If you find yourself staring pitifully at a pile of metal, your old PC yellowed by dust, lying unused for months or and do not want to bother with movie codec issues, then read on. You can use any ancient hardware to the very latest to make it your very own jukebox, and with no additional expenses.

GeeXBox – Open Media Center

GeeXboX , the stand alone multimedia operating system comes to the rescue. This mini jukebox can be booted from a Live-CD or installed in a usb-disk or a hard disk. This speed at which it boots and the space it takes takes your breath away – just 8 seconds to boot in my Pentium III rig (256 MB RAM) and only 9MB as download and install size. Its minimum specs are mind-boggling as well it requires only an x86 class Pentium class processor of clock speed of 400 Mhz (It does well even at 300 Mhz PC) and recommended RAM only 64MB(32MB may be well though). Also the BIOS has to be able to boot CDs on startup and also requires a DVD reader in case you plan to watch DVDs.

It also has the ability to autodetect joystics and the remotes supplied with a TV-Tuner card and thus eliminate the need of a keyboard.

Since it uses the versatile MPlayer which can be considered as one of the less cpu-dependent movie players, thanks to the use of FFMpeg for decoding movies. However the DivX format can cause genuine hiccups for oldies as well.

It has diverse file handling and can play Video CDs and audio CDs without any sweat. It automatically mounts your hard-disk partitions as well so that you can navigate and play any video or audio in your hard disk. The great part is that GeeXboX comes equipped with DVD menu reading ability as well as direct playback of DVDs unlike so many other players.

It is also possible to play back network streams for SHOUTcast, WebRadios, WebTV or even RTP/RTSP streaming allowing you to watch any kind of network or broadband stream from your own GeeXboX hub.

Running off a live CD

• Download the GeeXboX ISO image here
• Reboot your computer, enter the BIOS setup and ensure that you’ve set CDROM as the first priority in the boot order.
• Insert the GeeXbox Live CD inside the CD tray.
• GeeXboX will start automatically, after few seconds the CDROM tray will automaticall eject the CD-ROM tray so you can take out the CD and close the CD-ROM tray.
• The Keyboard can be used for navigation.
• Choose ‘Open File’ from the main menu and navigate to various directories, play your media and enjoy.

My GeeXBox Experience

In spite of owner of a DVD reader, I was unable to play DVDs neither in my Ubuntu (in spite of codecs installed) nor in Windows. In both cases the video was choppy aqnd totally unacceptable. VCDs ran fine though. Perhaps my humble PC specifications was the answer. Tried everything including configuring the X-server in ubuntu but no avail.

When I came across GeeXbox, I immediately decided to give it a try and lo it played DVDs as well as DivX media without any hitch. It was fast.

By only changing few options it even managed to run DVD with menus and otherwise would run the movie directly immediately after it is inserted.

For testing purposes, I managed to collect large no of DVDs and a dual movie DVD from friends quite illegally actually. Before you sue me, I must mention that I destroyed them as soon as possible.

The dual-movie DVD did not play directly as expected nor the menus since it was not original, I navigated through it menus into the contents of cdrom and tried to play few files and lo it played the movie perfectly as well.

In additon it played VCDs, Audio CD as well as MP3s, mpeg videos as well. In all a great piece of gem – 5 star rating.

GeeXboX Options