Best Linux Flavor for streaming

[mol3000]

What is the best Linux flavor for streaming video and music internally and externally in a network? Use less resources while converting?

[Clockwork]

I personally use Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my server which can serve up my video and audio through MediaTomb (DLNA) or simply Samba shares to my front ends (Android tablet and XBMC on jail-broken Apple TV box).

[Clockwork]

This is my server. It's just parked off in a corner in my basement. It's headless and I access it occasionally through a remote desktop connection for updates and such.

[mol3000]

has anyone use red hat 6 or the new solaris???? If so how do you feel about it?

[Hoser Rob]

Solaris isn't that new, and it hasn't been updated for a while. It was originally Sun's alternative to linux before it became a linux version under Oracle. I wouldn't bother with it myself.

Red Hat is fine, but it's aimed at business/enterprise. It therefore comes with a bunch of packages aimed at larger users you don't need. I don't think it's free and I know for sure the tech support is not free. Fedora is their consumer oriented linux flavor and it's not too bad, from what I've heard.

If you're relatively new to linux ubuntu is the one I'd recommend, with mint a rather distant second. I've used both.

Ubuntu comes in 4 varieties. The one just called ubuntu uses the unity desktop shell. Biggest mistake I ever made with linux was installing that version. It stinks.

I used to use xubuntu as well. That uses the xfce shell, which is pretty light.

Now I use kde based kubuntu. It uses a bit more ram and cpu than xfce but not much. And the video playing performance is awesome. The best I've ever used. As long as you go into settings -> effects -> advanced and tell it to shut off the compositor when apps go fullscreen. I later found benchmarks on geek sites that back this up.

The thing with ubuntu for newer user is the free tech support on the forums. It's the best linux support there is, bar none. It's actually better than red hat support, which you pay for. I know some serious linux geeks, and they all recommend ubuntu for this reason.

And you will likely need tech support. Linux is much more complex than windows and configuring it can take longer.

But the thing with unix/linux compared with windows is, it often takes longer to set up than a windows system. But then it damn well works.

[Hoser Rob]

Oh, one more thing or 2. Never assume that software that takes up less memory space will run faster. It's usually the opposite. Faster algorithms use more memory generally.

Also, as far as I'm concerned linux is so much better than windows it's just ridiculous ... I still have one win7 partition on another machine that's probably feeling neglected. But don't assume linux is necessarily faster than windows either. It isn't always.