set up a media server at home

I think I’m just going to use my computer and share the 2nd Partition of my drive dedicated for storage over the home network instead of using filezilla. I think this way I can stream video in windows media center. I THINK. Unfortunately I can’t hook up one of my computers to the network right now because I ran out of CAT-5 cables and I don’t have money to go get a wifi card or 40 foot CAT-5. :-/. Hopefully the interview for the internship at this engineering company goes well. If not, Back to the restaurant biz for the summer >:O.

So, I’m going to do a half-step (or more like a quarter-step) for now. Have an old Dell GX240; I’m going to throw a couple hard drives in it and hook it up to the network. At least I’ll have a start. I won’t really be streaming much from it, but having a storage server for all our media will be nice.

Figured out last night that my desired media-server config would run $600-700. Not hugely expensive, but quite a bit more than we have to expend right now.

My desktop just died, and I’m happy using my laptop, so maybe I’ll “replace” it with a media server.

What I’d like is 3 or 4 large (250GB or more) drives in a RAID 5 array. Haven’t yet figured out for sure what I want to do for the clients. The Roku Soundbridge looks good for audio, but I have to find something for video. I know there are things out there; I’ve read reviews various places. But haven’t come close to deciding on one yet. Any suggestions?

Netmedia is a fork of the now defunct Netjuke project. It’s SO worth it. I have all my music on the hard drive of my computer and connected to the speakers in both the computer room and my living room. I can control it from any other computer or any device with web browsing capabilities (phone, palm pilot, etc). :) Then, I can also stream my music anywhere. I often do this when I’m on campus studying. My laptop doesn’t have much hard drive space, so I keep the music at home and just stream.

Netmedia has some cool features planned. The idea is that eventually it could be used to manage video as well. Someday, I’m also going to be building a PVR and it would be cool to use something like mythTV to record a television program at home and then use something like netmedia to stream it to yourself wherever you are.