Building an MP3/DVD Box for the Home Audio System?

_typo asks: "I was thinking about building a nice MP3/VCD/DVD playing box for my home. Such box would stack along with the rest of the home entertainement equipment. I need suggestions about the case to use, the hardware to put in it and the software to drive it." This is similar to the Ask Slashdot on Home Theater Systems, but this approaches the issue from a different angle, that of building your own device to run the DVD/VCD/MP3 aspect of your mega-stereo system. Off the shelf products can do this decently well, especially with DVDs and VCDs, however about the best player of MP3s in existance, aside from the portables, is your average home computer. DVD/MP3 combos will play some MP3s fairly well, but even the best ones have problems with certain MP3s that will play well enough on a machine with a decent MP3 player.

" There's a few problems I need to solve to be able to do this.

First is the case to put the harware on. I've been looking for a case that's roughly the height and width of a 1U or 2U rackmount case but just 13'' or 14'' deep. It should have room for a standard motherboard, a hard drive, a DVD-ROM, and a front-mounted LCD.

To put inside this case I'd need a motherboard with Ethernet 10/100 and video-out included (to have less boards hanging around), and a reasonably good soundcard. As for CPU and memory, anything should do if it doesn't generate too much heat. This setup shouldn't need a fan, to avoid noise in the room.

To interface to the thing I'd like to have a wireless keyboard of some kind with a trackball and a IR remote interface. For the IR remote I think I can use lirc's plans to build a small IR receiver but I would still need to find a way to mount such receiver on the front of the case.

To drive all this I'd need proper software. Linux and X are the base options I'm most confortable with, but I still need the software to browse and play my MP3 collection and playback my dvd's (OMS?). Doing some Web browsing would be nice too but that seams easy enough to do with any regular linux browser.

Finaly I would like it to be cheap to build. Any help will be appreciated."

Comments

A few links

[Van Halen]

I was getting all geared up to build myself one of these almost 2 years ago, did some research, bought most of the parts, and then didn't have any time to actually build the thing. Ah well, such is life. ;-) For now, my custom perl script allowing me to instantly call up any of my 300 CDs worth of mp3s is good enough.

Here are some useful links I found while doing my research:

• First, check a similar ask slashdot story
• MP3 Server Box
• An even older related slashdot story
• LCDAT - Linux Compressed Digital Audio Transport
• Linux Central has lots of LCD display modules that are perfect for this.
• Cajun Car Audio Jukebox
• Linux MP3 Players Project Page
• You already know about LIRC but here's the link for those who may not.

I don't know anything about DVD stuff, but hopefully these will be useful.