Turn an Old PC into a Home Media Server

By Nick Mokey
June 10th, 2009

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 ...

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