Divx Box.

[Mashed_Penguin]

Hi Guys,

The canterbury university ski club owns a lodge at Temple Basin. At this lodge we have a big beast of a stero being fed by a tired old mp3 server (here are its specs).

Pentium II 266
32Mb Ram
approxamatley 30GB of hdd space in 3 different hdds
CD ROM 8x
SB Live 5.1
Running win2k

What I want to do is upgrade this tired little computer into something that can play Divx movies on our TV as well as playing mp3s.

Whatever I build will have to be out of second hand parts (or really cheap new ones), the club cannot justify spending lots of money on this. So I owuld be keen to hear your ideas on what would be available that would do the job. Note there must be some sort of tv out that is of good quality.

The parts I woul keep from the current one are the Sound card, the HDDs and the CD ROM.

I'm looking forward to your suggestions.

Cheers.

[paul rhee]

i'm making a divx box as well.. for TV out, try Radeon VE or GF4MX420.. both generally good quailty. and get a svideo to RCA converter if the TV doesn support it.
any duron or celeron aboce around 700mhz will be fast enough to handle divx quite well.. and 2nd hands go quite cheap too.
and get some cheap sdram.

[Wibber]

GA-7VTXE+ $210
256mb pc2100 $100
1gig Duron $125
GA radeon 7500 $200

$635

cheap enough? and you get 6 games for free!

and you can play q3 as well!

[Mashed_Penguin]

No not cheap enough :D

And we don't care about games, this box is sitting in our stero rack out putting to the tv and the stereo, it has no need of games, or good 3d acceleration for that matter.

A more realistic price tag would be around $300 (yes I know thats not much at all) :D

[Deviant]

Keep the MP3's on the computer, and buy a second hand stand alone DVD player.

[Mashed_Penguin]

That was the other thing we were thinking about. You can get second hand dvd players for cheap on trademe etc, its just that between us we have a whole heap of divx movies and it would be quite cool to have a library we could leave up there. DVDs being too expensive to leave lying around.

[Gh0s7 L3mUr]

Have you looked on TradeMe.

There's an ad for a Duron 900 for $70. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to find a mobo for around $100. And you can get GF2 MX 400 for about $100.

Are you going to sell (on behalf of the club) the components you upgrade, as that could provide you with a bit more money for something like RAM?

If possible go for a mobo with ddr as it's that cheap at the moment that you might as well take advantage of the erformance inrease.

[whetu]

you dont need all the power of a duron just to chug along some divx's... email around and ask about a Via C3, pick up a second hand socket370 mobo, or a new mATX socket370 and youre away

then all you need is a vid card that will do hardware coding and tv-out and voila..

there is also a divxOS (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Software/3691/DivxOS/) out and about somewhere...

and finally consider this:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/video/02q2/020621/index.html

[paul rhee]

well for me, i'll be using teh divxbox as a SKY decoder as well.. and not sure how that will run on c3.. sure it did ok on my 1.8g :-)
and since i will be putting gf4mx.. will do a bit of gaming too..

oh wait.. this is Mashed's thread..

[Mashed_Penguin]

No worries its all usful info Paul :D You thread hijacker you http://www.gpforums.co.nz/images/smilies/frustrated.gif

Whetu: Yeah i saw that article a few days ago, $200 approx whould be quite a good price, as long as it would work ok in a pentium 2 266 with 32 mb of ram. (The review seems to imply a 300 is the minimum).

[Sydog]

Ask Tastech if he has got any old duron lying around, or if you can get one cheaper then get that. an 800mhz is more than enough.

Just find a alright mobo, the soltek 75kav are good for this.

get some 2nd hand ram 128mb worth

search the net for a good video card with tvout, a gf2 mx 200 will work fine.

find a cheap 1-4x dvd drive so u can play dvds as well, if not look for a 16-24x cd rom or sumthing

[Geek4Life]

Originally posted by Deviant
Keep the MP3's on the computer, and buy a second hand stand alone DVD player.
But then you've got to spend more than the $300 to get a DVD Writer ;)