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2013-09-14, 12:22
Hello,
Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere, I've had a look around and not seen any posts, however there are a lot of topics!
I run XBMC on an AppleTV2 and only had very few problems, 720p works flawlessly so no real need to change anything. But I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I have a good dedicated server (HP ProLiant ML110 G7) sitting next door to my apple TV and I'm wondering what I could use my dedicated server for?!
I done some reading about HTPC and this sounds interesting, however my dedicated server is limited when it comes to graphics, I'm wondering if people have ideas on what I could use my sever for when it comes to XBMC?
I'm sure I would have a better XBMC experience using HTPC...
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You could probably add a cheap PCIe graphics card to it and use it directly as both an HTPC and a server. Just about any 'ol Nvidia card made in the last couple of years, even the dirt cheap ones, will likely be all you need. The rest of the specs, even for the Celeron versons, should be more than enough for an HTPC, and will probably out preform the ATV2.
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Cheers Ned!
I was looking to switching to HTPC as I'm sure as you have stated it will out preform the ATV2, I would love to be able to mod the ATV2, but as I'm sure you are aware there are limitations to the ATV2, 1080p being one of them and also using skins will use ATV2 is not such a good idea either.
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2013-09-16, 20:22
(This post was last modified: 2013-09-16, 20:22 by sapper6fd.)
Personally I would stay with the AppleTV as your media player and turn the HP unit into a NAS server. Throw a few 2 or 3 TB drives in it, install FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault or OpenFiler on it and stream everything directly to your AppleTV and any other system in the house running XBMC. Just don't do it with a Wireless.connection because I've found wireless cant handle the the bandwidth requirements for HD video streaming.
HTPC - i3-3240 Processor | Asus P8H77-I Mobo | 8 GB PC3 12800 DDR3 | 60 GB SSD | Windows 8.1 w/ XBMC Frodo
NAS Server - Dual Xeon E5440 Quad Core | 32 GB DDR2 ECC | 4 X 2TB Western Digital RED | RAIDz | FreeNAS
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It's already a server. Why can't it do both? I have a HP microserver doing exactly that; what's the benefit of having another box plugged in next to it doing something the server can do perfectly well?
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You can do both, just not with any form of NAS operating system as far as I can tell. If you run Windows or Linux on it, the server can absolutely work as both your XBMC Box and File Server for XBMC and other systems. Just make sure your video card is able to connect.
If this is what you want to do, I would set aside a smaller 500GB drive as your OS / XBMC drive (Go SSD!!!) and fill the rest of it up with hard drives in a raid array for redundancy purposes.
HTPC - i3-3240 Processor | Asus P8H77-I Mobo | 8 GB PC3 12800 DDR3 | 60 GB SSD | Windows 8.1 w/ XBMC Frodo
NAS Server - Dual Xeon E5440 Quad Core | 32 GB DDR2 ECC | 4 X 2TB Western Digital RED | RAIDz | FreeNAS
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(2013-09-17, 03:22)sapper6fd Wrote: You can do both, just not with any form of NAS operating system as far as I can tell. If you run Windows or Linux on it, the server can absolutely work as both your XBMC Box and File Server for XBMC and other systems. Just make sure your video card is able to connect.
If this is what you want to do, I would set aside a smaller 500GB drive as your OS / XBMC drive (Go SSD!!!) and fill the rest of it up with hard drives in a raid array for redundancy purposes.
His NAS runs Windows (most likely) and can run any form of linux, so no issues there.
