Linux Media Player distro

[slinky]

any ideas folks...

I've got an old C333 that I want to use as a media jukebox type affair, and seeing as it's only a 333 I thought a cut down linux distro would do the job...

Anyone got any recommendations for a distro to use?

Ta,

slinky

[rob_f]

I don't see why your would need a cut down version tbh. Most normal distros will work? I've got SuSE, it's easy to install which is great, got better things to do then spend hours fiddling with stuff.

Cheers,
Rob.

[Bodo]

What do you plan to do with it? (What kind of media is involved?)

I haven't tried all distributions but I was very satisfied with SuSE and Fedora for the desktop. Setting up a dedicated media machine should be easy with them. Most important libraries come with them, and apps are installed with graphical tools.

My colleagues are raving about Freevo for their media centers. Keep in mind that it won't be a pleasure to watch DVD with a <1GHz CPU. The 333's capabilities should be good for a local streaming music server.

In fact, you could use any distribution for the above, but I wouldn't recommend Debian or Gentoo if you haven't had the chance yet to play around with Linux a bit. Fedora for instance can be downloaded free from the net, and only installed with as much as you want. All relevant graphical configuration tools you need will fit on 2GB easily. There shouldn't be a big difference between different distros performance wise, because once you've setup your machine you configure to boot only to runlevel three, so no unneeded graphical desktop occupies the RAM which is needed for serving music

Here's an article from someone who built a machine using newer h/w.

[slinky]

Cheers for the advice so far Bodo, I should've been more specific with my first post...

I moved my main machine into the theatre a little while ago so have been using that to play MP3's, MPEG's and AVI's etc thru stereo and TV...

I managed to grab a free machine (the aformentioned C333) and thought that with a linux install it might serve ok as a player for the above mentioned formats... I've got a perfectly good DVD player so don't intend to be using it to watch those...

My main machine has more than enough disk space, so very little would actually be stored on the "media player"... I wouldn't be streaming, so would just be opening the files across the network (10mb)...

Does that give you a better idea as to what may serve my purpose, or should I just carry on down the route of using a normal install of linux and find a nice media player to use?

Cheers,

slinky

oh, btw, it's running a 6Gb hdd, so install size isn't really an issue..

>> Edited by slinky on Monday 13th September 22:02

[Bodo]

Slinky, if I understand that right, you want to use it as a terminal to start media which is stored in other places of the network.?

[slinky]

that's the one..

Will be throwing a TV out card and NIC into the box with the intention of doing exactly what you say..

slinky

[fatsteve]

Personally, I'd just go for standard RH distro, just don't install everything (unless you need to run apache, mysql, bind etc,etc,etc) - probably not!!

Power shouldn't be an issue, my DNAS server is a P200 with 96Mb memory, it does have a 250Gb hard disk though (what a bastard that was to get working!!). This has no issues streaming to 2 devices simultaneously (wirelessly at 11meg).

If you are streaming then you should be OK, however if you plan on DivX playback (or alike) then you may stuggle depending on bitrate / compression.

If you have time on your hands and want to work from the ground up, then there are plenty of fw distros which can fit on a couple of floppies. However, I fear you'd be constantly installing libs and stuff untill you had all the video and audio working.

[Bodo]

Well then you could start with a standard distribution installation. You may as well install Freevo on top of that at a later point, when you find Freevo fulfills your requirements.

When you install, say, SuSE 9.0 you get the KDE desktop by default. This desktop looks similar to the Windows environment, with a few differences of course. The Control Center allows you to do every bit of configuration you might need.

I recommend the following applications to try:
Samba Client: makes your machine mount drives (shares) from Windows PCs in your network
XMMS: a music player, very similar to WinAmp (it even uses the same skins)
Xine: video player
MPlayer: another video player (compare them)
Grip: a ripper that uses CDDB entries
JuK: a tool to scan and administrated HUGE music collections
There's a good TV player too, but I forgot how it is called. You will find more interesting applications when you browse the Media App Section on the SuSE CDs

[Pigeon]

On a machine that size which sounds like it's just going to be a kind of server I wouldn't bother installing X at all, let alone KDE. Or a keyboard or monitor. Command line via SSH would make more sense.