Digital Trends

Serve or play your media

Another great use for an older computer is as a Home Theater PC (HTPC) or a media server.

An HTPC is a computer configured specifically to allow you to play your media (music, movies and images) on regular home-theater components like stereos, TVs and multimedia projectors. Since an HTPC is only being used to play a few file types and that's it, it can be a stripped down operating system and can be set up to run very efficiently. There are Linux distributions created specifically to be HTPCs, or you can just use a version of Windows.

Many video cards have S-Video out and can easily be hooked up to a TV. An HTPC is basically future-proof and the image and audio quality can rival or be better than that of expensive home-theater components. Websites such as HTPCnews.com and MyHtpc.net can give you more information on how to proceed with an HTPC, or ask around on the forums on Digital Trends. One great program to check out is Snapstream. It is a multimedia front-end that allows you to easily setup an HTPC to record TV and play media.

There is also an open-source media server application that works with all platforms, called VideoLan. VideoLan can be used to stream media to computers or HTPCs throughout your network.

If you don't need a media player, you could use your old hardware to serve that media to your devices. We've compiled an extensive list of "Networked Media Devices" in our forums and there are many similar products to be announced in the next few months. These devices can hook up to your TV and/or audio components and play media that is stored remotely on your network. These devices all come with their own server software that can run on many different platforms.

You don't even need a wired network because many of these products, such as the Slim Devices Squeezebox and the Creative Sound Blaster Wireless Music player, support wireless networks.

Make a dedicated media station

You may do more than just view and listen to media. You may want to create media. An old computer can be quite useful for this too.

If you have a collection of home videos that you've been meaning to digitize and put on DVD, this is the perfect opportunity for that. Many people procrastinate doing this because it can be so time consuming, and can tie up your computer for hours. With a spare computer, you can let it rip, edit, compile and burn your videos without worrying how long it takes. So it may take a few hours longer than your main system – you can let it run overnight and not worry about it. You can capture, edit and burn videos with many Linux, Windows and Mac applications.

You can do the same with music. If you have a large collection of CDs and would like to burn them to MP3, you can turn this old PC into a dedicated ripping machine. So what if it takes a few minutes longer per CD than your main rig? I'm a big fan of the EAC (Exact Audio Copy) and LAME encoder tandem.

The Linux equivalents table is a great Web resource for finding open-source solutions for all computing projects.