[COLUG] Car Media Server

[Jonathan Ryan]

After another long trip with a minivan full of kids, I'm wondering about
buying or setting up a media server in my car.
I'd want something to play both music and movies, stored as MP3s and
MPEG4/Divx.

There don't seem to be any turnkey solution out there.  Has anyone seen
anything?

I'm looking into the possibility of putting together something with VLC
(http://www.videolan.org/) running on an Ubuntu server.  Some web
research I did suggested the VLC software would work very well, and it
has web-based controls.  A couple of guys apparently started something
like this last year, documenting it at http://www.cri.ch/carserver/.
Check out their Web Log page for their software reviews.  They also had
the interesting idea of putting a wireless LAN card in their hardware to
sync automatically to the house, and to let them control the whole thing
through a PocketPC web browser.

Whatever hardware I would set up would need to feed the Aux inputs on my
existing stereo/CD/DVD player in the car, while probably using some kind
of touch-screen for control.  I'm anticipating paying someone to do the
wiring.

Does anyone have any experience or suggestions?

Thanks,
Jon

Jonathan Ryan
Field Engineer, Avid Technology