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Homegrown Wireless Media Servers?
blurg64 asks: "I am about to move into a new house and am keen to be able to stream my mp3 collection out to my stereo. With all of the new media servers out there such as the Squeezebox, cd3o wireless network player and even HP's Wireless Digital Receiver offering, I was wondering if any /. readers had any tips or experiences in building a cheap wireless media server?"
Unless you are a real pro, you are better off getting your stuff from dealers.
or xmms/linux...it's ssh-oh-licious...or icecast-o-licious, i guess if you want more automation...
I've got an old Dell Celeron 400 running Win2k. I bought it for 50 bucks from a dot-bomb who was liquidating their assets.
I have a 40 GB HD in there and utilize a Creative Labs Extigy (USB 'puter to extigy, optical extigy to stereo).
I have no monitor or keyboard attached, so I use VNC (http://www.realvnc.com) on my 802.11b enabled laptop to control the sound from anywhere in the house.
It is great at parties, because I can just load up a playlist with hours of music, and let it play. Also I leave my Laptop logged in and my guests and use it as a virtual jukebox by adding to the playlist, or jumping around within the existing list.
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
I set up a p133 laptop with 32mb ram and it runs windows 98 + winamp2 + aac plugin (I think it was this one) + browseamp. It plays 192kbps AAC files, and all MP3 great. Files get to the machine over mounted network drives, phsyically located on my file server.
I can then log in using my laptop (wifi, also a source of some files) over http and control all aspecs of winamp, including browsing the network shares. I can also VNC in =] Just a note, my network is 11g, and I have not tested it on 11b.
It works wonderfully, though, sometimes the AACs skip when I VNC in, so a faster CPU / more RAM would be great.