There was a time when I was going to build myself a nice HTPC to stream all my media downloads to TV, as well as replace the usual Astro box as a PVR.
Well that plan has now gone to hell, with the acquisition of a certain piece of equipment. Let’s just say this piece plays really good looking games and is a uPNP/DLNA device. Let’s also say that it’s really expensive. 😛 For now, let’s call this the ‘media client’.
With this purchase, it looks like a HTPC is no longer necessary. Replacing Astro with a PC-based PVR doesn’t seem worth the effort too, so the idea to use MediaPortal will now be replaced with TVersity, a uPNP/DLNA media server software for Windows. With it, I can just stream stuff over to the media client, with support for on-the-fly transcoding just in case the client is anal about format.
Problem is this still needs me to set up a Windows 24/7 server to host the media. So I might use uShare as an alternative. uShare is another supported media server, but for Linux/BSD machines. That means I can continue using my BSD server for torrent downloads, and stream media directly from it.
Speaking of the BSD server, which I named Mario for some odd reason, it will have its Gnome GUI software removed with needed components migrated over to console. Gnome was becoming a pain in the butt to maintain, and I only needed it to run Azureus, which is also being replaced by TorrentFlux.
But anyway, looking forward to to the new way of things.
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