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Thread: Setting up a central PC to serve music/video at home

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    Setting up a central PC to serve music/video at home

    I am planning to set up a pc which will be part of my home network (I'm going to use a Compaq Deskpro SFF due to it's size and being almost silent). It will act as a printserver and a home for all my music and video so that any of the other pc's on my home network can access it for music/video and printing. I want this new pc to be hidden out of the way (in a cupboard) and if I need to do any work on it I want to be able to access it remotely - ie for updating virus definitions and MS updates (i don't plan on having a monitor or keyboard/mouse connected to it).
    All the pc's on my home network (including this one) are runing XP Pro except one of the kids PC's which is running XP home.
    What is the best way to set this new PC up? Is the remote access feature is XP suitable for allowing me to administor the pc?
    What's the best software to use to allow every pc to browse/play the music files on the central PC? All the music is in mP3 format and I'd like to use something that allows searches to be done using the ID3 tags. I've got 2 fairly young kids (5 and 8) so something uncomplicated is ideally what they need to use.

    Any inputs welcome, especially if someone has done something similar to this.

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    You could use vnc if you don't like xp remote (also allowing access over the web if you wanted)

    I use a media player called media monkey for mp3s cos it is free and is not microsoft.

    I have a similar server computer at home and just play the media files over the lan. What I haven't tried is playing several movies from the same ide drive simultaneously, I suspect this might not work very smoothly. My lan is only 100 but seems plenty for dvd playback.

    It is possible to use streaming instead but I haven't found a reason too yet, however I may look into streaming if I add one or more dvb-t cards so that tv viewing over the lan is also possible.
    Athlon 1800 HIS9550 128mb 17" AcerTFT DVI

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    Media Monkey looks pretty good, I'll download that and give it a go. I'm not bothered about accessing the pc from outside my LAN so I'll try the XP remote tool and see how I get on with that, unless someone suggests something else.

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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    just set up a basic windows file share or two on an xp pro machine, and mount them as z: or whatever on the client machines. that way, each machine can use any media player, by simply using the z: drive as a media library

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    I use vnc for controlling my other pcs on my network, great little app, easy to use and small.

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    what's the advantage of using VNC over the XP remote function?

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    VNC is slower in my experience. I would say it's biggest strength is being available on all platforms, but sounds like you're Windows only anyway.

    Agree that best idea is to simply put everything organized in one share and let the client PCs do what they want with the files. Maybe set as read-only to everyone but yourself as well, just in case ...

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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    one vnc advatage is it can serve xp home sessions - saves you buying lots o' xp pro licenses

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    had a look at VNC and I think I've found a HUGE advantage for me (correct me if I'm wrong) - more than 1 person can be logged on to a pc at the same time. If i use XP remote then only 1 user can be logged on? This means I can administor the kids pc's remotely without interuppting what their doing (and see what they're up to without them even knowing i'm watching

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    have a look at www.nslu2-linux.org . The NSLU2 is a network fileserver that uses embedded linux as the OS. It can be hacked to give access to the OS and you can thenm run applicatuions on it. At the moment I am running an apache webserver on it, and on another an ITunes server. If you want you can use a flash disk so you have a server that uses less than 10 watts power, and has no moving parts. Worth a look!

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    Ultra VNC from Sourceforge.net (do a search from the main page) has many facilities and is fast and will run from any type of network from a dial up to a GigE. Gives you full access and multi users on the same machine and has an excellent built in file transfer between machines.
    I`ve used it both at home on my DC farm and on the net to both dial up and broadband to support remote machines and help people sort their problems out.
    Lots of commercial people use it and the forums are excellent for support.

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