What is Kenbushi?
a powerful Media Server with full-screen media control (like Apple TV) and integrated support for Quicktime and VLC (so plays avi, divx, H264, flash, etc.), built-in cross-platform file sharing, web server and data backup over LAN/Internet. Perfect for building your own home media server. Many home users, developers, media consultants and businesses use Kenbushi.
Wow. This looks like an amazing tool – but then don’t they all before you use them? 😉
I recommend the free ones! http://www.geexbox.org for a media centre that fits in 20 Megabytes and runs fast on old PCs and auto-configures for most TV-out cards. It just plays everything. You boot off a CD, it copies the OS to RAM, and ejects the CD. Its a complete linux OS that doesn’t have to write to your hard disk. Mine is networked to my desktop PC’s hard drives and all my RSS TV shows and radio podcasts.
The big free one is MythTV which requires some form of linux installed seperately, first. However MythTV will let you browse the web for streaming video and do the TiVo TV recording thing, and even VOIP phone on the TV. Lots of add-on modules. However it requires a PC with over 1.8 GHz CPU, and a hard disk big enough to record all your shows.