Making a Video Hosting Server

I've got an old computer somewhere, and I want to make it into a server where I can host most of my video files...it's pretty slow at 533mhz and only 10 gb hdd with 256 ram.

Can someone tell me?

IM me: pyuke76 (aim)

are you trying to serve video just over http to websites or over the network to your computer or, are you trying to do something special with a windows media server or a Real Server?

http to websites

well, the amount of bandwidth to serve video content to websites is tremendous so, if you're planning to do this out of your house, the odds are that it won't work very well at all. Nevertheless, to set up to serve static video files can be done very simply over http just using a normal web server such as apache or IIS or any other. To install apache, for free, all you have to do is go to their website. The windows version in it's most basic form isn't hard to get going either.

moved to hosting

1. Install a decent linux distro (debian, gentoo, fedora to name a few)

2. Install thttpd on it

thttpd is not the most customizable or expandable http server, but it is definately very fast. I run it on a 200mhz,32MB ram, 1GB hdd box, and it serves up everyting (CGI, HTML, and images) almost isntantly.

Admittedly, I'm not serving up much other than HTML pages and CGI scritps (written in freepascal, staticly linked), and I'm only serving them to myself and a few friends. But it runs faster than apache ever did on the same box.

thttpd is ideal for an image server. I imagine it would be just as good at serving up videos, but I have never tested it for this purpose.