Only the TV, the MediaBox and the Sony have HDMI ports, so everything is connected via a nest of HDMI and RCA cables. My home theater system is rather a hodge-podge: an older 5.1 surround receiver, an old 6-disc CD changer, a newfangled Sony Blu-Ray player with Netflix, Amazon, Pandora, Hulu, and a ton of other online services, the MediaBox, and a 42″ teevee. (Do not pay a lot of money for cables! High-priced cables are scams.) HDMI is great because it eliminates a lot of cabling audio and video run over the same link, so you don’t need bales of RCA cables. For best performance you want SATA 3 hard drives, and lots of audio and video ports to plug into. A bigger case is more comfortable to work in, and has more room for drives and accessories.
#Build a small linux media center pc Pc
Of course, you can use any PC you want for your media server. A nice quiet little box that doesn’t need much room or use much power. It runs from a 250-Watt power supply, and the CPU temperature never goes over 40C. Wireless G speeds (maximum 54 Mbps) are adequate for streaming movies, and N speeds (maximum 600 Mbps) allow you to comfortably stream to multiple endpoints, and to do fast file transfers.
#Build a small linux media center pc Bluetooth
It also includes Bluetooth and wireless B/G/N. It has a front panel with 2 USB 2.0 ports, and headphone and microphone jacks. Mine is powered by an Intel quad-core i5-4430 CPU and 4GB RAM, and it comes with a nice batch of ports. The MediaBox is a little sweetheart that holds two 3.5″ SATA3 drives and a CD/DVD drive. But if that’s something you want you may have it, because Linux wants us to be happy. No cable, satellite, nor over-the-air even. It is not a DVR (digital video recorder), and it doesn’t need a TV tuner because I don’t have any broadcast TV. This is a simple system for playing movies and music.
I have Xubuntu running on a ZaReason MediaBox. Any Ubuntu variant (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, and so on) is exceptionally nice to set up as a media server because they make it easy to get restricted codecs. Just about any Linux makes an excellent media server because it’s lightweight and stable, so you can use whatever flavor you’re most comfortable with.