Any advice on setting up a home movie server?

Are these still a thing?

 

Nice try FBI

 

Well...I'm not sure how you would go about it, but if I were to need to some thing like that...this might work?

Buy a NAS like this 12tb beauty:
WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra WDBVBZ0120JCH 2-Bay Personal cloud Storage device - 2 x 6 TB

Set up a network at your home.

Hook this fella up to your TV:
https://express.google.com/u/0/prod...MIo52G4LCZ3wIVD9bACh0cuAPZEAkYASABEgKP3vD_BwE

Bing bang boom...?

I haven't messed with a "smart" tv yet...so I don't know if you could navigate a HFS system with one, let alone pick a video file and play it...

...so you would probably have to to "cast" the movie from a computer with a wifi key and DVD/BluRay software and pick it up from a tv with another wifi key/firestick/roku/etc?

 

There are a variety of options these days, depending on what you want to do.

Most of what I want to watch is saved on one of my PCs, or can be copied there easily. My TV is too old to be smart, so I needed something on that end to play the files. I use a basic Samsung wireless Blu-Ray player I picked up at Target for about $100.
Doing some reading, I discovered I needed something called Samsung PC Share Manager. Once I found that and installed it on my PCs, I'm able to share folders on each PC, and play movies out of those folders on TV.

If I had a smart TV, I wouldn't need any of that. The smart TV recognizes the home network - it just needs to find something to play movies from. I would need to install some sort of media server software on a PC. There are a variety of free options - something called Plex is one of popular ones. Windows Media Player might even work.

 

NAS with a built in media server.

simple.

 

Firestick(or Android box)+movie app(Cyberflix, CInema, TVZion, etc..)+real debrid.

You will have every movie ever made (TV series too). Most in 1080p or better unless they are older. Even most of those will be 720p.

 

NAS system hooked up to your network. Nvidia Shield or Amazon fire tv/stick with Kodi or Plex on it. Link your nas folder with the movies in it and you are on your way to tons of movies at your figure tips.

Take all your movies and rip them to your NAS.

 

Plex.tv yes very much a thing

 

Three words:

Call the man.

 

Cheater

 

Let me know how I can stream live NFL, NHL,and MLB games in HD to one of my sweet flat screens and I'll send @Roy Munson $1...................... Canadian.

 

I thought just about every sports fan was aware by now. But there are lots of ways. You can buy an IPTV service for 5 or 10 bucks a month and they have all the sports packages. You can cast from your phone if you dont have a dedicated device.

Also, plenty of websites like 720pstreams and Sportshd that stream the games for free too. Just hook your computer up with the HTML wire if you dont have a designated device on your TV. Even Reddit has alot of the streams for NFL games too.

Tell Roy not to spend that dollar all in one place.

 

I have streamed NFL games on my old laptop through one or more of the gambling sites, but video quality wasn't very good and the sites themselves were loaded with malware shit that I constantly had to be vigilant about.

I'll look into these other sites this month because I'm about to tell DirectTV to kiss my ass.

 

no thanks.

 

Reddit is probably the least hassle but I dont know what other sports they cover besides NFL. I seldomly use the sites anymore because the paid service (IPTV) has everything and usually in 1080p.

 

I started out loading all my Blu-Rays and DVD's in my Sony BDP-CX7000ES but got tired of always having to wait forever to watch a movie. I've since went with the movie server setup.

Get a NAS (I personally use a Synology DS1817+ with 4 of the 8 bays populated with 8TB drives). I use the Plex server app and have a FireTV, Roku, a few Raspberry Pi's and other devices as endpoints. I use MakeMKV (free while in beta, been in beta for years) to rip the media and Handbrake to encode the MKV's into something smaller like a .mp4 file (I skip this step on good action movies I want to keep uncompressed). That's pretty much all there is to it.

 

I ventured into the NAS world running a Plex server about a year ago. Unfortunately I didn't do the research and went cheap with the Synology DS218i with a weak ARM processor. The NAS's processor does the transcoding under Plex, so I would recommend getting a unit with a better processor. Currently my library is all 720p on this NAS, because it's all that puny ARM processor can handle.

Will probably upgrade to another NAS for a media server and downgrade the DS218i to surveillance.

Plex server is the way to go as stated above by Wunder.Noid, works flawlessly and is widely recognized by many devices.

 

I use Reddit streams for NHL games all the time.

It can get dicey once they get further into the playoffs.

 

on hockey dot TV

is what I've been using for NHL. Just a few popups to get started, then I can watch the whole game without any issues.