Turn an old laptop into a media center for Xbox 360 (Win2K Edition)
The other day my wife asked me to sell her old Pentium III laptop and then I saw an article on Lifehacker about turning old PCs into something useful and media centers was an idea. Then it all clicked that I could turn this old laptop in to a torrent grabbing, media streaming beast. I found it easiest to implement this with Windows and uTorrent since I'm already comfortable with these. I'll later throw my hat in to the ring with a Linux-based solution.
Goal:
To create a media PC that automatically downloads media and makes it accessible via an Xbox 360.
Laptop Specs:
NEC Versa SXi
Pentium III 750 MHz
384 MB RAM
3Com 10/100 PC card
20 GB Harddrive
Being that this laptop is a Pentium III, it doesn't really have the horsepower to run Windows XP. Windows 2000 is pretty light and it's a lot better than running Win9x.
Installation (Base):
The installation of Windows 2000 was pretty straight forward. I thinned out the install so stuff like extra sound schemes were not installed. Space is valuable so no need to load up the drive with extraneous items. Once Windows was installed I did was any good IT person would do, visit Windows Update. After several cycles, the OS was patched and up to date.
Since I'll be using torrents to get my video files, I'll need some sort of antivirus software. My personal favorite is Avast since it is pretty small and doesn't take up a lot of resources.
The last part of the base install to add RealVNC to allow for remote administration. I'm going to be leaving the laptop closed and under the TV. RealVNC will let me get to the desktop of the laptop over my home network and manage it. When you install RealVNC, you should accept all the defaults during the install. When the install is complete, you can get a password to use to login to your PC via RealVNC. On your other home computers, you should uncheck the option to install the Server portion of RealVNC since you'll only need the viewer software to connect to the laptop.
Installation (Additional Software):
With the base OS in place it's now time to move on setting up the components to get our media and stream it to the Xbox 360.
My goal is to be able to download TV shows via BitTorrent and my favorite BitTorrent application is uTorrent, since it has the ability to monitor RSS feeds. For information on using uTorrent to download via RSS feeds, check out this tutorial. This part is optional, but it does make it nice to see what you're downloading without having to get on to the laptop...I downloaded the WebUI for uTorrent [guide] so that I could see what was downloading via a web browser on another PC. It doesn't have quite all the options enabled that you'll need, like RSS, but it is nice piece that makes the laptop just that more transparent. Another option for RSS and torrents is to install Ted. I've yet to try it but Lifehacker seems to like it.
With uTorrent installed, I configured it to download all files to a directory just off the C:\ drive called Media so everything will be easy to find and manage. I also configured my RSS feeds and monitored what shows I wanted to download.
My next step was to install some Xvid and DivX codecs so I can play these tv shows on the laptop. Get the latest codecs here: K-Lite Codec Pack Basic.
The next step is to find some software to stream these videos to the Xbox 360. Windows Media Player 11 does this easily with Media Sharing but WMP 11 does not exist for Windows 2000 so I had to use something else: TVersity. TVersity will allow me to stream video and music to the Xbox 360 and since Divx support is now native on the Xbox 360, there's no need to transcode it. I configured TVersity to monitor my Media folder on the C:\ drive.
Wrapping it up:
The laptop is now all set to download media and TVersity is now sharing it over the network. The next thing to do is to play it on the XBox 360. You'll find the Media that TVersity is sharing by going to the Media blade and going in to the Video section. You should see your TVersity show up as a media source. You'll need to dig around bit after selecting the TVersity media source but you should be able to find your shared media folder and the files in it. Once you find the media files, you should be able to play them without a problem. Check out the screenshots at TVersity for some help on this if you get confused.
And that is it! It took me a couple of nights after work to get this all working but I took a couple of wrong turns along the way. I had tried WinAMP to steam the media but their software wouldn't stream the files on the Xbox and I didn't feel like waiting for them to fix this.
Please comment on this article. I'd like to make this as clear as possible for everyone out there.
Links:
Avast
RealVNC
uTorrent
K-Lite Codec Pack Basic
TVersity
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