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. In a home setting, a media server acts as an aggregator of information: video, audio, photos, books, etc.
A media server can be a network-attached storage (NAS) device, a PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition or MediaPortal/MythTV, or a commercial web server that hosts media for a large website. In a home setting, it acts as an aggregator of various media types like video, audio, photos, and books.