Accessable media devices

[Luke Davis]

I'm seeing this late, but why not use a MiniITX system for this, instead 
of a laptop?

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006, Shane wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am looking for a device which is able to stream audio and
> video from a central server to a home theatre with a
> minimum of quality loss.  There appear to be devices which
> do this via ethernet or wlan but all seem to require a
> piece of software on the server side to export the content
> which wouldn't work in the case of a Linux server. 
> Further, the audio output on these things seem to be all
> rca lr where I'd be looking for spdif or optical capable of
> transmitting ac3 directly for 5.1 output and lossless
> stereo.
> 
> I toyed with putting a pc into the home theatre room but
> it's too big and won't fit into the stereo cabinet.  My
> latest idea is a laptop with a wireless network running
> Linux with a bluetooth keyboard and software speech.  The
> laptop should be thin enough to fit into the stereo stand. 
> I'm just not sure whether Linux will be able to support the
> spdif and s/video outputs on the notebook and there's also
> the noise of the hard drive to consider.
> 
> Have others undertaken the computer integration project. 
> Perhapse there is a wireless media receiver out there I
> don't know about which can stream from a Samba or nfs
> share.
> 
> Best,
> Shane
> 
> 
>