Turn an old PC into a Mediacenter with XBMC Live

I've turned an old PC into Kid's Media Center and am ripping all our DVDs to save the Pingu, Sesame Street and Sendung mit der Maus DVDs from further scratches. This because already about a dozend of our disks are no longer playable - handling DVDs after playing in the sandbox probably was NOT what they had in mind when drafting the DVD hardware specs.

Using Windows XP and VLC, the slighly underpowered computer could not smoothly playing full resolution ripped DVDs, although it could play DVDs straight from the disk just fine.

I've tried a few media player softwares and had great success with XBMC Media Center. The project originally turns an XBox into a media player but is now also supported on Windows, Mac and Linux. On this hardware under Windows XP, it also did not play smoothly. However, there is a Linux distro custom-tailored for XBMC called XBMC Live. Running XBMC Live, lossless ripped DVD play just fine on the same hardware.

You can easily try XBMC by booting any PC from the Live CD Image, much like Knoppix. It can also be installed on a USB Stick if the computer supports booting from USB devices. In both cases, the harddrive (and any system on it) is not touched when using the Live CD or USB Stick. Unlike when booting from CD-R, settings can be preserved between boots on an USB Stick. You can download XBMC Live from this torrent or their download site. Write the ISO file to a CD-R, for example using ISO Recorder. To install, simply boot from the CD-R and choose the appropriate option at startup.

A few issues I encountered:

• For some settings, such as mounting additional external drives, you need to log in to a console (switch to tty1 using Ctrl-Alt-F1; switch back to the graphical console with Ctrl-Alt-F7). You can login as xbmc with same password. XBMC Live uses a reqular Ubuntu (9.4) Linux underneath, so it looks familiar for system admin tasks (or it's easy to find help using google).
  
• I had the problem that the sound was not loud enough - on some movies you could only hear it faintly when turning the speakers to the max. Using the command alsamixer from the command console, I could simply solve the problem by turning the volume up to eleven. Well, actually, the alsamixer controls go up to 100.
• Recognition of DVD information from imdb is mosly right (especially when naming the directories or files properly) but sometimes annoyingly wrong. Keeping TV series in directories separate from movies is a must to use the feature. However, things work just fine without turning on library mode too; it just doesn't look as flashy.

I'm using DVD Shrink (on a more powerful Windows XP box) to rip the DVDs to harddisk. I've set the quality so that most movies fit on a DVD-R, just in case I like to burn a DVD-R later. Ripping a DVD takes anywhere from 12 to 30 minutes, depending how full the DVD is (note it can have dual layers - up to about 8 GB). I mostly preserve all the DVD features (subtitles, language audio tracks, menus, extras etc.).

A neat side effect is the saved space - all the DVDs took up quite some space on shelves, and they can now go into a box for storage.