Ok so it's been a while since I did any modding and with my obscene holiday I get from uni., I've decided to actually pull my finger out and do something with my weekends. But first a quick story: I'm moving into a house next in September with another five friends (six in total), since we're all entering our second year it'll be nice to have a living room. I'm donating my 28" widescreen TV to the cause and decided that it needs a media centre box under it for streaming off my box in my room etc. So here's where we hit the problems, being on a tight budget for these things I took delivery of an old style RM computer from a school I did some work for over the easter break and used it as a Server 2k3 box, since that's been made redundant by a dual xeon box so I have this spare box to play with. It's spec's are: Gigabyte GA-6VMM Motherboard (Mini/Micro ATX) Integrated 1MB graphics Celeron 733 (Passive) 512mb SD133 40gig Maxtor HD So for kicks I threw in a pioneer DVD-ROM installed media center 2005 and this is where it fell on it's arse. Playback's slow, temp's sky rocketed so I was stuck. Spent a couple of hours researching Linux alternatives like MythTV and they're all rubbish (I'm open to opinion). After probing a little further I found GeexBox www.geexbox.org. It boots from CD and gives access to all the media on your installed HD or available on network shares. It's a bit slow on running DVD's however I'm going to fix that with this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=008&item=180006748573 i'm also installing a wireless card.. A-La this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ih=007&item=170005969120 So onto the modding........
The front of the machine is this standard ugly... almost school proof plastic so that came off... (ebay image, learn to photo first mod later!) and this happened Obviously it needs tidying up but that's going to happen in the evenings next week. The plan is to add a piece of frosted plastic behind the big void and add some LED's to light it up. The entire thing is being spray painted black (when i can be bothered to goto Halfords. This morning I dug out my old ATi Remote Wonder, GeexBox is compatible so it's a good start. Been trying to find a PCI graphics card with TV out still, so if anyone can help please do.
Whats wrong with AGP? dont all mobos have AGP or PCI-E and PCI...? And why not just create your own front instead of using the old one? I doubt it would be to hard, and you would certaintly like it better. This looks intersting, and i look forward to it
no, not all mobo's have agp or pci-e... a prime example is this one. School/Office computers don't need high end graphics do they?
You aren't going to get accelerated graphics working in ANY media software package on that sort of graphics card. Go to aria.co.uk or scan.co.uk, and pick up either a GeForce FX5200 128mb PCI graphics card, or an ATI Radeon 9200se 128mb PCI graphics card. You could then install a nice copy of Windows 2000, plus a free MCE clone for windows. Google it, there are plenty around!
I don't want another front end, they're rubbish alternatives. I've found an ATi 7000 which will do the task just fine.
Rubbish yes, but they will be much better suited to the specification you are running as opposed to Windows MCE 02 OR 05. Props on getting the cisco card, tho you may come up against the odd issue with 11mbps not being fast enough to accomodate high res video. That PIII 866 will do a halfway decent job of decoding well encoded files though, so it may not be too noticable.
have you not seen that i'm using geexbox? Geexbox minimum spec is far lower than I'm using secondly.. 11mbps can stream a DVD from a server to a laptop, thats around 8mbps as a data stream. So it should be fine.
Actaully, 11mbps is about 1.3mbps of real data stream, which in my experience, will choke. And bear in mind, if its NOT the only wireless device, that can half down to 5.5Mbps which works out at 688kbps which will be problematic for anything more than a high quality MP3.
well after watching DVD's being streamed through VLC I'll stick with what I know. Thanks for offering advice, it's just not quite the same in practice.
Bear in mind, if you are just going to pull data off as is, you wont be streaming using VLC, which offers specialised compression for streaming data over low-bandwidth lines. Please don't missunderstand this as telling you that you are wrong. A good media centre can be built with old parts, and Geexbox is a good choice as you know, but the way i see it, unless you want to manually set VLC to stream each time someone in the house wants to watch something, you are going to have trouble. Am i wrong in thinking you just want to browse to a mounted network directory from the Media Centre, and click play? Oh, and IF you still wanted to, with an 866Mhz PIII, and 512mb ram, you could run MCE05 with no issues with the omega drivers for the radeon7000. The only thing you would need it do is take MCE out of its pretty theme, and drop it to Win2K style (Windows Classic Mode).
ok so after testing the hardware, here's a list of stuff i'm doing tonight for the case: removing internal speaker, taking measurements for dome like top and frontage soldering the ATi dongle onto the USB headers drilling new mounting holes into the DVD drive for new rails for flat frontage... mm flat
Todays update: ATi graphics arrived and installed, won a piece of acrylic off ebay for sub £6... bargain! awaiting on: P3, acrylic and spray paint delivery also need to find a cheap bulgin anti-vandal... anyone help? Photo's follow later
It's my specialty But seriously after hearing your plans on what your going todo with this it looks really decent
Looks like MNPCtech has vandal-resistant switches for $4 a pop, cheapest I've ever seen them. Dunno about international shipping though. http://www.mnpctech.com/Vandal_Resistant_Switch.html
personaly, instead of buying new bits for the pc, i would have bought a chipped xbox, has tv out, has audo out, can have vga and digital out.has a dvd/cd reader and hdd, you can install mediacentre and can stream movies and music from any pc on a network very easily. and you can pick them up very cheap now. and you can have a remote control or use a wireless controller. you can also add a wireless game adaptor to the xbox.
