Lately, my wife and I have been watching 24 season 5. I have been downloading the episodes via torrent, burning them to DVD and then watching them. The last several episodes have had problems with the audio becoming out of sync with the video. This turns out to be a problem with my DVD burning software (NERO).
I have had an extra PC sitting around that I wanted to hook up as a fileserver/gameserver/whatever using linux.
Well last night was the night. I had downloaded and burned an ISO of GeeXboX
. This is a linux distribution wrapped around mplayer, a linux media player. It works pretty well. My pc happened to have a video card with TV out, so I just plugged it into the TV, stuck in the CD and it booted just fine. I put the avi files on a usb stick and it was able to play them from there. This weekend Ill hook it into our network, so I can just transfer the files over the net. I may also get a new sound card that has optical out that can hook into my receiver and then a remote control. It is pretty nice!