Re: Old laptop for a media server ? (F11, mediaTomb, transcoding, uPNP server, etc.)

On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 08:44 -0400, Richard Heck wrote:
On 10/05/2009 01:38 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote:
We have a Dell 5100 laptop sitting here not doing anything. My wife got
a new one a year ago. We need a media server to serve large digital
images to client computers running digikam and we also want to run
mediatomb to act as a server for our laptops and our uPNP capable tv.

The 5100 has a Pentium 4 running at 2.66 MHz. Right now it has 256 MB
of RAM, but I think I have 1 GB sitting around here for it. Plug in a
new 7200 RPM 500 GB hard drive ? Run a 1 TB USB drive for more
storage ?


Definitely add RAM. Even if you don't have the big stick, RAM is dirt
cheap and will make a big difference.

I would like to run Fedora 11 on it. (What else ?) Boot init 3 ? Run
init level 5 for doing administration ?


I ran Fedora on a server for quite some time, but eventually switched
away, for the simple reason that upgrading the server was too painful
with Fedora---as I'm sure we all know. And if the upgrade process
aborts, then I end up having to reconfigure the whole server. Not to
mention that I have to take the thing down anyway to do it. This could
be a reason to think about some Debian-based distro, or you could try
CentOS, which is what I'm now using. I don't know if MediaTomb can be
compiled for CentOS, though---I run Logitech's Slim Server, or whatever
it's called now, to feed music to a Squeezebox and two Transporters---or
if the formats you would need would be available there. If not, then I'd
think about Debian.

I am running the F11 Live CD on it right now. It seems to work fairly
well, albeit a bit slow.


You should see my server, then: 300MHz Pentium III.

I love the form factor. It would be quiet and small. Its got a monitor
and a keyboard and built in battery back up, for a couple hours, anyway.
We have a wireless card for it too... I could do administration on the
couch instead of in some closet somewhere.


The only thing I might worry about is heat, and what that will do to the
laptop if you're leaving it on all the time. (I'm guessing you want to
leave it on all the time.) You could try putting the laptop on one of
those laptop cooler things, that has built-in auxiliary fans. I've got
one that plugs into one of the USB ports.

Will it do the job ? I'm worried about the transcoding part of things.
Our TV doesn't support many video formats but mediaTomb does transcoding
so that we can watch just about anything we can store.

Will it do the job ?


Transcoding is labor intensive, but, given enough RAM, and assuming
you're not trying to transcode full HD, I'd think you'd have a chance of
having enough power. I think MediaTomb also has an option to "buffer"
the output, and if you set that high enough, then that'll help a lot.

If I were doing this now, I might think about building a dual-core
Atom-based box in some smallish case. The only downside to this sort of
thing, and this applies to the laptop, too, is that you very likely will
run out of disk space at some point, even with a 1TB drive, if you're
really collecting the videos, and then you have a problem. A
conventional case gives you a lot more room for new drives.

Richard


Thanks for the reply. I will be transcoding 1080 HD. Anyone have
experience with how much processing power that takes ?


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