Not yet ready to ditch your traditional home theater setup but still want the convenience of digital playback on your TV? Or maybe you intend to have multiple HTPC boxes around the house and require some way to control and access your content from one place. In this case, an ideal solution is to invest in a media server. Don't let the word 'server' scare you though. You won't need a temperature-controlled room with a team of administrators on 24-hour shift. A media server is but a PC converted to act as a dedicated central storage library to backup and organize all your audio, video and image files.
Of course, all these goodies just sitting in storage isn't going to do you any good. What you want is to be able to retrieve this content from other PCs in your home or stream music and video to your Hi-Fi and TV. While it wouldn't be a problem achieving this by creating a LAN with other PCs and HTPCs, you can't really plug a network card into your home theater equipment. That's where a good media extender comes into play and we've got that end covered as well.
We've also built our media server on the premise that it would also be used as a media processor. No point having all that processing power and letting it sit idle. Safeguard your DVD collection for storage or edit that family vacation footage into a video montage, our media server is powerful enough for everyday encoding needs.
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Intel Pentium 4 630 (3.0GHz) SRP: US$172
We chose a fairly powerful processor for our media server setup as we didn't want to gimp its possible uses. The 3GHz Pentium 4 630 may be too much if you only intend on having a passive storage server, but as a PC, your media server can be put to task with audio and video encoding, file serving and media streaming, all of which require some processing muscle. |
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