[Wylug-help] Linux Media Terminal, Hardware Advice Needed

[Dave Fisher]

Hi all,

As I intimated the other day, I've long been considering the possibility
of building a Linux home media system.

I've been thinking about a set-up in which the reception, capture,
editing, coding/decoding, streaming, scheduling, etc is done on a fairly
beefy headless server hidden away in a sound-proofed cupboard.

The ideal would be to stream audio/video to a diskless display terminal
with infrared control in my living room.

I still need to figure out a lot of the details, but I've seen fairly
decent documentation for almost everything bar the terminal hardware
requirements.

If at all possible, I'd like the display terminal to be fanless, like
the mini-itx board that I currently run my entire home system off.

Experience with the Via Epia 500 suggests, however, that it simply
doesn't have the umph to decode _and_ display even modestly sized video
files.

My question is whether something like the Epia ME6000 might be able to
cope with the display requirements if all the encoding/decoding were
taken off its hands?

  http://www.mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=2#p244

Since I don't know much about hardware (or X) and I don't have the time
to learn as much as I'd like, I thought I'd ask if anyone had any
thoughts on the feasibility of this or alternative set-ups for achieving
something similar?

One alternative that I have considered for the terminal is underclocking
a more powerful CPU to run it with a slower, and hence quieter, cooling
fan and/or a well-specced graphics card.

Dave