Car Media Center

[phenixdragon]

So here I am wishing I had a system in my new (well new to me) 88 Mustang GT Convert. as it was Sunny and nice in Seattle the past week. But the problem with having the car I do (which btw has a wide body fiberglass wide body and lots of other mods to it so it's pretty sweet) is that I have no tunes in this ride at all while my 98 Cutlass I spent a tone of money into the system but blew up the motor a few months back and am waiting for a cheap used donor car to pop up.

So my original plan was to have a custom box built for the rear and being a convert, a lot of cutting and piping needs to be run through the back seat as the top absorbs a lot of sound. With that I am thinking of at least for now dropping my box and subs from my other car into the back seat as I am looking at thousands for custom setup for the rear.

So I was thinking OK I need a deck as I already have the speaker. But for now I don’t want to spend too much on a deck that I plan on replacing down the road with a nice DVD player and the works.

Which THAT got me thinking, why don't I buy maybe a touch screen LCD running Windows and use that for playing music, DVDs, recorded TV and whatever as this is being transferred into a show car that will be a supper car pushing at laest 500hp+ naturally, and I think on ethanol.

Anyway, I got into reading about how MSFT is like nearly completed on their CE running in a car that can handle this, TI is working on a system too that includes WiFi to sync up musc, media files and whatever.

So my question is this, does anyone know any gear that already does this? I am basically looking to sync up DRM music (Yahoo Music! subscription rocks yo!) and possible media files. I figure I could run an ITX setup and just have a long video cable up front and like a USB DVD drive mounted up front somewhere.

So what I am looking for is either a simple deck that can support DRM music, which I think isn’t out there yet, or a way to run Windows or a CE type device.

[David Lawrance]

http://www.mp3car.com/ has some very good resources.

[IVB]

Make sure to check out the mp3 car forums. There's some straight-up gifted folks on that site.

That's where i got the idea for putting a Fujitsu 3400 in my house as a cheap wallmount tablet PC. It's $200 on eBay, and runs W2K [or XP but I wouldn't recommend that]. I actually bought mine off one of those guys.