I am very close to moving into my own place (apartment) and will finally have no roommates. I am wanting XBMC in my bedroom and living. I currently just have one xbmc box. I have a Panasonic plasma (bedroom) and an Epson 8350 (living room). I am wanting to move to a SFF box for both of these that hold just xbmc and have all the media served from something else. I was thinking Server2012. Has anyone done this and could guide me in what i should purchase. For the the two separate rooms I was thinking ill just get NUCS with a small msata drive. But for the server I was wondering what would be the best OS, is server 2012 the best or is there a better option? I would like the the main box to update the library and push out updates to the nucs (if possible)
You have an xbmc machine already, you can still use that.
What you are wanting to set up is very common. I use Linux on my server, but windows can work too. More expensive and not a real server OS of course.
Are you saying to use the current machine i have for the server parts, i could, i was just looking for all new, its an old AMD processor about 5 years now.
A 5 year old amd is fine for a server, but newer will give you more power while using less electricity.
I'm doing something similar. I'm hardware smart and software dumb so to say. I bought an Synology DS214 and am pretty darn happy with it. Currently using it with just one XBMC but a second will be coming shortly. There are several guides for getting mysql working to keep the library in sync with multiple systems.
For what it's worth, my setup is as follows:
2 * Raspberry Pi (1 in the living room and 1 in the bedroom) both running Raspbmc (XBMX), both connected via WiFi
1* HP MicroServer G7 with 8TB of storage and 8gb RAM running Ubuntu 14.04
The server shares media via Samba and it also contains my shared MySQL library.
I haven't tracked the spend but thinking about it now, excluding the hard drives, the setup cost just over £200