I want an Media Center 'Lite' Machine

[greymalkin]

Hello all,
I have a Celeron 766 w/Win98 and 386mb ram in it. I know it's slow, but I was hoping to be able to use is as an emulation machine for running the old nintendo/SNES emulators and HOPEFULLY use it to stream the video's my main pc records using it's capture card.

I plan on getting an older radeon card just so i have hardware mpeg support, but what is the benefit of getting a program such as vlc as opposed to just going to my shared video's folder on the server and launching it from the client pc? Does vlc use some special buffers that keeps the video running smoothly whereas the network might not? I can attempt it with my wirelessg or run 100mbit if needed..just fishing for suggestions to get a kleen machine that will allow me to watch movies that are stored on my "server" as well as play my emulators.

[Soopafresh]

You're trying to turn a Yugo into a Porsche, and unfortunately when you're done, you'll just end up with a weird looking Yugo.

However, that machine would be fine for streaming MP3s. Another use for it would be to serve as a video encoder. It'll be slow, but you can set the machine to encode 24/7.

[greymalkin]

no no no no no..i'm not trying to turn a yugo into a porche...it will do simple nes/snes emulation quite well..my question was about watching mpeg2 on it over a lan..mainly about what the difference is between streaming video using a specialized client or just streaming it over the network via a shared resource on my server. There will be no capturing/encoding done on this machine. theres no point in asking a celery 766 to encode when i've got a P4 3.0ghz for that.

asking it to play a simple mpeg2 file is not unreasonable, especially using an ATI card with mpeg playback hardware, the question comes in when the network is factored in. I can wire up a gigabit line if needed..i was wondering if 100mb would be fine or if i could get away with wireless g...AND, IF so, what benefit is something like VLC. This is the area i don't have any experience in, not computers in general.