Hi, I'm Ben.
I'm the fella that wrote MediaCentre.
The most important thing you need to know about me as a person (well, for this project anyway) is that I've got a Mac, a PC, and a Linux computer. And I like them all for various reasons.
I've also got a fair few media files that I want to see from any of my computers.
Oh, yeah, I'm also quite lazy (and I don't want to sacrifice one of my computers and change its operating system and spend 3 days of my life setting it up).

I wanted an application I can drop onto my computer, tell it where to get media files from and watch movies on any platform damn it!

And something like that doesn't exist (I looked for a fairly long time - the closest was the Wii Media Center X project thingey) so I wrote one.
MediaCentre aims to be a platform-independent, easy-to-use, standalone web server that can stream your movies, films, and photos from your home PC to wherever you're connected.

MediaCentre is built upon the OpenSource RED5 flash streaming server.
What does all that mean in lovely plain English?

Basically, when you click on the little progress bar of your movie or music, it moves to that bit.
It also lets you view your movie or music file a little piece at a time (so you don't have to wait ages for it all to download)

The good news is that the first cut of the server is ready, and can be downloaded from those nice folks at SourceForge at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mediacentre/

Oooh, yeah, MediaCentre unashamedly works best using firefox which, co-incidentally also works on all 3 platforms.