What would you recommend for this setup?

Akael · 2011-10-03 02:56:36

I just recently found Arch, and I love it so much I want to use it more.

I have been working on converting my media center pc's to Linux, and want some advice before moving forward. Here is what I have:

Living room (Main Media Center, 6 TB of storage, PS3)
Bedroom 1 (Media Center, Wii)
Bedroom 2 (Media Center, Xbox 360)
Bedroom 3 (Media Center)
Kitchen (Media Center)

I don't think the gaming systems matter, but wanted you to have the full picture.

What I would like to do is have a setup where the Living Room Media Center could be a media server for the other rooms, and also handle media for the TV it is connected to. Most of the movies we have are of two different formats:

VIDEO_TS folders for standard dvd's
MKV for HD movies

Is this type of setup possible with Arch, or should I use a Distro like XBMC completely?

lsbe · 2011-10-16 05:26:22

I use PlayStation Media Server (PMS-svn) to trans code to my consoles/PCs/tablets and it works very well, it also runs as a daemon and you could run XBMC on the PMS box.
any UPnP service should work and I believe XBMC can act as one as well

Awebb · 2011-10-16 08:20:11

I use a NAS to feed several devices in the house with media:

1x (Samba →) Boxee Box (proprietary Dlink mediacenter with Boxee)
2x (Samba →) XBMC on top of Ubuntu (family friendly )
1x (UPnP →) Playstation 3, but this is mostly for music, as the PS3 does not understand enough codecs and the NAS won't run PMS.

If you use the XBMC live CD, you can install it on a USB stick of HDD, it's built on top of Ubuntu. If you prefer Arch, you can install XBMC, it's in community. I'd recommend XBMC over Boxee, Boxee started as an XBMC fork, but now can't keep up with it. I only bought the Boxee Box, because I got it for half the price an additional 1080p-able computer would have eaten.

dunz0r · 2011-10-17 00:29:30

My setup is like this:
Living room(HTPC with Arch and XBMC+ various gaming systems, Hifi-reciever and what not)
Closet(Fileserver with Arch, sharing the storage over NFS)

Works great!

prohna · 2011-10-17 05:54:02

Ive had nothing but success with serviio.

zenlord · 2011-11-06 15:23:09

I've been using several DLNA-servers on Arch for two years now. I started out with coherence (lacks transcoding support), fuppes (lacked surround sound support), mediatomb (no srt subtitles AND surround sound together), and now I'm using pms(-svn) that does all I've ever needed.

1 small problem: since an update several weeks ago, libmediainfo is not working together anymore with pms: pms crashes on indexing with libmediainfo and sometimes on playing a movie file. On the PMS forums, there is one other user complaining about the same problem, but that's about it.

That's why I recently installed minidlna and I'm very impressed by this little program, but it doesn't play MKV or FLAC iirc. For now I've settled on PMS without libmediainfo, which means from time to time, a movie isn't played in 5.1 (whenever a movie file has two audio streams, the first one is played instead of choosing the 6 channel audio as default).

Anyway: I'd recommend a dlna-server on arch anytime. The protocol is getting more and more support - even TV's are sold with good dlna-support out of the box... If all goes well, my new house will be ready next summer and it will be dlna-powered all the way.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-10-03 02:56:36

What would you recommend for this setup?

#2 2011-10-16 05:26:22

Re: What would you recommend for this setup?

#3 2011-10-16 08:20:11

Re: What would you recommend for this setup?

#4 2011-10-17 00:29:30

Re: What would you recommend for this setup?

#5 2011-10-17 05:54:02

Re: What would you recommend for this setup?

#6 2011-11-06 15:23:09

Re: What would you recommend for this setup?

Board footer