Noob- Linux as media centre front end

lordrobs

lordrobs

lordrobs

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Joined
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I recently purchased- Asus S-Presso S1-P111 Barebones System to use as a media centre simply to play my mp3's, DVD's and DivX files.

I was planning to use a redundant copy of XP Home as the operating software but having searched high and low for both the CD and product key i'm starting to think I may have binned them :( Being a bit skint after buying the hardware side of things I can't really justify spending £70 on another operating system... so I thought i'd enquire about Linux. Being a complete beginner at Linux i'm after some advice.

Basically I want something that will be able to play my media (mp3, avi and DVD's) which is stored on an external hard disk. Thats all, everything else will be done on my XP based pc.

I'll be using the onboard graphics and will need to display at 1280x768 incase that makes a difference.

Any suggestions / help would be really appreciated. Thanks.
 
As always I recomend you try using simply mepis 3.4-3 (download from http://www.mepis.org/node/1462). It comes with a media player called Amarok which can play music files. However if you would to play wma files you would have to try out another media player as Amarok does not support the microsoft wma file type. You should be able to play the avi files using something. I have never played a dvd in linux before as usually use my dvd player for that.

No, onboard gfx should not make a difference. When you boot from the mepis disk make sure that you press F3 when you see the screen showing how you would like to boot with the mepis logo written on it. This is where you select what res you would like to use.

If you have any questions please reply. :P I am not good on advanced linux stuff though.
 
Right, well I've just recently installed SUSE10 (64bit version) on my main system (wanting to learn linux) and its pretty straight forward for the installation. All my hardware was picked up and as soon as it had installed (via the simple GUI install system). After reading a couple of articles I've got full mp3 and divx support.

USB devices are picked up straight away, and hopefully networking it up to windows PCs shouldnt be too difficult, if not it can read fat and ntfs partitions so you can always transfer files via a usb disk untill you've learnt the networking side.

Gota say, it took a while to install (1 hour+) but it comes with a shed load of legal software its really awesome.

Well worth a look IMO.
 
if you are not going to use the computer for anything else you could try one of the dedicated media playing distros like :

Geexbox

i used it a couple of years ago, worked fine. booted from CD and played media from a smb fileserver. There were no codecs included in the distro so you might need to get w32codecs for linux mplayer.



ip
 
ikapod said:
if you are not going to use the computer for anything else you could try one of the dedicated media playing distros like :

Geexbox

i used it a couple of years ago, worked fine. booted from CD and played media from a smb fileserver. There were no codecs included in the distro so you might need to get w32codecs for linux mplayer.



ip
Click to expand...

another vote for geexbox or try knopmyth but may be a bit overkill.

cheers
deano
 
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