Media server / NAS

[Tan]

Following on from my recent post on advice for a Blu-Ray player, I had finally decided on the Pioneer and was going to collect one at the weekend. However now a friend has put the idea of a media server / NAS in to my head.

If I get one and an external Blu-ray drive, is this really a replacement to a stand alone Blu-ray hooked up directly to my amp?

The other thing I am concerned about is how easy / time consuming is copy the DVD's or Blu-rays onto it?

My TV has optical out from to connect to the AMP, but will this give the full surround sound?

If I do go this route, can anyone recommend a unit? Can this be achieved for the original £150 budget or what will it cost for a reasonable set up?

Thanks

Tan

 

[wilsodg]

A Blu-Ray disk consumes a lot of disk space (can probably compress down to 5gb) - and takes a while to grab / process. Also, a lot of software doesn't do such a great job so you get lip-synch issues occasionally.

A NAS is great (I have all our movies/music/photos on one - 15tb), but you get what you pay for. You need a large disk (think terrabytes eventually), and then it really needs to be configured in a RAID array with multiple disks - otherwise with no protection against a disk failure you'll end up having to copy all those Blu-Rays again. You'll not do this on a budget of 150, and unless you are really techy you'll despair because you end up spending more time making it work than you do watching movies.

Additionally, you also need a way to play the movies from the NAS - some have HDMI out and enough grunt to play the movie (= expensive), otherwise you need something that can play movies from a network - modern TV's have network support but can't always decode compressed video as you would like. Look at a Western Digital box (c. £70 off Amazon). The main reason your TV has Optical out is to feed the sound from broadcast TV to your Amplifier. You can plug an HDMI lead from the player into some TV's, and they might feed the audio back to the amp - it depends on your TV.

Probably the most suitable NAS's for this are Synology or QNAP but they run in at 300+ for the smallest, and you still need to buy the disks etc. A lot depends on how much content you want to store, but if it's a few dozen DVD's then don't bother, and if it's 1000 then you need to invest a lot of cash and time.

The BluRay player you were going to buy for playing BR disks is probably different to the kind you would need to grab disks. Also, BR grab SW typically runs under windows and NAS's run Linux (or a derivative).

Bottom line - I'd suggest you buy your Blu-Ray player for now and think long and hard before you embark on setting up a media server. (based on 15 yrs experience running one).

 

[LTD]

Your PC can act as a media server using xbmc or Plex, etc.

The short-term issue is getting that onto your TV.

This can be done for about £25 using a NOW TV box and a hack to install Plex. Google is your friend, I have not done this and cannot vouch for it but it seems to work fine given the NOW TV box is a rebranded Roku that can run the Plex app.

If you need an external BR player and software to rip then this will be additional spends. Burn discs overnight to minimise the time spent.

Full rips with full audio is possible but it takes up to 50GB disc space per BR. HDD space might be your enemy here.

FWIW - I use my iMac with Plex as a media server and feed it to various TVs, iPads, Roku boxes, MacBooks and phones throughout the household.

I will eventually buy a QNAP NAS with multiple drives to allow RAID and a native Plex Media Server which will be connected to a network switch to feed everything and free up my iMac.

 

[Tan]

If I stay away from blu-ray rips and just store photos a legal movie downloads, would a 2tb NAS drive be ok, regards access my TV's are DNLA compliant.

 

[moonloops]

I've got a 12TB NAS front ended by a DUNE B1 blu-ray player. I rip from my PC using a first generation blu-ray reader on to the NAS after storing locally on the PC (takes about 2 hours). The NAS stores all my data and is cloud accessible so I can get access to files from anywhere on any device. Don't be tempted to compress blu-ray as the quality suffers. Each movie is 40 to 50 GB in size.

Everything I do is transported by either gigabit ethernet or HDMI so fairly standard all round I guess..

 

[wilsodg]

If I stay away from blu-ray rips and just store photos a legal movie downloads, would a 2tb NAS drive be ok, regards access my TV's are DNLA compliant.

You can get a lot on 2tb, but consider also that this needs to be backed up somewhere. Your TV might be DLNA compliant - that gives you access to the NAS from the TV, but note that the decoding devices on TV's are often incompatible with the encoded videos ( usually Audio related ). e.g. a new Samsung TV we have will not play a lot of movies in our library. Frankly, XBMC on a Raspberry Pi is better player and only costs 50 pounds. I'm running a QNAP 24tb NAS with another QNAP as backup in the workshop - never dreamed I'd end up with something this big but it just seems to grow and grow.

 

[Tan]

This has given me a lot to think about, in the mean time I have picked up a Blu-ray player.