[clug] Advice sought on wireless linux media distribution

[Paul Warren]

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Doug Palmer wrote:
> I have my computers (running Linux, naturally) in one room and my TV,
> stereo, comfy sofa, family, etc. in another. It's becoming sadly
> noticeable that any time I want to play something that is on my PC, I
> have to burn a CD/DVD. So, what I would like to do is arrange some
> method for routing audio and video back and forth between the two rooms.
> 
> I could probably get away with stringing cables back and forth, but it
> seems a little inelegant. The chance to route something to an outdoor
> speaker also appeals.
> 
> s Does anybody have any advice on achieving the following:
> 
> Must haves:
> 
> Send audio/video from a PC running fedora core 4 to TV and stereo
> Play MP3s, MPEGS, AVIs, DVDs, Ogg/Vorbis, and the rest of that crowd
> 
> Should haves:
> 
> Wireless
> Send audio/video from Radio/TV/VCR to the PC
> Ability to control playback, music selections from the TV-end; I'm not
> so far lost to shame that I can't rise from the sofa, but I would prefer
> not to go trotting from room to room all the time.
> 
> Would likes:
> 
> Routing to an outdoor or portable speaker. This should include radio
> from the stereo tuner, if possible.
> 
> I have a budget of about $1000 for this. Something like the D-Link
> DSM-320 appeals, to a certain extent. But I'd like to set things up to
> run both ways and I don't know if I can get server software to run on
> Linux. All advice gratefully received.
> 

I've just finished making somthing like this for myself as I also had
the problem of burning dvds to play on the TV.

I have (too many) computers in my study, one of which has ~500Gb of
storage space, and stores all my audio and video files.

What I did was to get an xbox, and put linux and freevo on it, and then
have a wireless link between my xbox (through a linksys wrt54gs) and my
file server where all the video/audio is.

Seems to work fairly well, doesn't do the tv/pvr thing that you want,
but it's small(ish) and quiet.

One of my mates has a fairly chunky computer with several HD capture
cards, an FM tuner and uses the mythtv backend on it, then has mythtv
frontend on an xbox next to the TV.

Some pretty funky things you can do in the media center sphere with linux :)

Good luck with it all.

Cheers
- --
Paul Warren
ANU Supercomputer Facility
Leonard Huxley Building.
u3292467 at anu dot edu dot au
pwarren.homelinux.org
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