So, a friend of mine recently turned me onto this great program called Plex. IT's sort of a library for your media, but it does a lot more than that. What I'm trying to do is get all of our media in one place, a centralized thing I can use for all our devices. Plex is great for this. It will scan folders with media, and automatically pull metadata and album art/etc for all of it, and catalog it nicely and cleanly. Like netflix, but for your own media.
That isn't even the coolest thing: the computer you are running as the server also can be used to on-the-fly reencode as you stream it. This can be for computers, for tablets, smartphones, roku app, etc. I have the plex app installed on my tablet and phone, and it allows me to watch stuff on the go. I was on vacation visiting family last week, and I was able to pull up the app on my tablet and stream shows from home. The server encodes it on the fly, to keep it within your upstream limitations. I generally use 720p/4mbps on the go, which works perfectly since my upstream is 5.
It's brilliant, I don't know how I didn't know about this sooner. I'm in the middle of the very long process of ripping and reencoding all our DVDs and blurays for this purpose. Fortunately my NAS should have more than enough storage space, though it is a very long, slow process to rip and reencode everything into h264 mkv files
I just ordered a Roku 3 for our living room, it has a plex app on it.
If this sounds interesting to you, check it out, it's free to use, the app for android/iOS is a few dollars, but it's worth it.
http://www.plexapp.com/
Here is some screenshots of what it looks like on the desktop/home theater app.
That isn't even the coolest thing: the computer you are running as the server also can be used to on-the-fly reencode as you stream it. This can be for computers, for tablets, smartphones, roku app, etc. I have the plex app installed on my tablet and phone, and it allows me to watch stuff on the go. I was on vacation visiting family last week, and I was able to pull up the app on my tablet and stream shows from home. The server encodes it on the fly, to keep it within your upstream limitations. I generally use 720p/4mbps on the go, which works perfectly since my upstream is 5.
It's brilliant, I don't know how I didn't know about this sooner. I'm in the middle of the very long process of ripping and reencoding all our DVDs and blurays for this purpose. Fortunately my NAS should have more than enough storage space, though it is a very long, slow process to rip and reencode everything into h264 mkv files
I just ordered a Roku 3 for our living room, it has a plex app on it.If this sounds interesting to you, check it out, it's free to use, the app for android/iOS is a few dollars, but it's worth it.
http://www.plexapp.com/
Here is some screenshots of what it looks like on the desktop/home theater app.
