Question about Servers

[mamamia88]

for those that have home media servers I have a question. do you need to have lots of horsepower to stream video over the network? just thinking of using my netbook to stream music and video to my xbox

[CharlesA]

Depends if you need to do transcoding on-the-fly or not.

[Barrucadu]

No, not really. My server is a mini-ITX board with an Atom processor running a dozen other services and the load averages rarely hit 1.

[RandomJoe]

My "server" is an OpenRD Client ARM-based system (basically a Sheeva Plug with more of the available I/O wired) with an esata attached HDD. Keeps up just fine streaming high-bitrate video to the computers I watch them on. I don't have it doing transcoding, though.

It also does a bunch of other stuff at the same time, firewall for the home network, streams an audio feed to Radio Reference, DNS / DHCP / etc server, that sort of thing.