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Home Entertainment - Plex and NAS

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    Home Entertainment - Plex and NAS

    Hi all,

    Been looking for a few days to put together a new home entertainment / backup / own cloud system. Have pulled an old case and a load of hard drives together and have just ordered a new mobo, RAM and processor.

    I really like the look of Plex - anyone using it?

    FreeNAS also has a lot of interesting features. Anyone used the two together on the same box?

    #2
    Originally posted by administrator View Post
    Hi all,

    Been looking for a few days to put together a new home entertainment / backup / own cloud system. Have pulled an old case and a load of hard drives together and have just ordered a new mobo, RAM and processor.

    I really like the look of Plex - anyone using it?

    FreeNAS also has a lot of interesting features. Anyone used the two together on the same box?
    Use it at home with a Synology NAS - works a treat (although the app for the Samsung TV is buggy) and I like the way content is decoded on the media server Vs something like XBMC which essentially forwards the content (and requires the target machine to decode on the fly).

    Comment


      #3
      Yeah been using XBMC for a good few years and really like it but we have an array of devices in the house including some iPads and I could not find a nice way to stream to them and also a lot of the old media is in avi format so I can't even push vids to the macbook and watch them direct. Hoping Plex will sort a good few of these issues.

      Saw that some native NAS boxes have struggled, especially transcoding 1080p files so have opted for i5 proc and more than enough RAM so should be able to provide several streams without it overloading. The Plexpass @ $150 or whatever looks interesting too. Not looked at home entertainment stuff for ages - my next questions will mainly be regarding sound bars and sonus speakers

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        #4
        oplayerhd app on iPad will stream an AVI from a NAS

        Comment


          #5
          Originally posted by administrator View Post
          FreeNAS also has a lot of interesting features. Anyone used the two together on the same box?
          Yep - doddle to set up. Even you could manage it

          I haven't managed to get it to connect outside the home network for streaming around the world, though - I tried once, managed to stop everything else connecting to the internet, so gave up.
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            #6
            I have used Plex for a few years and love it! My only real issue is choosing a decent player, but since there is now an app for the xbox one, I don't really have to worry.

            I am also hearding some really interesting things with the Google Chromecast dongle. You can play all your media directly to your TV, and it is only £30.
            Kind Regards,

            Paul

            Comment


              #7
              Originally posted by slice16 View Post
              I have used Plex for a few years and love it! My only real issue is choosing a decent player, but since there is now an app for the xbox one, I don't really have to worry.

              I am also hearding some really interesting things with the Google Chromecast dongle. You can play all your media directly to your TV, and it is only £30.
              I use a NowTV box from Sky with RARPlex on it. Cost £10 for a pretty good Plex player. There are other Plex channels you can install on the NowTV box, but the standard one had a nasty habit of cutting off the last 3 minutes of some files because it got a corrupt signal that said it had finished playing.
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                #8
                I've been using Plex for a while now and love it - we dont watch any terrestrial / sat anymore.

                My setup is the PC as the server - just tend to leave it running, it is low power anyway.

                For the TV client - I use a rasplex box - £25 and it's powered from the TV USB port. I like this as it is ethernet cabled into the home network which you need for some of the bigger HD files.

                All our apple devices have the plex app so can stream from it.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by administrator View Post
                  Yeah been using XBMC for a good few years and really like it but we have an array of devices in the house including some iPads and I could not find a nice way to stream to them and also a lot of the old media is in avi format so I can't even push vids to the macbook and watch them direct. Hoping Plex will sort a good few of these issues.

                  Saw that some native NAS boxes have struggled, especially transcoding 1080p files so have opted for i5 proc and more than enough RAM so should be able to provide several streams without it overloading. The Plexpass @ $150 or whatever looks interesting too. Not looked at home entertainment stuff for ages - my next questions will mainly be regarding sound bars and sonus speakers
                  Do you mean SONAS? I have a few and love them!
                  Originally posted by Stevie Wonder Boy
                  I can't see any way to do it can you please advise?

                  I want my account deleted and all of my information removed, I want to invoke my right to be forgotten.

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                    #10
                    I've also used XBMC for years and switched to Plex soon after they've forked.
                    I now have lifetime PlexPass so I can sync my media to my devices (phone, iPad) even when I'm not at home.

                    The server runs on a pretty decent PC so it can do any transcoding in realtime easily, if necessary and goes back to low-power idle most of the time.
                    I use windows Storage Spaces with mirroring, which means it's pretty flexible in terms of adding more disk or disk space.
                    Mirror mode (Raid-0) is not as safe as parity (Raid-5), but much easier to recover from - if one disk fails - the other appears just like a regular single drive. You also get double read performance, which is nice.
                    If both disks fail at the same time, you're screwed, but it's mostly music and video content that I can recover quite easily anyway...

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