Well that plan has now gone to hell, with the acquisition of a certain piece of equipment. Let’s just say this piece plays really good looking games and is a uPNP/DLNA device. Let’s also say that it’s really expensive. For now, let’s call this the ‘media client’.

With this purchase, it looks like a HTPC is no longer necessary. Replacing Astro with a PC-based PVR doesn’t seem worth the effort too, so the idea to use MediaPortal will now be replaced with TVersity, a uPNP/DLNA media server software for Windows. With it, I can just stream stuff over to the media client, with support for on-the-fly transcoding just in case the client is anal about format.

Problem is this still needs me to set up a Windows 24/7 server to host the media. So I might use uShare as an alternative. uShare is another supported media server, but for Linux/BSD machines. That means I can continue using my BSD server for torrent downloads, and stream media directly from it.

Speaking of the BSD server, which I named Mario for some odd reason, it will have its Gnome GUI software removed with needed components migrated over to console. Gnome was becoming a pain in the butt to maintain, and I only needed it to run Azureus, which is also being replaced by TorrentFlux.

But anyway, looking forward to to the new way of things.