Home media server solution

[mjwilson]

I have a NAS+RAID thingie, which I used a bit for backups and streaming media files onto the telly. But it's enormously obsolete now, network transfer is over a protocol so old and insecure that nothing supports it, and it has a user interface powered by Java applets.

So what's the modern thing that replaces this? I know there are still NAS+RAIDs but they might be a bit overpowered. Can I just get a big old USB drive and plug it into the telly these days? (I have an Android TV for my sins.) I know there's Plex and Kodi and stuff, but do these run on your PC or something?

[Sebastian Cobb]

The most modern solution is a Synology NAS. It's basically a low powered pc with an intel chipset. They can run plex or jellyfin in docker and can hardware transcode tricky files as well I think. Some are better at that than others, they also do ones meant for CCTV that are more geared for video processing but you probably don't need to go that far.
nas
Some tv's will support direct connection, but how well you get on depends on how well the tv's in-built media player is and some are more fussy with files than others. You could also get something like a Nvidia Shield and plug a box into that, it'll also work as a plex server. Or even a raspberry pi with a big drive hooked up to it and kodi (distributions like OSMC or OPENELEC do this pre-installed).

I myself am running something a bit like a DIY nas, it's a low-powered pc board with a load of sata ports, but I've complicated it a bit by installing proxmox virtualisation host on it, and having a nas vm and a separate 'services' vm that does Jellyfin (in docker, with hardware transcoding due to gpu passthrough) and some other stuff (sonarr/radarr/torrenting etc).

[Memorex MP3]

I've a pi 4 (£55) with a 4tb western digital portable hard drive (€55) connected to and powered through it running plex

Have an aluminum case on it so don't even use a fan. It can get pretty warm but never dangerously so. Use a very short wire and the drive has close to the same width and depth as the pi which means it's all in a fairly compact cube (I've some hacky crap to space them a bit and let some air in, not sure it's needed or helps but it eases my concerns)
Tend to directly torrent stuff on it and back up the lot every few weeks


Caveats:
- Anything over 1080p and it has issues
- ideally you should avoid needing to convert media on the fly too (Firefox is much worse for this than Chrome, I think?)
- if you plug in anything else at all that draws power while reading from the drive it can crash the hard drive

Fully aware this is a bit of a shit solution but it uses very very little power, takes up hardly any space and does as much as I need

One really stupid thing I done at the start was rename tons of films to have more readable file names, naturally plex was much better at parsing those torrent file names

[touchingcloth]

I do pretty much the same thing as @Memorex MP3, except I run the Plex server on my laptop so it's only available when it's powered up.

I thought about giving a Pi a go, but we have Mac and Windows at home and so the only filesystem compatible natively with both and that allows for files larger than 4GB is exFAT, which isn't journalled and so crashes would potentially lose a lot of data, which I have backed up but really can't be fucked with having to restore it particularly frequently given how regularly we have power cuts. I guess I could do stuff like torrent from my laptop to a share hosted by the Pi, but, eh, balls to that.

The Nvidia Shield thing @Sebastian Cobb mentions is essentially a productised version of your setup, but I think it has similar limitations to yours where larger/higher resolution files are concerned.

A Pi connected to a RAID (potentially his existing one, just with its own NAS switched off and the Pi handling that stuff as well?) sounds like it might be ideal for @mjwilson - the Pi5 is £60, and consumes less power than the 4 as well as including a 4K decoder in hardware.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I thought about giving a Pi a go, but we have Mac and Windows at home and so the only filesystem compatible natively with both and that allows for files larger than 4GB is exFAT, which isn't journalled and so crashes would potentially lose a lot of data, which I have backed up but really can't be fucked with having to restore it particularly frequently given how regularly we have power cuts. I guess I could do stuff like torrent from my laptop to a share hosted by the Pi, but, eh, balls to that.

At that point it's probably best to not worry about direct compatability and accept the mac and PC will pull files through the pi over the network. The caveat is you need a blank drive and have to rsync them on. Your mac will probably read ext4 and windows can be made to but often it's easier to use a Linux vm if it's a one-off. My point being if the pi dies you'll still be able to read the files if you really need to.

[mjwilson]

I looked at getting a newish Pi a year or two back and they were impossible to get hold of.

[touchingcloth]

At that point it's probably best to not worry about direct compatability and accept the mac and PC will pull files through the pi over the network. The caveat is you need a blank drive and have to rsync them on. Your mac will probably read ext4 and windows can be made to but often it's easier to use a Linux vm if it's a one-off. My point being if the pi dies you'll still be able to read the files if you really need to.

I don't necessarily need a blank drive, as I could do something like wipe my backup, format it as APFS (it looks like this is mountable on Linux, so I assume it would be possible on the variants that can run on a Pi), and use the Mac for rsyncing backups from the exFAT master. It would be just my luck for both drives to crash during the the first synch, though.

[touchingcloth]

I looked at getting a newish Pi a year or two back and they were impossible to get hold of.

Was that due to the wider chip shortage? Might be fine now if so...

[Sebastian Cobb]

They're getting back in stock now although the 5 has been announced and looks to have some advantages. It's probably better for nas stuff as it has a proper pcie lane. Earlier pis were suboptimal for nas stuff as the usb and network was on the same bus and it bottlnecked, I think this was much improved on the 4 though.

https://rpilocator.com/

[katzenjammer]

The most modern solution is a Synology NAS. It's basically a low powered pc with an intel chipset. They can run plex or jellyfin in docker and can hardware transcode tricky files as well I think. Some are better at that than others, they also do ones meant for CCTV that are more geared for video processing but you probably don't need to go that far.

I went down this route after years of using an ever more underpowered minipc that finally broke, and it's great. Very easy to set up with plex and the arr apps. It just sits there and does its thing. It's pricey but mine was second hand with 12TB and a RAM upgrade so hopefully it will last a good few years. Synology sell refurbished units which might be worth a look for anyone interested.

[seepage]

thinking about replacing this NAS case next to the telly:



with this:



worth it?

[Sebastian Cobb]

I wouldn't bother, the top case looks decent enough and less conspicuous.

[seepage]

thanks, just thought the wood accent might make it blend in with the sideboard the telly's sitting on

[Sebastian Cobb]

I nearly went for the first one, but ended getting a similar-looking Fractal Design case in the end. It doesn't have slide-out drive trays like the HP Microserver it replaced did, but I didn't fiddle around with the drives much so didn't really see that as much of a problem.

[waste of chops]

I went down this route after years of using an ever more underpowered minipc that finally broke, and it's great. Very easy to set up with plex and the arr apps. It just sits there and does its thing. It's pricey but mine was second hand with 12TB and a RAM upgrade so hopefully it will last a good few years. Synology sell refurbished units which might be worth a look for anyone interested.

I picked up a second-hand Terramaster 2-bay NAS from eBay for ~£100 which does the job well (no drives included but I had an old 2TB HDD hanging around I could use). Installing the *arrs and other services through its Docker GUI was pretty straightforward, with the exception of a couple of less-popular Docker images that I had to ssh in to download (one for syncing Bandcamp purchases, the other Deemix for downloading FLACs from Deezer) but once that was done I could administer them from the GUI.  It's not a particularly beefy unit so it's a little slow sometimes (Plex transcoding for remote streaming is right out for example) but overall I'm pretty pleased with it for the money and it's certainly good enough for automatically downloading TV shows and streaming them round the house.

[seepage]

I nearly went for the first one, but ended getting a similar-looking Fractal Design case in the end. It doesn't have slide-out drive trays like the HP Microserver it replaced did, but I didn't fiddle around with the drives much so didn't really see that as much of a problem.

yes, the Node 304 is the second-most least fun I've had with a case (albeit the only time I've done mini-ITX) the first being Fractal Design's Define 7 XL. It is what's inside that counts, after all

[Famous Mortimer]

My solution was:

Big old PC in the cellar that does all the downloading / storing
Powerline adapters so I don't have to rely on wifi
Mini-PC plugged into the telly
Set up network sharing

If you're mostly interested in keeping your lounge free of stuff (boxes and cables everywhere and so on) then this worked pretty well for me. Cheap, too (the mini PC and powerline adapters are about $100 each, the cellar PC could be anything. Find a business that's selling off all its old machines and use that). 

[touchingcloth]

Cheap, too (the mini PC and powerline adapters are about $100 each, the cellar PC could be anything. Find a business that's selling off all its old machines and use that). 

When I've looked at this sort of thing, the running costs start to rack up quickly even if the hardware is cheap. At £.1/unit, a 100W PSU will cost £7/month to run 24/7, which is going on for the price of a streaming subscription. A Synology with 8 disks would be ~60W, or another ~£4.50/month

Raspberry Pis are as low as 1W (or even less, I think), so depending on what sort of disks they're connected to they can be much cheaper to run than a traditional NAS, though with trade offs on data safety and ability to transcode content.

[Famous Mortimer]

Entirely fair, but in my setup, neither thing is on all the time. I like using a Pi, but I also use both PCs for other things (living room one, mostly posting on here and watching Youtube; one downstairs has good speakers so I listen to music on it). Pis are very good, though, if you just need what they can provide. I have one elsewhere in the house I mostly use as a retro game emulator.

[touchingcloth]

It makes me wonder what the hell electricity cost circa 2005. When I was at university I think a 900W PSU wasn't unusual, while gamers might have 1500W ones. These days I feel like I can hear the meter spinning when I so much as look at the vac, so I'm very glad that I can charge my phone, work, and personal laptops at the same time if I want to for less than the power it would have taken me to run Minesweeper.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Going from memory my machine takes about 12w on idle without a spinning disk, which makes it closer to 20. I can live with that and it allows me to run multiple vm's (including tiny 10 for when I need to do the odd windows job). It's half of what the microserver it replaced consumed.

I actually have a pi next to it for some supplemental tasks - the most important managing dynamic dns and keeping a wireguard tunnel up, so if there's a power cut I can get in and re-issue the password to unlock the main computer's drives.

I looked at using pi's or nvidia jetson's before building, but getting a streaming server like plex or jellyfin to do the transcoding looked a massive pain, with people using shimmed-in ffmpeg binaries into docker containers to get things working. Even using much more common Intel integrated graphics can be a pain tbh, you really need to make sure you're using the right firmware or it dies on its arse. I think the slight extra bump in electricity has probably saved me hours of frustration. And I'm not even sure if a pi 4 would run all the services I am currently. Also at the time of writing finding a housing for a pi with 3.5" drives was ugly and expensive, ideally I'd want a compute module with an I/O board that supports sata natively rather than using a usb adaptor. I really wanted to make it work as I'm a bit of an arm fanboy but I found I was going to end up with something slower, uglier and much worse supported than a mini-itx board.

yes, the Node 304 is the second-most least fun I've had with a case (albeit the only time I've done mini-ITX) the first being Fractal Design's Define 7 XL. It is what's inside that counts, after all

Mine's a core 500 apparently.

[Noodle Lizard]

I have a NAS+RAID thingie, which I used a bit for backups and streaming media files onto the telly. But it's enormously obsolete now, network transfer is over a protocol so old and insecure that nothing supports it, and it has a user interface powered by Java applets.

So what's the modern thing that replaces this? I know there are still NAS+RAIDs but they might be a bit overpowered. Can I just get a big old USB drive and plug it into the telly these days? (I have an Android TV for my sins.) I know there's Plex and Kodi and stuff, but do these run on your PC or something?

I looked into a lot of this faffing myself, but honestly - if your WiFi is running at modern speeds, just get a dedicated external drive for your computer and run a Plex server off that. It's well-supported and does most of the complicated stuff for you, every smart TV has the app for it and you can run it off your phone. Additionally, should your WiFi ever go out, you could still just plug said hard drive directly into your TV via USB or easily transfer files to whatever device needs them.

Setting this up is free (assuming you already have a spare drive lying around) and has meant I've been able to reduce my streaming services to basically nothing. Nice.

[touchingcloth]

I looked into a lot of this faffing myself, but honestly - if your WiFi is running at modern speeds, just get a dedicated external drive for your computer and run a Plex server off that. It's well-supported and does most of the complicated stuff for you, every smart TV has the app for it and you can run it off your phone. Additionally, should your WiFi ever go out, you could still just plug said hard drive directly into your TV via USB or easily transfer files to whatever device needs them.

Setting this up is free (assuming you already have a spare drive lying around) and has meant I've been able to reduce my streaming services to basically nothing. Nice.

This has a lot going for it, and as mentioned upthread is what I do. Actually the external drives are just a media disk and its backup, and I copy the files I want to watch at any given time onto my laptop and clear them up when I'm done.

For the amount of stuff I watch and the file sizes I watch it at, there is essentially no downside to doing things this way as opposed to having a dedicated standalone server, the main one being if I travel away from home with my laptop then that's the Plex setup gone with me. That, and the fact that Macs make it difficult to setup to not go to sleep when idle or with their lids closed,  or the fact that if you need to reboot for some reason then you need to stop watching stuff while you do.

I can't plug the hard drive into my non-smart TV because it only supports a limited selection of video formats, but honestly, the "should your WiFi ever go out" situation basically doesn't happen outside of a power cut.

[Noodle Lizard]

This has a lot going for it, and as mentioned upthread is what I do. Actually the external drives are just a media disk and its backup, and I copy the files I want to watch at any given time onto my laptop and clear them up when I'm done.

For the amount of stuff I watch and the file sizes I watch it at, there is essentially no downside to doing things this way as opposed to having a dedicated standalone server, the main one being if I travel away from home with my laptop then that's the Plex setup gone with me. That, and the fact that Macs make it difficult to setup to not go to sleep when idle or with their lids closed,  or the fact that if you need to reboot for some reason then you need to stop watching stuff while you do.

I can't plug the hard drive into my non-smart TV because it only supports a limited selection of video formats, but honestly, the "should your WiFi ever go out" situation basically doesn't happen outside of a power cut.

Yes. Ideally you'd have it set up with a stationary computer or an old laptop that can sit quietly somewhere not causing any harm, but if you can manage that then you won't have to spend any additional money or (hopefully) time faffing about with setups trying to get it working properly.

The tagging on Plex can sometimes be annoying, but you can turn that off and do it manually I think.

[touchingcloth]

The one thing to say about Plex specifically is that it's really fussy about file and folder naming. I used to have a load of randomly sorted and named files, but part of switching to Plex was renaming them and reorganising them, which even with various tools to automate it took me a lot of my free time over a few evenings.

It's better now that I've put the effort in to do that, but if you've got a lot of media it might be a big old pain in the arse.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yes. Ideally you'd have it set up with a stationary computer or an old laptop that can sit quietly somewhere not causing any harm, but if you can manage that then you won't have to spend any additional money or (hopefully) time faffing about with setups trying to get it working properly.

It was such a faff getting gpu passthrough onto both a vm and docker on this that I knew I wouldn't remember how to do it, so ended up writing Ansible scripts to do it all.

It was handy when I had an issue (that turned out to be nothing to do with the above) as the scripts could spin up a completely fresh Debian instance, mount the drives and provision everything in a couple of minutes to rule out any config issues etc.

I realise this is madness though. It's kind-of my job to do this, but I normally don't bother at home because I find it a bit of a chore.

[touchingcloth]

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Quite literally in my dad's case - he was a cabinet maker, and ruined the TV when he tried to setup Plex by connecting it with panel pins.