Home Media Server

A

Andrew A. Robinson

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Good morning, Everyone! I'm soliciting help on getting a media server set up on my home file server. I have Fedora Server 24 up & running, and it works great for accessing and moving files around among the various devices on my home network. I also have lots of media installed, which I have been using VLC to access on individual devices.
I would like to be able to view videos & movies on my 55" Samsung SmartTV, rather than on a small screen. I need recommendations on hardware and software to do this. Based on my research, I'm thinking about using my Amazon FireStick and Plex to access the media,
Can anyone tell me if that is workable, make suggestions on other choices, or provide links to any online references? Thanks in advance for your help.
 


Hey... Plex is fine, I tried it out but there are very efficient, free alternatives if you take some time to set them up - not that difficult or time consuming to be honest.

Can your Smart TV consume DLNA services from your home network? If that's the case you won't really need a casting stick.

Mediatomb (lightweight server without transcoding) is great if your playback hardware supports a wide range of codecs, or if you only have media in broadly supported formats like x264/older.

Universal Media Server
, on the other hand, features transcoding on demand for devices that support few codecs. Simply put, UMS is full featured.

I use both along with Chromecast. Also, I browse them on my android phone in order to pick what chromecast will stream from the media server to my dumb TV (I like my displays dumb :D).

As those are DLNA providers with built-in web servers, I can either use an app in order to access the DLNA shares directly or just browse the web interface on my phone and cast videos to my tv.

If your TV can browse DLNA shares natively (or the web), it'll do the trick for you.

Chromecast can decode popular formats but I sometimes want to play quirky files I got from god knows where, so Universal Media Server comes in handy to serve it real time transcodes seamlessly.

Set up Mediatomb or UMS, find out if your TV supports streaming from DLNS servers on your local network and you're good to go.

Local DNS might be useful to avoid entering IPs all the time... And a free DNS service to access your media servers remotely.

As a side note, you can usually plug usb drives to your router and enable its native media server (many routers feature that).

There are several solutions... It all comes down to how smart your TV is as in whether it will need extra streaming hardware or not.

Personally, I wouldn't pay for Plex while something as powerful as UMS is lying around, but it's a decent option, yes.
 

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