Mr. Smith's Media Mibbles!

I'm pretty happy to have finally got somewhere with what's basically been a year-long project: turning an old PC I got given into a fully-fledged server and media centre. I knew I wanted to call it Pegasus because it's generally a cool name. I call my desktop Apollo and if I ever get a proper laptop I'll call it Deadalus, so maybe you'll see a running theme going on...

It's gone from a horrible beige case that I daren't take a picture of without stripping it down:

to a lovely, quiet, small black case I got for a bargain price of £27 from eBuyer. Being the techy person I am, I didn't think to take any pictures while I was installing the 1.4Ghz Duron motherboard, but here's one of the new silent fan I clipped on before the case arrived: (Click for larger)

It took a lot of fiddling, but eventually I managed to get it all nicely set up with Ubuntu Server, and all the usual apache/MySQL/PHP you have on a server. I then turned my attention towards mpd. It was easy to copy all my music to the internal RAID 0 array (Yes, don't kill me for using RAID0! It has an 80GB HD and a 40GB HD and this was the most useful way of using them.) and set up the mpd server so that I could pop to http://pegasus/music in any browser on my home network and make up a playlist, using the very nice RelaXXPlayer (http://relaxx.sourceforge.net/) The only problem was, running the sound through the TV was a little energy-wasting because there was no picture, but the LCD screen was still turned on. So I decided to utilise this and set up an X server with a visualisation!

About a week later, and after a lot of searching and deliberating, I gave up on the vis idea because a) all the programs with visualisations in need a keyboard/mouse to activate it, and b) The PC wasn't powerful enough for any particularly epic fullscreen visualisers anyway.
That was when I watched "The Stolen Earth" on TV, and had quite the brainwave! The BBC offer a free screensaver of the patterns that wiggle around Mr. Smith's screen in the Sarah Jane Adventures, and I think it looks über cool, so I decompiled the flash file and recoded the video to loop continuously while music was playing. Add in a web-controller VLC player and a load of TV programmes stored on disk, and it's my perfect idea of a media centre! (again, click to enlarge)

There's only a few little bits that need ironing out now:

• Videos don't smooth very well, because I had to use XVideo extension in VLC. They look a lot nicer with the OpenGL extension, but that runs really slowly due to the 16MB integrated graphics. If I use it a lot I might buy a dedicated AGP graphics card to quicken it up a bit.
• When it's starting up, it looks a tad unprofessional!
• I need to make a fancy script to automatically start the X server, VLC and the MPD OSD. Currently for some random reason I can't have VLC and the OSD in the same .xinitrc file, which is annoying.

Viva la technologie! Oh, and it's also a backup of anything I want, and it has a Firefly Streaming Media server to serve music anywhere in the world. I turned that off, though, because it was slowing everything else down. I don't leave it on 24/7 at the moment because the PSU gets rather warm, but that's another thing I'll look into replacing at the earliest opportunity. Then I can set every computer to share it's music library from there, which'll be awesome.

P.S. I tried to take a video of the Mr. Smith animation, but there's something wrong with my camera and it came out in a decidedly blue hue. :/ Anyway, all I did was sped it up to 200% to make it look more smooth (it was 12fps to start with).