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advice on setting up a WAN stream box

O

oneofusjustin

Member
The box
Xeon Quad 2.2ghz
24 gigs ram
3x 2tb Raid 5
1 random hdd for os
1gb network on a 50 up 50 down line

My goal is to make a box that i can fill up with media ( music and videos) that i can then stream to a smart TV, computer, tablet or phone over the internet to myself in the outside world ( not just lan).

I need advice on the following What OS to use. And what software to use to stream the media. And how exactly will i access the media on my various devices?
 
Are you going to be encoding as well because that box is gonna be overkill from what i've seen.

Operating System:
This doesn't really matter much but I'll suggest Debian or one or the LTS release of Ubuntu. FreeNAS is also worth a shot as well.

Software:
Your requirement for viewing from the outside world rules out DLNA. Plex may work but I'm not sure.

If you go the DLNA route at home (you should). Minidlna to act as a server, your TV should be able to use DLNA (mine does), for android devices skifta is an excellent DLNA client and server if need be.
 
If you already have the hardware it is better to build your own. But I ended up using QNAP 212 -- mainly because I wanted to keep power consumption minimum. QNAP 212 takes about 15-17watts with two hard drives. One problem with QNAP is that it keeps spinning the hard drive active most of the time, even though its real use is only for a couple of hours a day. I also tried miniDLNA on GoFlex/ArchLinux (around 3-7W with one harddrive). GoFlex works the best as a simple dlna/file server and it spins up hard drive only when you access those files, as the OS is installed on a flash drive. But GoFlex does not have RAID on that device and no web interface like QNAP.
 
Jodell88 said:
Are you going to be encoding as well because that box is gonna be overkill from what i've seen.

Operating System:
This doesn't really matter much but I'll suggest Debian or one or the LTS release of Ubuntu. FreeNAS is also worth a shot as well.

Software:
Your requirement for viewing from the outside world rules out DLNA. Plex may work but I'm not sure.

If you go the DLNA route at home (you should). Minidlna to act as a server, your TV should be able to use DLNA (mine does), for android devices skifta is an excellent DLNA client and server if need be.
Click to expand...

Will freenas be able to use PLEX or other things like XBMC? i was under the impression it was just a basic file server platform.

Also what are the advantages to encoding on the server side, and what software would it require to be able to do that?
 
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