Be Excellent To Each Other

Getting near to the end of my DVD ripping, so I'd best start thinking about how I'm going to use it.

At the moment, my PC has the hard drive with all of them on connected to it, with TVersity acting as the media server so that my blu-ray player, Xbox and PS3 can access it and play accordingly. However, this means the PC has to be on 24/7 which isn't ideal. When I move house, I'd like to streamline - what's the best way of going about it?

I have two TVs, so connecting the media storage to a set-top box is no good as that'll be limited to one TV.

I've been recommended Plex Media Server (and Media Center) as it fetches cover art etc. for me which is an absolute MUST, I want a nice looking front-end so I can choose movies based on their cover art if the mood strikes me

What's the best way of achieving what I want to achieve? Will Google's Chromecast present a Plex front-end (using the Plex app) or do I need to use an iPad or whatever to control it?

Are there any NAS enclosures that will allow me to connect to the drives over a Windows network share as opposed to using a stupid web file server or FTP?

I do it the other way around. My NAS contains all the media, and I have a couple of media PCs connected up to the TVs, one which is XBMC on a Lenovo mini PC, and the other is my old Boxee Box. The XBMC machine handles all the cover art etc...

I do have plex running, in case I want to access something from a mobile device, but I never use it.

I have a Thecus NAS in my attic and its all wired in via 1GB switches.

All my TV and films accessible to PC and Media players just via the network, I copy new things to the NAS via the PC.

For media I run Open Elec (XBMC), have XBMC on a JB Ipad as well but don't use this much.

If you have the budget get something decent like a Thecus, there are lots of cheaper NAS but you get cheap raid controllers on these.

With the cheaper ones the copy speeds can be 90% slower that higher end models, not an issue when doing 1 or 2 TV episodes but a pain when you have an entire collection to move onto one.

Not that I know off really. A NAS is designed to give your storage on your network, which would sort out the issue with your PC on all the time.

Depending on what NAS you buy you can get apps that install on it. I have a BT client running on one of mine.

Best thing would be to get a NAS on your network and get your stuff copied to it, then all you devices can see the media and you can stick the NAS in a cupboard.

This is a great little 2 drive NAS

http://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-ShareCen ... ywords=NAS

Got one for my parents and set up XBMC

You could get one of these and 2X 4TB drives for around £350, as I said in my other post the copy speed will not be fast though (around 10-12mb) but the play back over the network is fine, my dad has MKV films of 30GB on his that play ok

This is the NAS I have and it's pretty good, certainly much better than the Netgear I also have.

http://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/overview/DS413j

It shows up as either SMB, or AFP, or whatever you want really.

One of mine has just fallen on its arse.. again

Thecus are really helpful, but it always involves me sending the unit minus drives to Holland at my own expense

This time I will insist the send me a new DOM as that's the issue, it happened on my other one as soon as I took it out of the box

That looks pretty sweet. What is the Lenovo PC you have?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-IdeaCent ... enovo+q190

One of these.

That looks ace. Do you have XBMC running on it via Windows, or a custom boot or something?

I have the exact same one and have found it really good - however i'd never heard of plex so its just installed and building indexes for the stuff i have on there (which i normally just stream to the TV)

You can use Plex on it? Even better!

Yup, xbmc running on Windows 8.
The only issue is the fan is a bit noisy by default, so you really need to be running Windows on it to be able to use fanspeed so you can slow it down so that it becomes silent.

Found there is now (or may have been for a while) a Plex module for my Thecus

So installed it tonight

Have to say impressed with Plex. Doubt I will use it on the TV as XBMC is fine there (also my TV is not "Smart")

But its really nice on the IPads, only option for this before was to Jail Break and use XBMC

In the end I found that Plex (on the Thecus ) was not good at updating the library so I got board of it as I have XBMC already.

Now though it looks like Plex have a Thecus module on their site, before the module was only on the Thecus site.

So I might give it another go given that the fire TV stick has a Plex client

I've moved over to plex now, the home theatre client is pretty good these days.

Works really well with the Chromecast, too.

See, mine has just stopped working well with the Chromecast. I moved all my media over to a new NAS and now playback is all choppy, which is odd. It's fine through any other device (or the TV directly), but then I can't drive it with my phone

Have you set it to Direct Play and Direct Stream in the client?

Yup.

Hmm.

Which NAS? Are you running the Plex server on the NAS or on a different box?

Plex server is running off the same PC it always has. Read and write speeds from the NAS are great - like I said, everything else manages fine. The Chromecast just doesn't like it for some reason.

I should probably try restarting the routers.

Crowded wifi channel maybe?

Possibly. It never used to be an issue, though.

Are you standing on the invisible wifi wires?

Chromecast only supports 2.4 GHz, it's possible your other devices are all 5 GHz.

Hmm, maybe. So setting the router to only use 2.4Ghz would fix that?

Odd that it started acting up just as the new NAS was installed, though. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as the West Wing taught us.

You would expect that if your media is on your NAS then 5GHZ and 2.4GHZ devices would all be able to see and play it OK as they are all part of the same workgroup\network. Is the PC you are using for the media server LAN or wireless

I did recently see an issue with the bands when I bought a new DECT phone that allowed IOS devices to act as handsets, the phone would connect by default to 2.4GHZ and any IOS device on the 5GHZ would not see the DECT handset so wouldn't work.

No, I'm theorising that your 2.4 GHz network might be congested but your 5 GHz network is clear.

I can't see how it could be related, given that all your other Plex clients still play fine. But perhaps I'm missing something. It does seem like a bit of a coincidence.

Everything's wired apart from the Chromecast (and phones, obviously).

Sure, but the phones play fine.

Edit -- the TV is wired?

Yup.

Set mine up again this weekend, it still won't update the library automatically when I add something new to my NAS, I read something on their site that indicated this doesn't work for SMB, which I find odd as they are providing clients for Thecus and other Linux based devices.

Also there privacy page appears to say they log everything you watch and will share the info if law enforcement ask, again odd for something that came from an XBMC code fork which is primarily for watching downloaded content

https://plex.tv/legal

Stuck this on my NAS again at the weekend with the aim of seeing how it ran on the Xbox One

I bought a premium pass as I thought this was required, found out they made it free from the Xbox One on 16th December afterwards

Among some of the extra stuff you get with the premium is a superior music tagging service, so I set it off against a 1TB collection that was reasonable well tagged that I got off a guy a work. It took about 2 days to do it all, then I added my own stuff in. Another day doing that, I had to reboot the NAS as the CPU and RAM got stuck at 100%.

Now I have 150,000 tracks and I would say 90% of artwork and information was there first time, the errors are mostly classical music albums and other completions.

Next job is duplicate removal which I would estimate at 20% or more