I have unused pc, wifi router, ipod touch at home.
I want to use this pc as media server, which streams the content to TVs, mini-compo sound system. I want the ipod touch to be used as remote control, to choose the video or songs to be played.
Any ideas how to do it? I dont mind buying inexpensive additional hardware to make it work.

Crap! pressing enter without editing the post subject.

Pretty sure iTunes will do what you want.

It acts like your media host, and you install the iTunes remote on the iPod Touch to tell it to play/stop/etc.

Except as I understand it, you then have to buy everything from the Apple store.  Oh, excuse me, they don't SELL you anything, you only get to RENT it for awhile.

iTunes can manage non-Apple media. I use it for my MP3 / MP4 library.

Here's what you should do -- buy an Apple TV unit. They're $99 and have wifi. Connect it to your TV. Use iTunes on any old PC, and from any AirPlay capable source (there is a module for doubletwist on Android) to push media to it. Problem solved elegantly, with very low power consumption, elegantly and completely.

When people do the homebrew media thing it ends up derelict and abandoned the overwhelming majority of the time.

Fair enough.  Good answer, DF, I withdraw my ignorant and poorly informed objections.

Seriously though the Apple TV box is a *crazy* value. I am extremely satisfied with it.

How good is iTunes about pulling its own metadata for torrented files that are just dumped into its library directory?

Dump into it's directory? That's not how it works. You have to import through iTunes, which will do a lossy format conversion that increases file size.

Right - you don't just drop files in - you have to import them into iTunes (option-O on a Mac, probably Ctrl-O on Windows).

It will scan the files for the mp3 ID tags so it can update it's internal metadata. And also scan the files for gapless playback.  It does not do any transcoding.

oh, well my solution just lets me drop files in. they don't have ID tags. They're usually named something like "the.avengers.2012.BluRay.rip.lol.xxx.avi". pulls backdrops and synopsis and credits and genera info that are interlinked and indexed.

itunes does not support many file formats, like APE and FLAC. Mp3 sucks when played in a home theater.

WD player handles more formats.

You can install a decent graphics card with HDMI and a sound card with SPIF output to use as HTPC. But unless it is a quiet machine it is not worth the efforts.

*You have to import through iTunes, which will do a lossy format conversion that increases file size.*

All of my files are either mp3 or mp4, both of which it deals with natively with no conversion. If your video is simply a wrapper around mp4/aac streams, most of the time you can almost just convert the wrapper with the streams left untouched.

I just looked at re-ripping my CDs in Apple Lossless.  It definitely sounds better, but still not identical to the original CD (loses a lot of dynamics and so is audibly compressed).  The file sizes are about 3x bigger than mp3 rips.

OS X/iTunes has no support for FLAC.

Ah, I think back to those days in the 1970's, when Audiophiles had access to .01% Total Harmonic Distortion, 40 Watt Stereo amplifiers were small, 100 watt and 250 watt per channel were higher end, getting 20 Hz to 20KHz with .01% THD was standard, getting 3-way speakers to do that from 40 Hz to 20K was the goal for $500 per pair low-end, $1500 Klipsch if you were really serious.  LP Records would get you 20 Hz to 20Khz, CD's with 44Khz 16-bit sampling weren't "good enough".  Koss Pro-4AA's for $100 were the top headphones.

Now, we have compression with loss, everyone plays their music into $10 ear-buds or $100 PC speakers.  I guess all the audiophiles have died, replaced with technophiles who don't know any better.

"It definitely sounds better, but still not identical to the original CD (loses a lot of dynamics and so is audibly compressed)."

So it isn't lossless?

When comparing the sound, you have to get the digital input to the same receiver.

If you output analog to the receiver, the result will be different, because each device's DAC is different.

You should be able to convert ALAC back to the exact same source WAV file. It has to be the same or it wouldn't be called lossless.

They can CALL it whatever the hell they want to CALL it.  If you can't get back the original signal, then it's not really "lossless", however they call it. 

And if you CAN get back the original signal, then it really IS "lossless" and what they call it matches reality.  But that's often not a given, and hardly ever when Sales is involved.

Which is not to say that the original signal hadn't been compromised already.

Thanks for that brilliant bit of insight, StH. My motorcycle is actually an SUV and my parakeet is really a tourniquet.

It's a lossless format that has been in play for years. I see no one saying that it isn't lossless, so I am quite firmly convinced that it is indeed lossless. Lossless only means lossless. It doesn't mean "sort of lossy".