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You might want to check back in 2013 OSX is bit perfect again.

Not free, not even particularly cheap, but the best one I've encountered; JRiver Media Center. If you want to take digital media on your PC seriously.

http://www.jriver.com/

If you don't mind paying for your software J.River Media Center is probably the single most powerful iTunes-like media player/organizer for Windows. They also have a free edition, but that only handles music (and not e.g. video).

I don't know much about DiVX

I have a 1TB media server RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array.

Anyway, one advantage I have noticed about DIVX over DVD is reduced bandwidth. You can get very respectable video quality from 1.5Mbps DIVX, versus ~4-5 times that DVD. Either of these is acceptable over wired connections, but 802.11a barely allows acceptable DIVX, and even 802.11g struggles to support more than a few DVD streams. But it manages several DIVX streams handily. There's also the issue of multiple seeks and STR rates on the RAID-array. So if you are in a family/group situation and you anticipate multiple simultaneous wireless access, recompressing to DIVX/XVID is a good option to reduce contention.

Also, if you're setting up a media server, then Media Center is a good choice. Its ability to do on-the-fly codec transcoding and bandwidth downsampling based on client profiles is a godsend, as is its ability to control Tivo and uPNP media hardware devices on the network. Technical info here.

Media Center 11 has an elegant-but-beta Library Server that does realtime transcoding of bitrates and formats between its server and attached clients, across LAN or WAN. You can couple this with its "Media Scheduler" module to record internet radio streams and then serve them up in whatever format and bitrate a client specifies. What's nice is that you can also stream video and photos to clients. MC will also do bitrate transcoding while streaming from attached Tivo HMOs.

MC also has a beta uPNP module that lets you control attached media streaming devices and offload the transcoding duties to them.

And oh yeah, SlimServer is GPL'd. You can script this to do on-the-fly custom transcoding. It's more flexible than pre-rolled, but less friendly.

Media Center 11 has an elegant-but-beta Library Server that does realtime transcoding of bitrates and formats between its server and attached clients, across LAN or WAN. You can couple this with its "Media Scheduler" module to record internet radio streams and then serve them up in whatever format and bitrate a client specifies. What's nice is that you can also stream video and photos to clients. MC will also do bitrate transcoding while streaming from attached Tivo HMOs.

MC also has a beta uPNP module that lets you control attached media streaming devices and offload the transcoding duties to them.

And oh yeah, SlimServer is GPL'd. You can script this to do on-the-fly custom transcoding. It's more flexible than pre-rolled, but less friendly.

Media Center 11 has an elegant-but-beta Library Server that does realtime transcoding of bitrates and formats between its server and attached clients, across LAN or WAN. You can couple this with its "Media Scheduler" module to record internet radio streams and then serve them up in whatever format and bitrate a client specifies. What's nice is that you can also stream video and photos to clients. MC will also do bitrate transcoding while streaming from attached Tivo HMOs.

MC also has a beta uPNP module that lets you control attached media streaming devices and offload the transcoding duties to them.

And oh yeah, SlimServer is GPL'd. You can script this to do on-the-fly custom transcoding. It's more flexible than pre-rolled, but less friendly.

A TiVo plugin for iTunes would be nice, though!

There's a Tivo HMO plugin for Media Center. You can even access your SmartLists and radio stations through any connected Tivo. Now, if they could only do one for ReplayTV I'd be a lot happier!

Yes, the lack of built-in global hotkeys has been mentioned many times by users as sorely lacking for novice users. For further info, just type "hotkeys" in here.

There are a few solutions that probably illustrate why the developers have not bothered to date implementing a global hotkey support for menu items. The first is that MC users tend to be a crafty lot and many have already linked MC with girder and their existing universal home theatre remotes or AirPanels. The other is that MC can be driven using the command line, so many people map their function and macro keys to some of MC's command line parameters, along the lines of

C:\WINNT\system32\mjextman.exe /Command Pause

C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\mjextman.exe /PLAY TREEPATH=Playlists\Top Hits

etc etc.

You can even get one of those blank UI templates with lots of buttons and make yourself your own on-screen widget to control the program this way. Some people use their PDAs, or Bluetooth phones for this.

All I really want is one player that plays all the audio formats. *Sigh* I currently have WMP, Winamp 5, Foobar2000 and iTunes all fighting over extensions...

You probably should try Media Center - it plays everything, audio and video. The developers' slogan is "All Media, One Interface". It supports over 80 formats, does ASIO playback, and has a scripting engine that can drive any unsupported formats using their player's API. It can also transcode between formats on-the-fly while serving clients, as well as doing bitrate downsampling and soundstage upsampling. More info. Windows only though, I am afraid, although it has been embedded in several home theatre and media playback set top boxes.

iTunes won't work for this...what would really be nice is something like iTunes that ran remotely so that I could control it from my laptop ... iTunes is nice, but it is hardly the most advanced jukebox conceivable. There's a lot of room for improvement.

You're right there. Try Media Center - it makes iTunes look pretty weak. It has a web interface, an API interface, and of course a GUI. Best of all, it understand Zones with multiple distinct SPDIF outputs, so you can route different playback streams to different rooms or speaker configurations depending on mood. It also does ASIO playback (full 32-bit internal sound processing) so you have pinpoint control and amazing DSP options. Another thing MC is notable for is its client-server mode: the streaming works across Internet as well as Intranet. I've used it for on-demand streaming of tunes and video coast-to-coast. There is no silly LAN-only limitation.

If you have money to burn you should get an AirPanel controller with something like NetRemote for couch bliss. With less money you should go for a cheap JP1 remote.

There are some good MC user rigs described here, here.

Media Center embedded is also used as the software "glue" for some OEM'd HTPC products: Music Mountain and Cinemar come to mind. MC also understands uPNP, so it's becoming increasingly easy to autodiscover and stream to random devices using uPNP.

iTunes won't work for this...what would really be nice is something like iTunes that ran remotely so that I could control it from my laptop ... iTunes is nice, but it is hardly the most advanced jukebox conceivable. There's a lot of room for improvement.

You're right there. Try Media Center - it makes iTunes look pretty weak. It has a web interface, an API interface, and of course a GUI. Best of all, it understand Zones with multiple distinct SPDIF outputs, so you can route different playback streams to different rooms or speaker configurations depending on mood. It also does ASIO playback (full 32-bit internal sound processing) so you have pinpoint control and amazing DSP options. Another thing MC is notable for is its client-server mode: the streaming works across Internet as well as Intranet. I've used it for on-demand streaming of tunes and video coast-to-coast. There is no silly LAN-only limitation.

If you have money to burn you should get an AirPanel controller with something like NetRemote for couch bliss. With less money you should go for a cheap JP1 remote.

There are some good MC user rigs described here, here.

Media Center embedded is also used as the software "glue" for some OEM'd HTPC products: Music Mountain and Cinemar come to mind. MC also understands uPNP, so it's becoming increasingly easy to autodiscover and stream to random devices using uPNP.

iTunes won't work for this...what would really be nice is something like iTunes that ran remotely so that I could control it from my laptop ... iTunes is nice, but it is hardly the most advanced jukebox conceivable. There's a lot of room for improvement.

You're right there. Try Media Center - it makes iTunes look pretty weak. It has a web interface, an API interface, and of course a GUI. Best of all, it understand Zones with multiple distinct SPDIF outputs, so you can route different playback streams to different rooms or speaker configurations depending on mood. It also does ASIO playback (full 32-bit internal sound processing) so you have pinpoint control and amazing DSP options. Another thing MC is notable for is its client-server mode: the streaming works across Internet as well as Intranet. I've used it for on-demand streaming of tunes and video coast-to-coast. There is no silly LAN-only limitation.

If you have money to burn you should get an AirPanel controller with something like NetRemote for couch bliss. With less money you should go for a cheap JP1 remote.

There are some good MC user rigs described here, here.

Media Center embedded is also used as the software "glue" for some OEM'd HTPC products: Music Mountain and Cinemar come to mind. MC also understands uPNP, so it's becoming increasingly easy to autodiscover and stream to random devices using uPNP.

iTunes won't work for this...what would really be nice is something like iTunes that ran remotely so that I could control it from my laptop ... iTunes is nice, but it is hardly the most advanced jukebox conceivable. There's a lot of room for improvement.

You're right there. Try Media Center - it makes iTunes look pretty weak. It has a web interface, an API interface, and of course a GUI. Best of all, it understand Zones with multiple distinct SPDIF outputs, so you can route different playback streams to different rooms or speaker configurations depending on mood. It also does ASIO playback (full 32-bit internal sound processing) so you have pinpoint control and amazing DSP options. Another thing MC is notable for is its client-server mode: the streaming works across Internet as well as Intranet. I've used it for on-demand streaming of tunes and video coast-to-coast. There is no silly LAN-only limitation.

If you have money to burn you should get an AirPanel controller with something like NetRemote for couch bliss. With less money you should go for a cheap JP1 remote.

There are some good MC user rigs described here, here.

Media Center embedded is also used as the software "glue" for some OEM'd HTPC products: Music Mountain and Cinemar come to mind. MC also understands uPNP, so it's becoming increasingly easy to autodiscover and stream to random devices using uPNP.

iTunes won't work for this...what would really be nice is something like iTunes that ran remotely so that I could control it from my laptop ... iTunes is nice, but it is hardly the most advanced jukebox conceivable. There's a lot of room for improvement.

You're right there. Try Media Center - it makes iTunes look pretty weak. It has a web interface, an API interface, and of course a GUI. Best of all, it understand Zones with multiple distinct SPDIF outputs, so you can route different playback streams to different rooms or speaker configurations depending on mood. It also does ASIO playback (full 32-bit internal sound processing) so you have pinpoint control and amazing DSP options. Another thing MC is notable for is its client-server mode: the streaming works across Internet as well as Intranet. I've used it for on-demand streaming of tunes and video coast-to-coast. There is no silly LAN-only limitation.

If you have money to burn you should get an AirPanel controller with something like NetRemote for couch bliss. With less money you should go for a cheap JP1 remote.

There are some good MC user rigs described here, here.

Media Center embedded is also used as the software "glue" for some OEM'd HTPC products: Music Mountain and Cinemar come to mind. MC also understands uPNP, so it's becoming increasingly easy to autodiscover and stream to random devices using uPNP.

I take exception to the "nobody else comes close" part. J. River's Media Center has been doing everything iTunes offers for years, and with much more of the versatility that /. readers seem to crave than iTunes will ever give you. Yet if you're really attached to the look of iTunes, someone made a dupe.

I got 8 Maxtor 4A300J0 drives @ 5400. Picked them up from CompUSA for $239 during a mail-in rebate thing they had going on last month.

I'm running RAID5 so I loose 300GB to parity, but like you say, given the 2TB limit, that worked out pretty good. Btw, windows report my dynamic shared volume at 2,099,996,200,960 bytes, so it looks like I overcame the 2TB limit somehow.

I boot from a seperate drive that contains just XP and apps.

I ran some test on my RAID5, and here are my numbers:

Sequential Read 74.4 MBytes/Sec
Sequential Write 29.2 MBytes/Sec
Random Seek + RW 4.5 Mbytes/Sec

This was when I was running the 3ware in a P3 800 board. If we round the sequential read to 80MB/s (640Mb/s) out of the raid, barring other bottlenecks (PCI bus and Ethernet I/O) I should be able to transfer:

32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or
23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or
106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or
71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or
2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or
444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s)

If the 3ware card is plugged into a 64bit/66MHz PCI slot, and you have integrated Gigabit Ethernet that doesn't ride the PCI bus, you just might be able to dump 640Mb/s to a 1Gb/s switch and then feed clients from there.

I haven't really had a chance to stress test the system yet since I'm still waiting on my 1Gb/s switch, but things run real well over my current 100Mb/s switched network (3Com Superstack II switch).

I'm seeing maybe 3% network utilization when streaming a DVD to a client, I would not anticipate any problems with a half dozen streams which would be the most I could ever imagine streaming at once.

When moving 50GB across the 100Mb/s connection, network utilization goes to 75-80%, but cpu remains less than 5%. And it does not affect the ability of the server to stream lossless audio and/or video to a htpc client.

The 1Gb/s switch will be shared between the server and the workstations that I use to rip from. The media clients (htpcs) will remain connected to the current 100Mb/s switch which in turns connects to the 1Gb/s switch.

Yes, MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones.

I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients if I don't want to fetch the airpanel and control it that way.

It should be noted that you can't remote desktop directly to one of the clients if your intent is to launch something on the local display. The thinsoft folks I mentioned earlier well sell a single license client to allow remote desktop access to a single client while preseving the local session.

I like the ATI cards myself. Since the server isn't normally connected to a monitor, it just got some old AGP card in it, a Voodo5 I think. I run a Pro-9700 MP-1 in my main htpc, and a 9200 in the htpc connected to a rear projector via s-video. I'm not pleased with the s-video of this card, and have been told ATI aren't know for s-video quality. Anyway, likely not a concern in your case.

I don't have any regrets from going the XP route vs. linux or 2003 server. My environment is very stable, and I haven't had any hardware conflicts/issues.

I'm running a 2.8Ghz P4c with a Zalman 7000Cu heatsink and Kingston Hyper-X PC 3500.

I got 8 Maxtor 4A300J0 drives @ 5400. Picked them up from CompUSA for $239 during a mail-in rebate thing they had going on last month.

I'm running RAID5 so I loose 300GB to parity, but like you say, given the 2TB limit, that worked out pretty good. Btw, windows report my dynamic shared volume at 2,099,996,200,960 bytes, so it looks like I overcame the 2TB limit somehow.

I boot from a seperate drive that contains just XP and apps.

I ran some test on my RAID5, and here are my numbers:

Sequential Read 74.4 MBytes/Sec
Sequential Write 29.2 MBytes/Sec
Random Seek + RW 4.5 Mbytes/Sec

This was when I was running the 3ware in a P3 800 board. If we round the sequential read to 80MB/s (640Mb/s) out of the raid, barring other bottlenecks (PCI bus and Ethernet I/O) I should be able to transfer:

32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or
23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or
106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or
71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or
2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or
444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s)

If the 3ware card is plugged into a 64bit/66MHz PCI slot, and you have integrated Gigabit Ethernet that doesn't ride the PCI bus, you just might be able to dump 640Mb/s to a 1Gb/s switch and then feed clients from there.

I haven't really had a chance to stress test the system yet since I'm still waiting on my 1Gb/s switch, but things run real well over my current 100Mb/s switched network (3Com Superstack II switch).

I'm seeing maybe 3% network utilization when streaming a DVD to a client, I would not anticipate any problems with a half dozen streams which would be the most I could ever imagine streaming at once.

When moving 50GB across the 100Mb/s connection, network utilization goes to 75-80%, but cpu remains less than 5%. And it does not affect the ability of the server to stream lossless audio and/or video to a htpc client.

The 1Gb/s switch will be shared between the server and the workstations that I use to rip from. The media clients (htpcs) will remain connected to the current 100Mb/s switch which in turns connects to the 1Gb/s switch.

Yes, MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones.

I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients if I don't want to fetch the airpanel and control it that way.

It should be noted that you can't remote desktop directly to one of the clients if your intent is to launch something on the local display. The thinsoft folks I mentioned earlier well sell a single license client to allow remote desktop access to a single client while preseving the local session.

I like the ATI cards myself. Since the server isn't normally connected to a monitor, it just got some old AGP card in it, a Voodo5 I think. I run a Pro-9700 MP-1 in my main htpc, and a 9200 in the htpc connected to a rear projector via s-video. I'm not pleased with the s-video of this card, and have been told ATI aren't know for s-video quality. Anyway, likely not a concern in your case.

I don't have any regrets from going the XP route vs. linux or 2003 server. My environment is very stable, and I haven't had any hardware conflicts/issues.

I'm running a 2.8Ghz P4c with a Zalman 7000Cu heatsink and Kingston Hyper-X PC 3500.

Within less than a minute, I had achieved what I'd never been able to achieve between two Windows boxes with WMP.

32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or 23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or 106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or 71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or 2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or 444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s) ... MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones. I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients.

Within less than a minute, I had achieved what I'd never been able to achieve between two Windows boxes with WMP.

32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or 23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or 106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or 71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or 2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or 444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s) ... MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones. I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients.