Since these transmissions are already digital, they do not need to be encoded.

In most of the rest of the world, DVB-T is the accepted standard. In North America and in South Korea, the ATSC standard is used. Digital TV tuner cards take input from broadcast digital TV. This encoding can be done with software running on the Media server computer or by hardware on the TV tuner card. This analog video then needs to be encoded in digital format to be stored on the media server. Analog TV tuner cards can capture video from analog broadcast TV and output from cable/satellite set top boxes. This is done with specialized hardware such as TV tuner cards. Many media servers also have the ability to capture media. However, a RAID configuration may be used to prevent loss of the media files due to disk failure as well. A RAID array may be used to create a large amount of storage, though it is generally not necessary in a home media server to use a RAID array that gives a performance increase because current home network transfer speeds are slower than that of most current hard drives. Depending on the uses and applications that it runs, a media server may require large amounts of RAM, or a powerful multicore CPU. The only requirement for a media server is a method of storing media and a network connection with enough bandwidth to allow access to that media. It may also be used to run special applications that allow the user(s) to access the media from a remote location via the internet. Access to these is then available from a central location. These different types of media (whether they originated on DVD, CD, digital camera, or in physical form) are stored on the media server's hard drive. In a home setting, a media server acts as an aggregator of information: video, audio, photos, books, etc. It may be a NAS drive, a home theater PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition, MediaPortal or MythTV, or a commercial web server that hosts media for a large web site.

This definition is vague, and can allow several different devices to be called media servers. 4 Media servers in performance environmentsīy definition, a media server is a device that simply stores and shares media.3 Home theater PC packages with server capabilities.

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