devquotes,

Introduction

Here is the 4th and final post on this subject. Previous posts can be found here, here, and there.

I’ll cover the installation of:

• A 4 ports SATA card ;
• A Media Center Remote USB receiver + remote ;
• Samba for home network CIFS filesharing ;
• ZFS for the main storage.

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Introduction

This is the third article about my journey building a HTPC server. If you didn’t follow the whole serie, they are available here: basic & hardware considerations.

I finally received all the hardware required to build my server. I only bought the base: a motherboard which includes CPU plus graphic card (AT5IONT-I), memory (1x1GB + 1x2GB), a case (Lian-Li PC-V354R), and a Blu-Ray reader. I re-used a Antec EarthWatt 500W power supply unit and a old 500G hard drive I had in some server laying at my place.

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Introduction

This is the second part of my brainstorming which should lead to building a HTPC server. If you missed the first part, its available right here.

After I decided what kind of HTPC I was looking for, I started crawling the Internet trying to figure out what would be the best hardware. This post will try to expose and explain the decisions I made. As of today, I’m waiting for all those parts to be delivered.

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My initial problem

My previous ISP (Free) provided me with a nice triple-play ADSL set-top box (aka « Freebox »). It has an internal 40GB hard disk drive accessible using FTP and was able to play content streamed through UPnP. I recently switched to a new ISP (Numéricable) because they were offering FTTH (100mbits downstream, 5mbits upstream) in my place, but unfortunately they’re not offering any kind of set-top box. I just got a classic Netgear modem and Netgear DVB device, which is unable to play any video content from the network.

As it turns out, I’m missing the HTPC-kind functionalities a pretty damn lot. Playing my video content on my living room’s TV is important in my eyes. Sadly, my computer is too far from the TV to link both using an HMDI cable. That’s how I decided that I’ll be building an HTPC.

What’s an HTPC?

What is exactly an HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer or Home Cinéma & Media Center in french):

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