control it with but I'm now thinking I might just go the lazy, significantly cheaper route of just buying a second hand used laptop and using that as my system using the tv out to wire it up to a monitor if I want to.

Its just going to be used for streaming playback of movies and music over the wireless network and thats about it.
Movie's will mainly be compressed with xvid/divx.


Wondering what you all think the minimum spec I could get would be that'd do this smoothly without any issues.

I'm personally thinking:

700Mhz + (preferably 1Ghz but depends on price)
256Mb RAM
any old graphics and any old sound card


What'd you all think? Please dont just say 'oh 2Ghz CPU with 512Mb RAM cause thats obviously an easy claim but is way excesive and results in a HUGE price jump.
I'm seeing the older spec laptops on ebay for around $100 which to me sounds perfect to throw together a HTPC onto as a receiver for one room.

Thoughts, suggestions, ideas?

[Mastiff]

Depends a lot on your OS. With XP? Forget it, you'll be a part of the World Wide Wait (very widespreda, if not popular form of WWW now that Vista's out...). Windows 2000 may work. As for TV out for video playback, I wouldn't recommend it. DiVX/XViD looks like nuts to begin with, and with a composite or S-Video (I assume that's what you're talking about) it will be even worse. I gotta admit I have a few DiVX videos myself, but they are all at least 640 MB per 90 minutes, most of them at least the double. I tried that on the TV once, and gave up at once. So what I have done is to mount a widescreen 19" LCD monitor with a ceiling mount, run the cables through the mount up to the computer that's in the attic and control it all with Girder and an ATI Remote Wonder. That's a well working system that both my wife and kids are able to use without any problems. I have an identical system in the kitchen, exvept for that the monitor's stasnding in a corner and the cables go through the wall.

But that's obviously not what you're shooting for, with that budget. So if you're able to tolerate TV out from a laptop, you could as I said probably be able to get away with those specs for Windows 2000, especially if you don't have the same extremely short patience with slow computers that I have. My carputer is a Core Duo with dual Radeon X1600 cards...

[benn600]

Well, I think it's a great project and I may be interested.  First, you may want to consider a Dlink DSM-320.  I got mine for ~$90 and it plays Xvid if I'm not mistaken.  But I don't think it plays Divx.  Anyway, this is a very slim box that would work great with Media Center--it uses the UPnP server.  I personally have 300 DVD's in my video folder, which are all VIDEO_TS folders, and I can play the VOB's but the menu doesn't work at all so this is a downfall for me.

Otherwise, you will spend more for a laptop and then have a ton of setup.  I'm not even sure what OS to use for you.  I would say 700 MHz minimum.  I have a 600 MHz Athlon (not Celeron!!!) and it can almost play video.  Try to get 1 GHz if possible.  The issue is that you'll get it and it will not work!

I play my videos on my SD TV from time to time and they look fine.  They actually look better than they do on a high res 1600x1200 monitor.

[paulfife]

I think you guys think he's wanting to play videos, etc. on this machine, however, from reading the post it looks like he only wants to use it as a file server to stream the files over the network.

Assuming this is all the machine does I don't see any reason why it couldn't handle the load.  If you use Windows XP you might want a bit more RAM, however, you may do just fine with 256MB. You can always add another 256 if you get too much swapping, but you probably could turn off a lot of unneeded tasks and services and get some extra wiggle room too.

[johnnyboy]

Thanks for the replies.

With regards to xvid - I have a ton - I rip aload of my personal movies and encode them to xvid and then stream them over the network and play them back on XBMC which outputs them to the TV which works fine and the quality on them is pretty much perfect for the ones coverted to 2 CD (1.4Gb) and even for the 700Mb ones its pretty darn close - I dont see any real quality issues.

For the OS - I was actually thinking about Win98SE. For Win98 that was pretty good hardware and it has such a low system requirements that it'd be pretty perfect. Not too sure about software compatibility as I haven't used it in forever and then some but I hope it would all work with it.

I also dont have that much patience but was hoping that with an OS lilke Win98 and with such a tiny (one app at a time) workload, it'd behave fairly responsively.


As for the Dlink benn - afraid I just dont want to buy any hardware streamer. Having to rely on some third party to release support for new codecs, etc just isn't my cup of T - give me a PC I can config and control any day. If I want support for a new codec I just simply install it.
As for no menu's - as per my other thread, thats something I'd love anyway. I hate all the menu's and stuff, I just want to watch my film in peace and simplicity.


Paul - they were actually right, I would be using this to do the actual playback.

Thanks for the feedback guys.

[paulfife]

Since MS doesn't support 98SE anymore I'd think that using it would not be a great idea. It's probably not as good as you remember it being either.