MaximumPC 2004 06

Media Server PC

How To...^ A step-by-step guide to tweaking your PC Experience

TIME TO COMPLETION

04:30

HOURS MINUTES

MAXIMUMPC A step-by-step guide to assembling a kick-ass PC that will stream

music and video to any room in your home

W

e love having 20,000 songs and a couple hun-

dred movies and TV shows at our fingertips

at any given time. But storing that much data

takes a dump truck load of drive space, and running mul-

tiple drives makes too much noise for a living room. The

solution is simple: Instead of keeping a noisy, expensive

PC in every room of your home, just build one monster

server to hold all your movies and music, and stream the

content to, smaller, quieter, quick-starting, network-con-

nected dumb clients at every TV.

Of course, it’s not this simple. A media server isn’t

something you can just pick up at Best Buy; you’ll

need to either build a new machine from scratch or

adapt an older PC to your new needs.

So what kind of hardware makes the best server?

What kind of network gear is required? What software

and hardware tie it all together? Stick with us—we’ll

show you how it’s done.

BUILD A

BY WILL SMITH

7 MAXIMUMPC JUNE 2004

A computer with a TV

tuner

A reliable operating

system

A home network—

wireless or wired

The biggest hard drive

(or drives) you can afford

DVD archiving software

Beyond TV

(www.snapstream.com )

An IR blaster to change

cable box channels

Music and video

streaming devices

What you’ll need:

STEP 1

Collect the ingredients

Your home media server doesn’t need

the latest processor or cutting-edge

videocard. Pretty much any Pentium

4 or Athlon XP will do. You will need

lots of memory, oodles of hard drive

space, an optical drive, and a cable

or satellite line to the room housing

your PC. You’ll also need a soundcard

of some sort, or a mobo that features

onboard sound support, which is per-

fectly acceptable for our purposes.

Choose your case carefully—allow

plenty of space for upgrades and cool-

ing because the power will be on all the

time. You may want to build your media

server in a full tower case with lots of

drive bays—after all, it’ll take multiple

hard drives to archive music, TV, and

movies. We recommend a minimum of

250GB drive space—that’s enough to

store more than 200 hours of TV, about

30,000 songs, more than 50 DVDs, or

any combination of the three.

The most important component

in your media server is the TV tuner.

You’ll use it to record video from your

cable or satellite TV signal. We recom-

mend the ATI TV Wonder Pro ($50) or

the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 ($140).

Both encode high-quality video and

are affordably priced.

There are several options available

for a media server OS. Cheapest, but

the most difficult to configure, is

Linux. If you pay close attention to the

hardware you purchase—not all TV

tuners and media streaming boxes

have Linux drivers—you can build a

top-notch Linux-based media server.

For sheer simplicity of setup and ease

of maintenance, we recommend

using a Windows-based server

instead. Windows XP Professional is

sufficient for a low-traffic server with

just a few simultaneous connections,

but as you connect more TVs and add

functionality, you should consider

upgrading your rig to Windows Small