Dennis Krul

Because I wanted to watch movies from my couch without burning DVD’s all the time I decided to put together a simple mediacenter a couple of weeks ago. I had an old P2-400 laying around, put in a network card that supports PXE boot (3c509c), an old Nvidia card with TV out, a Soundblaster Live with digital out and removed the noisy parts (harddisc, CD player). I installed GeeXbox on my server and set up my DHCP server to boot geexbox on my mediacenter over PXE. The PC is connected with a SCART to S-video cable to my TV. The soundblaster is connected to my home cinema set with the digital output, so AC3 surround sound also works.

I didn’t expect much from GeeXbox, but I have to say I was quite impressed! I set up in no time and it boots in about 10 seconds. It pulls files from my server over NFS, but you can also use Windows fileshares or UPnP NAS devices. Basically it’s just mplayer over the framebuffer, with a highly customizable menu. It plays music from shoutcast and just about any media file you throw at it. Even though it isn’t a very fast CPU it can handle most DivX and Xvid files. I haven’t tried DVD’s, but I guess that’s too much to handle for this old box.

Ofcourse with this setup I can’t record TV shows and stuff, but I don’t really need that anyway. Maybe one day I’ll put one of these DVB-C digital decoder cards in my server, but because the technology is still quite expensive I’m going to wait a while for it to become a bit cheaper. I’m not going to invest in an analog TV card setup anymore.