For years, one of my pet projects has been to create a low cost (below $20K) central solution to store and serve my massive media collection. I have thousands of DVD’s, Video, Audio, Pictures, etc. ( Click to see about 2/3 of my DVD collection )
I also want a central location to serve up my TV/Satellite feeds etc. I have played with probably every possible combination of OS, Hardware, Embedded, Software, etc that I could get my hands on.
Lately, you all know that I have been on a Linux kick (yet again). I was beginning to play with MythTV but that would just solve the issue of serving the media to MythTV frontends. I was playing with several DLNA servers but the issues I ran into with those was one of transcoding, most linux DLNA servers don’t transcode. (transcoding is taking media of one type, say WMV and serving it up another type, say MP4, so your device can play it properly) So for now, I kinda put DLNA on the back burner.
I think I have found the light! LinuxMCE, it’s like MythTV PLUS PLUS. ( http://www.linuxmce.com/ ) I pretty much just started playing with it today. So far it’s looking pretty slickery. I installed it on one of my mini HP S7700N’s and it went pretty smooth. It runs on top of Kubuntu 7.04 ( ewww KDE ). I am liking it for the most part. It does ave a slight network “requirement” that I am so far working around (it wants the “core” LinuxMCE box to be your home DHCP server - for most home users this is not an issue, but I have a pretty unique network configuration).
Anyways, here are a couple of videos showing off what it can do:
This video is for the previous version but it’s an interesting comparison to windows MCE.
I am just starting to play with it, it has promise. I will blog my findings as I get to them. For The Win? perhaps, but I will let you know! 
