Turn an Old PC into a Home Media Server

We show you how to recast an aging PC as a cutting edge multimedia machine with new software.

We’ve experimented with any number of home media servers that will stream YouTube, play movies across a home network, and stream music from a library of connected home storage appliance. And they’re nice if that’s all you ever want to do. But for ultimate flexibility, nothing beats a true home theater PC. Using a fully functional PC, you throw away all the limitations of a traditional set top box, building up a box that does exactly what you want it to, the way you want it to.

With that in mind, blowing $1,000 on a custom-built computer just for the task seems like a waste. In the big scale of computing tasks, playing video isn’t a particularly taxing task, and computers have been able to do it for years, meaning just about any one will do. So rather than showing you how to empty your wallet shelling out for custom home theater components, we’re going to show you how to do it on the cheap, with just about any old machine you happen to have.

Getting Started

Here’s our makeover machine: A ratty old Dell Inspiron 5150 from about five years ago. The screen blinks when you move it up and down, the top plastic has been partially melted by God-knows-what from the previous owner, and the battery last only long enough to jump it from one outlet to the next without turning it off. By any modern laptop standard, this thing is worthless, especially with a weight of 8.1 pounds (without the gigantic power adapter) for a 15.4-inch notebook.

But for our purposes, it will work just fine. It has a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, and perhaps most importantly, a GeForce FX Go 5200 card. In the gaming world, that translates to about the computing horsepower necessary to play Call of Duty 2, but in terms of video, it will drive video at full-screen 1024 x 768 resolution without breaking a sweat. That’s a bit short of 1080p content, but we’re going to be using this machine to pull stuff from the Web, where that quality of content is extremely rare anyway.

Why use a laptop? Since you’re going to be dropping the final product under your television, you have to deal with a few concerns most desktops don’t really address, like noise and size, that laptops handle better. This little guy will slide right in alongside our other A/V equipment, and won’t emit anything more than a whisper during movies when we want silence. Of course, if you have an old desktop lying around, it should work too, you might just have to invest more time in carefully placing it so that the quiet scenes in your favorite movies aren’t ruined by the sound of a jet taking off under your entertainment cabinet.

Hardware

Whichever way you go, we encourage you to use whatever hardware you can scrounge up. Test whatever machine you use in Windows to see if it can handle YouTube, YouTube in “high-quality” mode, and YouTube in 720p HD mode, which will give you some idea if it will work for your purposes. In general, look for a discrete video card (something from ATI or Nvidia, basically,) which will greatly improve your multimedia performance, even if it’s something ancient.

Besides performance, you need to pay attention to connectivity. You’ll need both audio and video outs to connect up to your home theater, and the quality of what you need will depend on what you’re trying to do. Older machines, like ours, won’t offer much. The Inspiron 5150 offers a VGA output and S-Video output for video, and a sole headphone jack for audio. It will work for our purposes, but home theater buffs will probably want DVI or HDMI video outputs and 5.1-channel sound. True audiophiles building desktop rigs might even opt for discrete sound cards, like Asus’ Xonar Essence STX, to deliver high-fidelity sound.

You might notice that we don’t have a cable tuner to allow our box to serve as a personal video recorder (PVR) for time shifting. We opted out of this particular functionality simply because most folks have either digital cable or satellite these days, which need to be decoded by a supplier-provided box, and won’t be able to work with a PVR meant for analog cable.

Our notebook doesn’t actually come with built-in Wi-Fi, but a Linksys PC card adapter will allow us to use wireless networking nonetheless. 802.11a/b/g will all work fine for standard-def content, but you may wish to step up with 802.11n, the latest standard, for high-def content, or fall back on a hard Ethernet wire.

Software

We hope you weren’t planning on keeping all those old Word documents and photos lying around on your decrepit old machine, because they’ve got to go. The easiest way to boost performance on an old machine is simply wiping it clean and reinstalling a new OS, so get whatever files you want to save off it via thumb drive or external hard drive. We’re building a dedicated home theater machine, not a PC hooked up to a display.

The operating system you choose will radically effect your later choices. For instance, one of the hottest media center applications out there right now is Boxee, which allows immediate access to sites like CNN, ABC and YouTube as soon as you fire it up, making it by far one of the most powerful apps out there. Unfortunately, at the moment, it only runs on Linux and OS X. We’ve also sampled it on those operating systems, and while it easily has the most potential of any of these apps, it’s too unstable for us to recommend at the moment.

Which is why we’re instead using Boxee’s predecessor, XBMC. The open-source XBMC application (short for Xbox Media Center) provides the framework that Boxee rides on, and while it doesn’t have as much long-term potential, it’s far more polished at the moment, and you can run it on Windows. We’ll be using Windows XP, since it has a much smaller footprint than Vista and will work better on old hardware.

If we weren’t going with XBMC, we might opt for something like MythTV, which also serves as a PVR, SageTV, or even Microsoft’s own Windows Media Center, which comes integrated right into Vista.

Setting Up

After selecting your operating system of choice and software, it’s time to get cracking on installation. We won’t cover the entire process of installing a fresh copy of Windows here, that’s another topic for another article, but in the meantime, Lifehacker has done an excellent job wrapping it up in this concise guide.

So you’re at the clean Windows boot screen, what’s next? Install XBMC. It’s mercifully quite easy compared to the hoops we had to jump through to get Boxee to work: Just head to XBMC.org, grab the Windows installer, and let it run setup like any other app.

Afterwards, you’ll be able to fire up XBMC and get a taste of what’s to come: graceful menus, quick navigation, and even a preinstalled plug-in that lets you browse through and view Apple’s library of movie trailers.

But the real power is in customization. After installation, you can point XBMC to all your movies and music, and install plug-ins that allow it to access online content like YouTube, all from within the existing navigation structure. Sites like XBMCZone will help you download scripts, plug-ins and themes for your XBMC that extend functionality far beyond simply browsing your own photos and videos. Check out the online manual to read step-by-step instructions for all of these tasks, better than we can print here.

Connect It All Up

It makes the most sense to setup XBMC before connecting it up, since you’ll be able to mess with it more easily on a desktop than squirreled away in a home theater cabinet. But when everything appears to up and running smoothly on the little screen, it’s time to transition to the big screen.

On ours, it was a simple matter of connecting both the VGA cables and audio cables that convert the headphone jack on the notebook into more standard right and left RCA plugs for the TV. You’ll probably need to tell Windows that you’re hooking up a second display, so it will send out signal to the second monitor. You may encounter troubles, though. For instance, with our ancient hardware, it was impossible to run a standard desktop and a 1080p secondary display with 32-bit color depth. Our solution: Just make the television the main display, so your computer isn’t working harder to drive a second.

Sit Back and Enjoy

At last, your PC is connected. Fire up a movie, TV show, or your favorite album and show it off. Working well? Excellent. But don’t break out the popcorn just yet.

If you really want to enjoy it without standing up to mess with a touchpad every time, you’ll need to invest in a wireless controller to make your selections from the couch. We opted for a wireless keyboard and mouse, but if you’re looking for something a little less bulky, try one of Microsoft’s media center remotes, or an ATI Remote Wonder. If you ever manage to transition to Linux for Boxee (or the perpetually delayed Windows version ever appears), you can even use an iPhone app to control your media center wirelessly.

Conclusion

Building a simple home theater PC doesn’t need to be difficult or expensive. In fact, as our own model proves, hardware that’s half a decade old can still do the trick. But there are limitations: Our system ran respectably around 720p resolution, but video didn’t play smoothly enough at 1080p to satisfy us. Newer hardware would improve that, but be careful how much you spend. At some point, an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 makes more sense than dropping much money on PC hardware. The fact remains: If you’re patient, that haggard old box you were ready to throw away can provide many more hours of YouTube, Hulu and South Park in front of your TV.