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Ask Slashdot: Suggestions For a Simple Media Server?
rueger writes "We live and breathe Netflix, but sometimes want to watch programs downloaded from the 'net. I've been carrying them downstairs on a USB stick, but would prefer to run a small media server on my Mint Linux box. As usual, I thought this would be simple. Install a package on my PC, and use our Netgear NeoTV Max box to play stuff off of the server. Plex was highly recommended, and installed easily, but will see some .mkv files, but not others, for no obvious reason. The one file that does show up plays fine, except that subtitles don't work. And it completely refuses to see the partition full of music. A quick tour of the Plex forums suggests that making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend. Serviio looked good too, and 'sees' my music, and sees the movie folders that Plex couldn't, but won't show the actual .mkv files. And again, it looks like configuring the thing could consume half of my life. So I'm asking: is there a fairly simple, works-right-out-of-the-box, fairly resource friendly media server that will just allow me to play movies that I download without a lot of headaches? (One obvious issue is that movies and TV shows downloaded can be in a any of a dozen formats. I'd love it if the server dealt with that. I'm also open to suggestions for a Roku style box that does Netflix well, but which will also play nicely with a media server. And if any or all of these things can also let me play streaming video off the web (like BBC iPlayer content), I'll be in heaven.)"
I use Universal Media Server on OS X, which is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. It works well with our WD HD TV Live and various Samsung TV and DVR devices. But the first thing to do would probably be to get the Netgear device the boot.
I had a brief look on the product page and couldn't find a clear answer if it supports DLNA or not, but it should do. So maybe look at something nice and simple such as MiniDLNA which was recently renamed to ReadyMedia apparently.
XBMC is your go-to media server software.
Install it, set the path for your content and it'll take care of the rest.
Subtitles can even be setup to be downloaded automatically.
xbmc.org
- Witticism is an epitaph on the death of a feeling
Four letters: XBMC ....Strongly recommended, plays pretty much anything and also has loads of add-ons.
XBMC but on a PC might be annoying? Also take a look at PS3 Media Server - I used to use it before moving to a NAS, works really well
The Western Digital TV live box is cheap and it plays almost any reasonable media file (except flv) you'd throw at it. Certainly the ones prevalent on internet. It can access a shared folder on your computer so you don't have to walk around with that stick anymore. To be fair, I only use it for downloaded video files. For music and photo I have an Apple TV, I love its GUI and easy integration in our Mac/IOS based home.
I plug my laptop into the TV and play stuff from my storage array.
If I wanted some sort of dedicated device, I'd put XBMC on a Raspberry Pi, point it at my array, and control it with my phone, tablet, or laptop.
The problems you've found come not from the server, but from the netgear box you are using. Apparently, it only supports USB or DLNA to play your local content, and that is a huge limitation. Should it support some other ways to access your content, you could play whatever you wanted; for example, windows networking, that is native in windows machines and easily incorporated into linux machines via the samba package and (I think) also in OSX machines. That way, anything in your computer could be accessed from the client machine just by locally sharing the path where you store it.
So, really, the best solution would be to have a more capable box in your TV (a XBMC box will be probably the best solution, although it can take some time to configure everything properly, specially if you want just one box and so XBMC need to take care of netflix etc to get rid of the netgear device).
If you do not want to add a new box to the TV and keep only your actual netgear client machine, you must then bend everything else to cope with its limitations, in this case you should look for a capable DLNA server that plays nice both with your actual content (format, naming convention, etc) and also with the special needs of the NeoTV Max, whatever they are; plex is one possibility, and there are others, but probably none will be at the same time good enough, cheap enough and easy enough for your purposes. But the main culprit is the less-than-capable box in your TV: local windows sharing should be more than enough.
"making this work would take more hours than I'm prepared to spend."
There is no turn key no work involved media server out there. you can try a standard NAS and build yourself a XBMC playback box, but you can not buy one.
You will have to invest an entire weekend if you are a novice, or an entire saturday if you are an expert to do what you want. You had better prepare to spend some hours on this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I use Mediatomb from my Linux Mint box. If I recall correctly, I had to edit a conf file to get it to work with my PS3, but I don't think it was too involved to set up.
Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
I've seen several comments for Plex and XMBC, both of which don't require one to "break out a circuit board and build their own solution." In the case of Plex, you don't have to 'break out a keyboard every time they want to watch a movie," either. In the case of Android, WP8, and IOS there are apps that can be downloaded that will act as a remote for the Plex Home Theater (which would be installed on a PC connected to your TV). Not everyone may want to sit down and use their phone/tablet to start a movie, but I don't see it as being too different from using a normal TV/media player remote...
bork bork bork!
I use it for all my files, media or otherwise. I can go on and on but this works for me. Run it as a VM if you have no extra hardware layin around.
Backend: commodity Pentium 4 2.6GHz PC (that I was given) with 2TB RAID & laptop with XBMC and 11TB USB storage->Softmodded XBox Crystal Rev. 1.1, 20GB HDD (£15 at good gaming stores), XBMC->TV
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'll bite. I'll even be so kind as to preface this with I am simply a user of this product. Shillflame me all you want ...
My brother got me a Chromecast for Xmas. It's a pretty sweet gift for a brother because he knows I wouldn't buy one for myself, and yet they're only $35.
I tried it out, and was initially pretty disappointed. Being locked in to only being able to cast Chrome tabbed content felt like a gross artificial limitation. I figured it was just the was it was gonna be.
I found some workarounds by using remote desktop to remote into your own desktop inside a tab so you could then cast it to the TV. Phew. That was a ridiculous waste of effort along the lines of building a Java VM inside Javascript.
Then I discovered (I never saw it before ... not that it wasn't there, just never saw it) the little arrow icon that gives you an option to "Cast Desktop". From then it was on. I can now just put the laptop on full screen and hit play.
The tradeoff for not having to deal with audio cables is that you do need to have a good WiFi network to get the best performance. Here's my setup:
- Thinkpad g wifi
- custom 4core 16gb workstation upstairs serving media files
- workstation gets internet from 4g hotspot via USB
- hotspot as router, but only g wifi
So my laptop reads files over the g wifi >> shitty low power hotspot router >> USB >> spinning SATA II disk >> back to the laptop which then streams it back over the hotspot router to the Chromecast device which is once again another trip back downstairs.
If I leave my laptop just a few feet in the other room it works perfect. No hiccups. If I keep it near the TV it gets choppy every 3-5 minutes.
So like I said, if you have a good network, expect it to work at least better than that.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Just expose the directory as a "Windows Share" and any client on the network should be able to see it.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Ah, very helpful. Use a computer. I bet he never thought of that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
With sickbeard and couchpotato to rename the media nicely into folders and download meta-data. Be careful with those though. If there are two files they think are the same, they'll delete one without warning.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Miro is a free Cross Platform media manager and has built-in library streaming and video converter. Just put in RSS feeds or have it monitor folders.
http://www.getmiro.com/
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Someone has a new hammer and every problem is looking like nail...
Come on, it's 2014: media streaming is not a "problem" anymore.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
As far as i'm concerned, XBMC is pretty much the only way to go here. I keep my media files (Movies, TV, Music) on a terabyte drive in my first generation Mac Pro and samba share them gigabit to a Zotac id41 running Openelec. Openelec is an appliance-like Linux distribution that installs quickly and does nothing other than run XBMC (there's no "desktop" except XBMC; you can control it via ssh). I tried Serviio, and a couple of streaming servers, but they don't always understand what a file is supposed to do and choke on it. Samba just shares files and lets the remote machine figure them out. XBMC figures everything out that I've sent it so far; it has a host of plug-ins (what they call "add ons") including one for the BBC iPlayer, and for the ITV player, and for Hulu and you can even control rtorrent from one of them. For the Beeb and ITV I use Witopia's VPN service which can be invoked from Openelec's command line if you know what you're about. Plays 1080p nicely on my 50", all sorts of 5.1 audio goes through a semi-decent Pioneer amp. Openelec is not for dedicated Linux tinkerers. I set the Zotac up originally with Arch Linux because, you know, "I'm a geek, uh huh, uh huh" and it was a huge mistake because I was updating the damned thing every 20 minutes the way Arch people do, and I put a desktop on it and installed browsers and so forth thinking that I'd have a neat fully blown computer there in my living room and I could surf and check my email -- fahgeddaboudit! It's an HTPC only these days, plays music and video. Those Zotacs are powerful little machines though. I have a friend in town does the same thing with a Pi.
Doh.
Just buy a NAS from Synology and be done with it. It's simple to set up, has an attractive web front end and supports DLNA, SMB and other ways you might want to stream content.
Really? While some folks have a few problems installing XBMC just like any software, for the most part it works without a hitch. I have installed XBMC on multiple windows machines, and Ubuntu machine, and multiple OpenELEC installations. The only time it didn't "just work" was a Rasberry-Pi. And in that case it was working correctly with a little settings manipulation.
I can't speak for PLEX, but I rarely see significant problems on the forums related to simple setup, and they have a huge user base.
Plex Media Server for the backend and Roku 3 players.
Nothing is 100%. Plex is pretty close. Other than that, build a PC and use Mobile Mouse.
Well, the OP seems to be having a problem with it. Media streaming is kinda in an in between point right now, lots of solutions for people who like to tinker, and some good solutions for people who just want to pay for a centrally administered service. The stuff in between however is rather spotty and while every project and company likes to claim how easy and effective their solution is, sorting through the claims and finding one that gets the specific use case done with minimal hassle is non trivial.
In fairness, I use a Raspberry Pi myself however I use it as an XBMC machine plugged into my TV, rather than the media server. I let it access the files directly, via an NFS share and it works incredibly well. It can also use SMB if you're a windows user (and in fact, I'm running a Windows server, but since it has NFS support and that has a lower overhead, that's what I use), as well as various other protocols - and there's a plex plugin for it.
The OP isn't prepared to put some arbitrary hours in to getting his current setup working and if he values his time, dropping $35 on a PI seems like a reasonable option to me as it can be setup in just a few mins. It's literally a case of sticking the RaspBMC image onto an SD card, plugging it in and when XBMC boots, telling it which paths to scan for media.
They're cool little devices to have anyway and using XBMC on it means he doesn't have to run anything special on his existing Linux box.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Well thanks for your references to the cheap, elegant, well-documented and functional solutions that already exist. I find those really helpful.
Oh wait, I don't because they don't exist.
Really? Funny. I thought that the WDTV Live! I bought was pretty cheap, all things considered. It does exactly what he wants (to replace the Netgear box he currently has), and it can play off network-mounted file shares, meaning that he doesn't actually have to install any packages on his Mint box at all, just tell it to share the folder in question by Samba.
Unless you think that setting up a Samba share is an unsolved problem?
Didn't experience any such problems. I am playing large avi over smb all the time.
Another happy WDTV Live user here. I have this exact model, purchased in November 2011:
www.amazon.com/Live-Media-Player-Wi-fi-1080p/dp/B005KOZNBW/ref=sr_1_1
Just set up a SMB or NFS share on any computer you want, and this device will play ANYTHING you can throw at it (including flv, at least in my experience). Has 100Mb ethernet, N wifi, HDMI out, optical out, USB port, and a remote.
It will talk to a "media server" if you really want it to (DLNA, etc), but I've found a simple file share is the way to go.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I've only thrown .mkv files at Plex, since that's the container all the pirates seem to use for movies (I have no idea why, and I've not bothered to look into it).
It's because MKV isn't proprietary, is in active development, and was designed from the ground up to be able to contain completely arbitrary data, so even an "unsupported" format can be stored inside it as just a binary blob.
Add in the fact that it has direct support for nearly every codec in use today, plus the tools that can understand those formats enough to extract every bit of metadata along with the content, and you have the only reasonable container for movies.
DLNA is not a standard. if it will not play off of a SMB share it is not worth buying. I have seen more things fail with DNLA than anything else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
To me I wanted a solution that "just worked" for everyone in the family. That included me not wanting to have to compile anything or modify scripts, and the interface had to look polished hence running VLC isn't a solution for me.
I've got a 2010 mac mini with an external nas hooked up to my TV. I've got over a hundred movies ripped and thousands of mp3s and a few dozen tv shows. I put them into to root folders "Movies", "music" and "TV Shows". I pick the right scanner for each (30 seconds worth of effort). If I wanted I could store the music in iTunes and plex can retrieve it from there.
As long as you've got the files named something useful (I use the movie's name and year of release in the filename rather than "ROTJ.mov"). Only issues are with titles that are a bit out there like concert DVDs, and for those very few I just manually correct it. (5 min of work).
The GUI for plex is optimized for a remote control If you've got the silver apple remote this is perfect (the old white plastic one didn't have enough buttons). Or just use the iphone/android app instead. I do have an IR keyboard if I need to do something on the mac.
No kidding. Set up a file server with NFS and use an Intel NUC at the TV installed with xbmc (and/or mythtv.) Intel themselves has instructions for setting up their NUC with xbmc using Linux Mint. The newer NUCs even have an IR receiver built in so all you need is a MCE remote (or a Harmony) and you're set.