Media PC

po0k

Yeah, freevo was the route I was thinking of going down.
Going to put my current P3 800 either out in the garage or silence it and put it in the study to be on 24/7 as a fileserver.
All I need is DSL out in Moycullen and a mother who's willing to pay the bill (as I won't be there to use it).

RE:Remote uses.
Aside from the basic media/DVD play/stop/next/prev/pause etc. commands, I'd be hoping to use it to navigate around the "desktop", but will have a small tiny Cherry G84-4100 compact keyboard (Snaga) and some sort of pos wireless optical mouse as backup.

moridin

Originally posted by SyxPak
Right, I would like, at the end of this thread, to be able to put together a media box for sitting under/ontop of the TV at home for as cheap as possible.

When you say media box above, I don't necessarily think of a pc system straight away... I've said it before on boards and I'll say it again... a modded x-box makes a wonderful media-hub that sits nicely around the tv area.

Going through your list of requirements...

DVD/DIVX/XVID/SVCD player

Yup... xBox media player and the newer xBox media centre support all of these.

MP3/OGG/DVDA Playback (is DVDA playable through software?)

Same again.

Console Emulation station (SNES, Megadrive, Amiga, MAME etc.)

I think all of these have emulators available for the x-box

Possible Capture station in the future

Not sure, I guess it's possible

Be able to playback all Divx/Xvid/DVD/SVCD files/discs perfectly

Yup, and multi-regions too

Case to be the same width as a standard VCR/Set-top box

Yea, you can even get a nice crystal version

High-quality PAL 50Hz and NTSC 60hz TV-Out via S-Video, decent 2D rendering speed, prehaps some OpenGL acceleration for the emulators that can use it, DVD playback assistance etc.

TV-out via scart and analog cables, not s-video afaik.

High-quality 5.1 channel audio via either SPDIF Out or 3 analogue jacks. Headphone+Mic Jacks replicated on the front for late-night Sreet Fighter2 / Sonic / MarioKart sessions

Yup

Joystick/MIDI port would be nice extra for gamepads, though two front-USB ports would make this largelyredundant

4 joystick/joypad ports, which are actually just fronting for USB connectors.

Firewire jack on front and/or rear would be nice, but I don't forsee it being all that useful as the amchine won't be powerful enough to edit DV and the cam can be hooked to the TV via Scart/Composite in most cases anyway

I don't think it has firewire.

10/100Mbit NIC
GigE would be nicer

Integrated 10/100 NIC, and reads windows shared volumes.

1 PCI and/or AGP slot would be nice for future expandability

Pretty compact inside, so no.

Min. of 4 USB2.0 ports (2 front, 2 rear)

Again, the joypad ports are actually just USB device ports, you can mod your USB devices to work with them afaik.

DVDRom 8x drive, quiet, UDMA33 minimum, multiregion, either looks good and matches case colour, or is masked behind a slide-down bezel.
Low-profile DVDRom+CDRW combo drive would be nicer

Won't write CD's or DVD's but will play them.

[*]1x int 3.5" Bay
1~120Gigs of hdd storage, maybe 160, 7200rpm, but quiet as possible, performance isn't much of an issue.

Replace HDD it comes with with a decent size HDD? no problem.

HAVE FULL LINUX SUPPORT

Yes, you can install linux on it.

Some way to control basic functions via IR remote (or bluetooth-USB combo solution)

Buy a wireless controller.

Quiet as possible (ie fanless)

I don't think you'll get a PC that's quieter.

Cheap as possible (ie ~€350-400 inc VAT + Del

€200 for console, €60-€80 for chip, €100 for HDD.

Might be worth considering

po0k

It would still be ugly as sin and only have 64meg ram.
Tbh, the Venus is a nice enough little case, I'd prefer if it were book-shaped, but it seems to be right up my alley.
I've long considered an XBox, but the neccessity to buy a mod chip and then another hard drive while still having a pretty piss-poor base system justs turns me off it.
Still, I might get one for myself later

po0k

A few options have arisen....

I've got a spare machine lying about doing nothing, should be enough (Xeon733).
Slap a soundcard, seagate, NIC and a DVD drive into her....she already has a 3Dfx Voodoo3 with what looks like S-Video out....
Just need to volt mod the fans (there's at least 3 120s blowing at full tild in her).
Maybe spray the case
Only problem is that she's feckin HUGE and really heavy.
I'm planning on building a new box for myself over the summer, so I should have a P3 800 768meg lying about in a month or two, can take the sound card from that (slightly borked SBLive, but good enough for stereo-out).

Hmmm......this has changed things a bit

All I need is to mount USB ports on the front and I'd nearly settle, would save me about €200-300

Gerry

Good to hear you have a suitable box lined up. One problem though, the tv-out quality on the 3dfx is supposed to be atrocious. From the freevo forums, in descending order of quality (roughly):

Matrox -> Dxr3/Hollywood Plus -> Nvidia/Ati -> 3DFX

Of course, you can just run with the 3dfx, and get a better card later if it gives you trouble.

po0k

I thought ATI had better quality?
Was thinking of a 9200 for later on.
Soundcard would be a fairly basic SBLive 5.1 OEM (~33euros off komplett) matched to a set of Logitech Z640s (analogue 5.1, but good sound out of them imho).
Only problem I can see with this machine (the xeon) is that
a) it's fucking massive. IBM Intellistation Zpro model:6866
b) I don't actually know how powerful a P3 Xeon 733 is compared to a ordinary P3 733
c) it only has 2x 128meg sticks of PC600 RDRAM, and only has another 2 slots. Anyone looking to offload some RIMMS?

po0k

Actually, come to think of it, I could put together a very compact little MP3 machine from the amount of spare parts I have at home....LIRC should take care of the control nicely and it could be pretty much headless.....

Anyone know what the bare-ass spec is for playback of 192kbit mp3s/Oggs? I have various pentium chips in the 75Mhz-120Mhz range.

yellum

Is this guide any good ?

Gerry

Ati probably slightly better quality than nvidia ok. The xeon chip will hopefully have some extra cache, 512kb or 1mb ( or even 2mb if yer really lucky ). I'm not sure it speeds up encoding/decoding very much, but it will probably help the response time of the interface. I think you can play mp3's on any pentium, 486's can play 128kbit with an optimized player.

po0k

Afaik it's only a 256K chip.
Not sure about that.
I personally never understood what makes Xeons any better than standard pentiums.

Gerry

I think that p3 xeons can do glueless 4-way ( and possibly 8-way ) smp.

po0k

so effectively it's a P3 733??
Fair enough.
256megs of ram + some sort of better gfx card will still make it better than an XBox for Divx/DVD playback.

Gerry

More progress, got lirc and me tv remote working with freevo... also got a case for the machine and another 4 gig disk, working much better now. Tomorrow will be throwing the dvd drive in. Still need to sort some problems with dxr3 by tweaking the filters for each filetype.