Category Archives: Media Centre

Building a NAS Media Server Part Two: Choosing and installing an operating system

By Lucas Schad | | Media Centre, Tutorials

<< Previous: Hardware << Contents >> Next: Software>> Choosing the right operating system for your NAS Media Server is essential. I recommend that you use a Linux / BSD rather than a windows based OS mainly because they require far less hardware resources. Another benefit is that common Linux / BSD distributions are available for free. If you have experience with any Linux distribution, you should consider using a server os based on that distribution. I have experience with CentOS 6 (running a VPS on it) Debian 7 (home server) and Ubuntu 12/13 (home server). I can recommend all three …
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Building a NAS Media Server Part One: Hardware

By Lucas Schad | | Media Centre, Tutorials

<< Previous: Why? << Contents >> Next: Operating System>> Hardware You won’t need high end hardware to create a NAS media server since it is just holding and sharing your data along with some minor tasks that usually won’t need much CPU power. Mainboard The mainboard is the heart of our server. The more SATA ports you have, the more drives you can connect. A good choice is a Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H. It has 8 onboard SATA 6GB/s connectors. The Intel z87 chipset can only have 6 SATA controllers, so 2 of the ports are running on a single Marvell 88SE9172 …
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How to Build a NAS Media Server

By Lucas Schad | | Media Centre, Tutorials

If you have a rapidly expanding media collection, you’ll no doubt have experienced the challenge of where and how to store it. This step-by-step guide will help you build and administrate your own NAS Media Server, starting with choosing hardware all the way to applying the finishing touches. Why build your own NAS Media Server? Why should you build a network attached storage server instead buying one from a manufacturer? While there are a huge selection of pre-built options are available, a custom NAS server can be much more flexible than a pre-built system with it’s own operating system. If you’re planning …
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Building a NAS Server Part Three: Setting up your NAS

By Lucas Schad | | Media Centre, Tutorials

<< Previous: Operating System << Contents >> Next: Software>> Set up your NAS Server Setup your network configuration Since you are running a server I guess you don’t want to run it in dhcp mode. $ sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces sudo will run your command with root (administrator) privileges – you have to enter your password to do this. Further information for the sudo command. Your output should look like this # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). # The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet …
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MediaBrowser and Fanart.tv working in perfect harmony!

By Cheesegeezer | | Latest News, Media Centre, mediabrowser, Movies, Music, TV

MediaBrowser has come on leaps and bounds within the last year or so. Firstly, it’s no longer confined to Windows Media Centre, it’s undergone a complete overhaul, complete recoding and opened up a world of new beginnings for the HTPC world, where the community is always listening to improve the MediaBrowser experience as a whole to the end user. Over the course of the next few weeks I will be enlightening you to more of the intricacies of MediaBrowser and what’s available.  For now,  I’d just like to give you a brief overview and how fanart.tv and MediaBrowser help to …
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XBMC and OUYA

By Martijn | | Latest News, Media Centre, XBMC

In the last 40 hours of the Kickstarter campaign, team XBMC & OUYA platform have just announced that will be working together on bringing XBMC Android to the OUYA platform to ensure tha XBMC works well on OUYA. Talks are still in early stage however they do look promissing. The Kickstarter campaign already raise 6.8 Million to get the project going. Wonders if that will be increased some more after this announcement.       Some more news from Ouya We’re boosting our radio reception around the world.  We’ve partnered with TuneIn, a free service that lets people listen to the …
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libCEC 1.8.0 Firmware upgrade and Raspberry Pi support

By Martijn | | Media Centre, XBMC

They guys of Pulse-Eight (who also sponsored our contest with some great gadgets) have just announced a new firmware upgrade for their libCEC library. The software that allows you to control XBMC with your TV remote through the HDMI cable and CEC adapter contains a numbers of bug fixes and improved compatibility. Besides that it now also support the Raspberry Pi board without the CEC adapter or any other special wires besides an HDMI cable. So just pick up your TV remote and you can control XBMC. This will be included in the OpenELEC version of XBMC For the full …
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XBMC for Android

By Martijn | | Latest News, Media Centre, XBMC

So as an XBMC Team member I think it’s my duty (and also proud) to make this post to say XBMC for Android is coming. Still a lot of work has to be done and it is only available for the ones that can compile it themselves. No it isn’t available yet in Play Store so if you find any app that poses as XBMC hit report before it gets a bad name. More info can be found on XBMC for Android press release.


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