Pushing Audio or A/V from an old Xserve

Question

I want to run iTunes on my G4 xserve and push the music through to my stereo. Possibly do the same thing for video content residing on the drives. It appears that I would need some sort of doohickey converting Firewire to the three A/V RCA jacks. Does such exist and if so, who makes it? Could the original USB handle streaming audio across it or is that too slow. Didn't Griffin make some kind of USB to audio doohickey a few years back?
Or is there a different way to get A/V out without springing for some kind of board?
And if I want to play music AND send the video/audio from a movie to a different output simultaneously, THAT would probably need an extra board?

Answer 1

I think an Xserve G4 is probably the hardest machine you could choose to try and do this job.
Firewire is a SCSI out that only transports data so an "doohickey" would need to do Digital to Analog conversion and that's assuming you can get an audio and/or video player that somehow targets the firewire as an output because you can't do it on a system level. All the system can do is attempt to transport a file itself - like an mp3 - out through the firewire it doesn't stream the data from the file sequentially at it.
I think the only hope you have would be to install a video card and an audio card into the PCI/AGP slots and that would be a challenge. The video cards that worked with the AGP slot were well documented and you could probably find one of those although you would might probably need to convert the video out to analog depending on your TV inputs. (RCA inputs are analog.) The number of audio cards with drivers for the Mac then was low but finding a an old-school PCI card with Mac drivers to output audio seems unlikely. There were probably video cards with analog RCA outs and TV tuners but I don't remember any of them having Mac drivers.
I think this is a square peg and round hole problem. This is a trivial task for certain models of computers (even very cheap ones) but is huge task for Xserve especially an old one. To get this working you will need to research, find and the get working a series of cards and converters and then you're still stuck with an Xserve within cables length of your TV and stereo. I'd look into buying an older Mac Mini that has the outs you want on it and attaching your media on a firewire drive. It will be easier, way quieter in your media room and maybe even cheaper.
Sorry, my $.02,
=Tod