The "PC Revolution" may be well behind us, but PCs continue to change how we interact and play with video and audio content. From PVR applications that turn TV content into digital video files, to storing an entire music CD collection on a single hard-drive, the PC still has a little revolution left in it after all. And when you add wireless network to the mix, things get really interesting.

In Part II of our Go Wireless series, we showed you how to deploy wireless clients throughout your house and get them all good signal quality. Wireless networks remain unfriendly places to stream media traffic, because all traffic is treated with the same urgency, an approach called "best effort." But with a few workarounds, you can give yourself a better chance of successful streaming.

At the core of this wireless wonderland there needs to be a repository, a media furnace (a.k.a. server) that holds and disseminates all of your media. But how beefy of a machine does this need to be? That answer depends on what tasks you expect this server to do. We'll help figure just out how much server your home network is going to need. Then we'll show you the right components to bring this machine to life.

The first question to ask is: what do you want this server to do? Do you currently plan to only serve up your music collection and still photos to machines around your house? Or are you looking to do video capture and streaming over your network? The answer to this last question is the key determinant to how much horsepower this server needs, since video is by far the most demanding media type to encode and deliver over a network.

If you don't need video services, then a more modest system will get the job done. You can also repurpose an older PC, and stick a big hard-drive in it to act as your primary media bucket. Something as modest as Pentium-III 800MHz system will be more than adequate for an audio/still image server, though you'll want at least 256MB of system memory if you're going to be running Windows XP on it. Linux is an option here as well, but most mainstream distros, when loaded up with X Windows, a decent number of software packages and system services will also run better with additional system memory.

There is future-proofing to consider here as well. You may not want to put streaming video on your network now, but what about six to twelve months from now? If it's something that may be in your future, then consider "shooting ahead of the duck." Beef up your server's components to have it ready for heavier future workloads. And appreciate that even if you're only serving up audio and still images for now, you have to rip those CDs to the server, and for that task a faster CPU should definitely be on your list. Another option here is to rip your CDs using the fastest machine on your network, then copying the ripped tracks over to the server. But for the file-copy you'll definitely want to use the wired side of your network.

Network Segmentation Options

The next area of concern is how to put this server on your network. There are basically three options: Put the server on the wireless net: Probably the least appealing option, because not only will wireless clients be hitting the server for streaming media and file I/O requests, so will your wired clients (via the Access Point). Put the server on both nets: This option is a good one, since wireless and wired clients will each access the server via their respective pipes. You can even bridge the two connections, though an access point effectively handles that task. However, the wireless hardware for the server will add about $70-80 of cost. Put the server on the wired net: This approach is the best and cheapest, and here's why: wired clients will access the server through a speedy 100Mbits/sec Ethernet pipe. Wireless clients will (after bridging onto the wired network via the AP) also use this same fat pipe to access data on the server. In addition, if wired clients need to say, copy files from the server, this additional I/O won't consume precious wireless bandwidth, and shouldn't cause trouble for media streams already in flight. One way to give streaming media is best chance for success on a wireless network is to reduce or eliminate all other traffic on the air. By having the server on the wired network, all wireless clients will access it via the AP, and wired clients won't add any traffic on the wireless network. Appreciate that this design is the best way to accommodate streaming media over wireless, but it doesn't guarantee a hiccup-free media experience. But if the human coprocessor (that's you) provides the media streams with as much of a clean transmission path as possible, the odds for success increase considerably.