Media Center

[fubz]

My friend and I are trying to make a Media Center in his room. He has 2 PC's a new one for the latest games, and one that runs windows 98. The one that ones 98 we want to turn into a media center, this is the IDEA, but im not sure how hard some things might be to implement.

for the media Pc we will be purchasing a 200+ Gb HD, so we can rip our DVD collection to the HD + Music. Then we will purchase some video card w/ remote control support.

S-Video cables to hook up to the new 52inch

USB cables to connect the two computers together.

Now my question is...

What would be the best vid card to do this with, i was thinking ATI All in Wonder, my uncle has it and im pretty sure it had the S-video, TV-tuner, and remote control.

Since the 2 computers will be connected via USB, is there a way/a program that will be able to take the current screen from the main computer and send it to the secondary computer then resized so it could be shown on the TV?

Ummm i think that is all. Any links would be appreciative.

[shanenin]

for the media Pc we will be purchasing a 200+ Gb HD, so we can rip our DVD collection to the HD + Music.

That is a great idea. I have two of those systems, one running linux, and the other running windows.

Since the 2 computers will be connected via USB, is there a way/a program that will be able to take the current screen from the main computer and send it to the secondary computer then resized so it could be shown on the TV?

first off, if possible, use ethernet to connect the two via a router. I am not sure how you would do that with usb. Also the older computer with usb, is probably just usb 1.1, which is very slow.

With VNC you are send your desktop to another computer and control it remotely. Are you hoping to send your games over usb(or ethernet) to the larger tv, if so I do not think that will work, thier may be to much lag.

What would be the best vid card to do this with

what is the processor speed of the 98 machine? I would reccomend putting linux on it. I have made a auto install cd that will automaitcally install a full working video jukebox, that will run on slow hardware. It requires a matrox g450 card. It does svideo out flawlessly. I have used this on a celeron 450 with 64mb of ram. That system could play videos on the tv and serve movies via nfs and samba(windows file sharing) simulteneously.

as to the remote control, I use a wireless keyboard. I know a remote control can be set up, but I have never done that. I think you would need another hardware device to do that(using the linux system).

[Sir_Siddy]

How are you going about linking the two computers via USB? Thats something Iv never heard of but like to know if there is a way.

[xxkbxx]

How are you going about linking the two computers via USB? Thats something Iv never heard of but like to know if there is a way.

It's possible to link two computers by USB

[tictoc5150]

How are you going about linking the two computers via USB? Thats something Iv never heard of but like to know if there is a way.

Something like this would be used but it's hardly ideal...seeing that it says 6Mbps transfer rate, an ethernet connection would be a helluva lot quicker...and something tells me that 6Mbps is one of those "you may get speeds up to 6Mbps" kind of things.

[Sir_Siddy]

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Edited April 20, 2006 by Sir_Siddy