Gav's World

My Media PC [borg]

This little black box was a replacement for my Nano ITX PC - due to the limited spec of the old box, it just couldn't handle anything other than MPEG 2 / 4 videos. These days a lot of web video content is H264.

Obviously, it runs a proper operating system: Linux. The flavour of the moment to provide the media capabilities is XBMCbuntu 12.2.

This allows me to watch any videos that I have on the network, play music (although I tend to do that directly to my media streamers) and more importantly get the likes of iPlayer, 4OD, YouTube and Ted Talks on my telly since it is a pre-Internet telly.

Also, the box runs MythTV to give me access to my MythTV network on the the server and I have Skype installed. I've also got a cracking wee keyboard / mouse gadget for it!

There were a few issues setting all of this up, so here is a quick tutorial of what I did.

Anyway, here are borg's specifications:

Specifications:

Unit:	Acer Aspire R3700 (HDMI, VGA, Gigabyte Ethernet, 5 USB, SPDIF, multi-card reader)
Processor:	Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz)
RAM:	2GByte DDR3
Graphics:	NVIDIA ION Chipset
Hard Drive:	Western Digital Scorpio Blue (320GByte SATA)
Optical Drive:	None
Monitor:	Sony KDL-37W5500 (LCD TV) with Pulse Eight USB-CEC Adapter
Webcam:	Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000
Keyboard / Mouse:	Logitech diNovo Mini

---

[ Page last updated Sat 16th Nov 2013 | viewed 2606 times ]