OK, I just keep on keeping on putting off modding an old Xbox to use as a media director (not server–it only has a 40GB hard drive). So sue me. This may well be the lazy tightwad’s (well, this lazy tightwad’s) answer to the need for a media server:
The Digital Entertainer Live (DE Live) is a compact HD TV media player that connects directly to your TV and home media. Now you can access your digital media collection stored on your computer and storage devices, and enjoy it directly on your TV.
DE Live features two USB 2.0 ports that connect directly to external USB storage devices, and an Ethernet port that connects to your home network, so you can access the Internet, computers, and network attached storage devices, such as the NETGEAR® ReadyNASTM Duo. The Digital Entertainer Live also features an HDMI port that connects directly to your HD TV or regular RCA jacks for connecting to older analog TVs.
Now, that sounds just about right for our MOR media usage patterns. And it might be just the thing to move me off TDC in selecting both a new TV and a NAS (network attached storage) solution. In the mean time, it’ll attach to our old, fairly large analog TV, and I have a router that’ll accept a large USB drive attached, so I can emulate a NAS… and even attach a couple of drives I have laying around directly to the unit. Until the NAS is in place, could just keep different media on different drives (and all backed up elsewhere, of course) as well as making a separate “media” folder on my hosted account available. It wouldn’t be as organizationally tight as having all the stuff on one media server but it’d at least work. For us. (And, I like Netgear stuff, so for me that’s a plus.)