Game Night canceled…Talked media distribution

It was bound to happpen at some point. We cancelled last night’s game night. Only a small number was planning to play and our host (Bob, not me 🙂 developed back problems late Thursday/early Friday. He’s getting around but the prospect of sitting for an extended period of time was not appealing. Instead, he and I talked about serving up media throughout his house. He already has some distribution capabilities and wants to add a server to the mix. He just picked up a fairly powerful Wintel machine with Windows Media Center on it. It looks like it could do some of the heavy lifting for serving media from a computer but there are things about it that we do not know if it can do and some things we don’t like.

Anyone have suggestions regarding software used to select/control/serve media (both audio and video) from a computer? Selection/control needs to be able to occur via a handheld device such as a universal remote that is wireless or can be pointed at an IR repeater in a room or a client running on a wireless PDA, etc.

Any good websites that talk about this subject would be most appreciated too!

A couple of things we’re going to look at is how Media Center adds media external to the application into its library and whether there is any ability to control the application via web technologies.

I store all of my music in MP3 format so that I am less constrained on the playback devices I can target. That’s mostly computers and iPods but I also have a Rio Receiver that is best suited for MP3 playback. Bob is looking along the same lines of being able to serve up music to his whole house audio system as well as being able to share music with other computers in his house and sync with multiple playback devices which may be iPods or other MP3 devices.