[Kazuka]

Skinnieh, that is indeed a great idea. It would be the equivalent of XBMC Live or Ubuntu Server based XBMC.

Not very familiar with the Core setup of Windows 2008, i'm wondering if this can even be achieved. As I understand the Core installation has no GUI, Explorer or something like that. It's all command line and we need to find proper drivers for the video and audio hardware. Since it's based on the Vista kernel, my guess is you can use Vista drivers for a lot of hardware?

But this is something really cool to look into!

[SKiNNiEH]

This is something i want to try soon! Im confident it should work but id like to compare that with my current xbmc/vista sp1 setup in both startup speed and performance during playback. What would be a good way to benchmark before starting over?

[SKiNNiEH]

I've done sone initial stuff in VMWare to get familiar with how the Core version of 2008 server works. It is so severely stripped, that 99% goes via the command line or via the registry. When logging on the only thing you see is a dos box and the only way to set the resolution, for example, is by means of the registry.

Setup of xbmc is possible by simply running the installer from the command prompt... next-next-finish as normal. The footprint of the OS is extremely small and i believe it is perfectly capable of running xbmc as long as:

a. ati (in my case) drivers install properly
b. realtek drivers install properly

In VMWare there is no opengl support and i believe xbmc is also asking for a few directx .dll's... i'm unsure if directx is something that can be installed or if only the 2 or 3 .dll's need to be present in c:\windows\system32.

The next step is to set this up on my HTPC and see if i can get it to work 100% with xbmc... not a project for the average user and maybe the gain in performance is not worth the trouble.

If only there was a proper benchmark way so that it can be compared to my current setup!

[kizer]

Why not just build it like the CarPC guys are doing it with Compact flash cards for boot drives and putting their swap on a seperate hard drive, which in this case would be your movie drive I suppose. Make it a fast and small drive and you could stream all your media across a small network to keep the power use/heat down to a minimum.

IDE to Compact Flash :

These units allow users to replace traditional hard drives with standard Compact Flash cards.

There are some real nice bennefits to using compact flash in place of a regular hard drive.

These include:
- very low power consumption (less then 0.5W)
- Fast startup, no spin up time, or USB bottleneck
- high transfer rate
- phisically very durable
- compatibility with IDE drivers, nothing special needed
- they are completely silent
- The use commodity (cheap and plentiful) CF cards

[User 9163]

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