Serviio

I've used Serviio for my desktop PC before and really liked it, but I want to build myself a new, light-weight, compact media server that I can have switched on in the office for the whole day. I have a Western Digital Media player that does something similar but I haven't been able to get it working with my Sony Bravia... my PC running Serviio worked brilliantly.

So, does anyone have any recommendations as to how I go about building a dedicated Serviio media player box? I would need to hook it up to at least two USB hard drives for media content and a standard LAN cable.

Almost any PC can handle the basics. Of course, it can be Windows, Linux or Mac, depending on your experience with these OSs. If you have HD video that needs transcoding, I suggest a quad core CPU or better. Memory doesn't seem to be a major issue. I have two servers, one with a quad core and 8 gig and another with a dual core and 4 gig. The smaller one sometimes has trouble keeping up with transcoding, but it greatly depends on the viewing device. My Sony BD players don't need transcoding for practically anything, so no issues. The Roku players need transcoding for everything except MPEG-TS and MP4, but is limited in how much bit rate it can swallow, so even some compatible videos need transcoding to throttle the bitrate.

My servers run 24/7 with no issues. My big server currently has 7-8 hard drives (can't remember right off hand ) with about 14 TB of space, but I had to add a SATA card with additional ports. Most motherboards max out at 6 ports. I need to add another drive soon, as I've maxed out my TV series drive, so if I run out of ports I'll just get another SATA card