Hi. A plan is to setup music player, able to play FLAC, WMA lossless & MP3 etc., out of old PowerBook G4 or some Windows notebook - have few laying around. Usage will be quite simple and limited - rip available CDs' in FLAC and keep classified by artists, albums, genre - pretty much like FrontRow in Mac. Also it could play DVD video.

But it has to be STUPID SIMPLE. I want to build it for mom to keep her favorite songs and able to run some rented DVDs'. It has to boot as fast as possible. It has to load into home screen ready to play music or video. It has to be silent. It has to have good audio output. It has to have as less features as possible. It has to beable to retrive album info & art from the internet. Oh, and it has to be able to read/write japanese.

Ideally Sooloos seams perfect, or SqueezeBox etc.. But I want to built it from ground up. Arduino builds look nice, but I don't know much of them and will be time-consuming. So if you have any guides, ideas, your own builds to up - please, post here.

Cheers.