Media server?

[Charlie]

Right I am moving into a house next year with my mates from university... now I have been thinking about how the computer system in the house should work (I am an electronic and computer engineer, so what do you expect ). I was thinking of maybe having an old (but quiet) computer running in the front room where the internet comes in, then having this computer linked to the TV in there.

We will probably go with virgin media were you get the tv/internet package in one. Now I want this computer to act as a firewall for the house and allow us to browse the music/videos on our laptop around the house... all these will be probably connected via a wireless lan. There will be 1 MacBook (Mine!) and 7 Windows machines (Vista or XP).

I am quite tempted to blow all of this and just buy an Apple Tv which should do it all nicely... (apart from the firewall and restrict us to iTunes) but I think an linux machine would serve better as it can act as a firewall and maybe a small file server.

Infact I probably won't need this firewall because the wireless router will do all this. Although maybe routing the TV signal through the linux machine which would mean we could record things (although I am not sure how virgin tv works).

So anyone got any ideas on what distro and applications I will need?
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Past: Honda x8rs, Honda City fly, Honda Hornet 250, Honda VFR750, Yamaha xt600e.
Current: Honda CBR929RR & Yamaha XT660Z Tenere

[neil.]

LinuxMCE if you're techie enough. Or perhaps another distro running MythTV or Elisa (which will run on bog standard Windows/Linux too) - https://elisa.fluendo.com/

Edit: I'd also imagine you'd want to set up some sort of QoS or packet shaping to prioritise HTTP, POP and HTTPS (or whatever stuff you need fast) on your firewall, so that when the 7 windows machines max out your network with P2P stuff (and being students, they WILL!), you can still browse the web without a major slowdown. You can run a Linux distro called IPCop that can do this, on a REALLY old machine (I did it on a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM) to serve as a router/gateway with a decent firewall etc.
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CBT February 2008 | A2 June 2008 | Yamaha YBR125 (written off) | Honda CBF125 (current)

[Charlie]

While all the sounds great Luke but I don't think us cheap students will be needing a lot of that. Plus I am on a mac so won't be using Vista (every time I use my friends vista pc's my dislike to vista grows).

I was quite tempted to find an old (but still intel) mac mini and then running the media center off there but I am sure I can do it a cheaper way... I also need to find out what sort connectors the TV is going to take.

The idea of giving proities to different types of protocol sounds like a good idea as I would get annoyed at webpages taking ages to load... shall have to give that a bit on an investigation.

Thanks a lot guys.
____________________
Past: Honda x8rs, Honda City fly, Honda Hornet 250, Honda VFR750, Yamaha xt600e.
Current: Honda CBR929RR & Yamaha XT660Z Tenere