Just something I threw together for a road trip, its cheaper than running a standard media server on normal hardware or a raspi, and does just the bare minimum for me and the guys to get entertainment on the road. Basically the same thing that most airlines use for inflight entertainment these days.
My goal was to keep it small and cheap (its also my first time working with one of these things) but I am almost done the big fancy polish update which will add much better file type support, and can even do higher quality HD video now, well soon in like a day or two when I post it lol. I am also working on a raspi 2w version for it though since the ARM board have some useful features!
I hadn't seen pirate box when I put it together, but someone recently forked my project to literally reserect piratebox! check it out on the github under forks.