Media servers

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

Earlier today, there was a chat about how people could watch their media now, since Google is now algorithmically blocking adblock users, and Melon and another suggested home media servers, and I'm curious about how these things work, since I've never really heard of these things before. I know theres media streaming options on computers like mine but won't you need software on other devices to hear the streamed music? if so, what software do you use? Can you make infinite playlists and have your own personal radio station? Can you make your own PC the media server, or does it need to be a shared hard drive? Is there a media server where a bunch of people can add their own stuff and collaborate to make one pool of different things?
The closest thing I've done to a media server is sticking a little fm transmitter on something and listening through my hifi

[Melooon]

Ok so yes! There's a lot of info related to media servers and they can range from very complex setups to very simple ones!

A media server at its heart is essentially just a computer of some sort, sharing some sort of files with other computers on your network; sometimes more techy people will call this a NAS (Network Attached Storage) but that's also its own whole separate thing so don't worry about that to start with.

The simplest media server possible is just to share your computers files:

• On Mac go to Preferences/Settings and Click Sharing, and enable File Sharing
• On Windows setup a WORKGROUP and pray   (I did get it to work.. once.. in 15 years..)
• On Linux, type some stuff in terminal  (Usually called Samba, I did this on my Pi2 and its not too hard)

You should then be able to access your computers files from any other computer/phone on your wifi network by going to your Files/Explorer program and typing in your computers sharename (if your computer is named) or local IP address, it might even just show up as an icon to click under the Network tab if you're on mac or you get lucky on windows!!

You can them simply play media files using your favorite media program as if they were a local file on your computer/phone/tablet (for phones and tablets VLC is a good media app that supports networks files)

That's the most basic kind of media server and you don't need any special software to set it up, its all built into your PC. You can improve it a bit by setting up a dedicated harddrive to share rather than all your computer files, and you can even make it always-on by using a rasberry-pi or an old computer as a dedicated media server computer, but the process is the same. (Getting back to those NAS's I mentioned earlier, you can by a dedicated NAS like a Synology that can work as a media server, they are a bit expensive, but good to be aware of since they also work as a backup)

If your just doing a basic file share, you can access the media your sharing on modern Xboxes/Playstations and any TV boxes that have an appstore by installing VLC, its free and runs on most devices and it will have a slimier Network option that lets you access your shared computer.

Playstation 3's can work, but they only support some media files and they need a UPnP file server.. I don't recommend trying to set that up, but maybe the PS3 has better homebrew media apps? You might have better luck with a Xbox 360, though I've not tested!


HOWEVER there is also dedicated media server software you can install that adds a bunch of extra features and functionality to give you a more polished experience. That might include:

• Transcoding so you can watch super high-res movies on mobile devices.
• Logging of your watched episodes and movies
• Ratings, cover art and info for your legally acquired movies and shows.
• Generally nice app support to make it feel less hacky.

Traditionally people used a program called Plex, but Plex is bad now and no one should use it. The cool kid is called Jellyfin and I'm gonna pester @Dan Q to talk more about that since I have never had much luck getting it to work reliably for me, but it is super handy if you can get it going.

Finally I'll add that if your using an AppleTV or iPad to watch media from your media server you can use an app called Infuse, it gives you a Jellyfin-like interface with artwork and watch history, but you dont need to setup any special software, it works with a regular file share. I've found this has been a nice middle ground for me though I also use VLC on things that don't support Infuse.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other options out there that people will share, so please do that, but hopefully this gives you a basic getting started intro point to work with!

[oversky]

Traditionally people used a program called Plex, but Plex is bad now and no one should use it. The cool kid is called Jellyfin and I'm gonna pester @Dan Q to talk more about that since I have never had much luck getting it to work reliably for me, but it is super handy if you can get it going.

I've been fiddling around with these a fair bit since I dropped my spotify subscription.
Originally I had plex which  - as Melon said - has been getting increasingly terrible, def avoid if you can.

Lately I've tried running both Jellyfin and Navidrome servers on my PC for streaming music to my phone, Jellyfin has been the most robust and supports video so I'd say it's worth a try.

Both of these host a webpage on your computer which you can load up on your phone / laptop to listen to your music, make playlists, and that sort of thing. If you port-forward the webpage then you can stream on the go!

Personally, I like to use an app on my phone to connect to my server since the interface is nicer and you can make local downloads. There are a lot of options for this but I've been using Finamp (simple, free) and Symphonium (flashy, $9.99).

Happy Listening

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

@Melooon how does setting up a workgroup work? and how does it work with vlc?
I actually am more familiar with NAS servers. Its usually a big array of hard drives that holds all the data one or more other servers use. They use them so that multiple servers can share the same pool of storage space.
What did you do to get workgroups working> is there an application that could make it easier to set up? and do dedicated media servers still show up on phones, or do they need some dedicated software?
Btw, jellyfish looks super sick. you can even watch a movie together remotely. its like some kinda server for the family.

[Dan Q]

Okay, here's my setup!

Pre-2019: shared files on my network

Prior to about 2019 I used to just have a big ol' shared drive on a computer that was almost-always on. Melooon's given a good description of how to set this up, but the short of it is: you have a folder on a computer, you mark it as shared, other computers on your network can read from it. Tada! Now just organise your media so you can find it and you're sorted.

There are downsides. Like:

• It won't keep track of which episode you're up to etc. (we used to just keep a shared text file and write ourselves notes in it, in our house!)
• It won't transcode (change the format or quality of media) for you: if you use your phone to watch a 4K movie from your computer... the entire 16GB or whatever gets copied over to your phone (if you're lucky - depends on the format - it'll copy only a bit at a time, play that, and move on to the next [buffering]: but not all file formats are suitable for this - by the way, do you know the actual difference between downloading and streaming, 'cos I made an animation to explain...).
• All you get are files and their names: you don't get the "value-added" stuff you're used to from streaming services, e.g. episode summaries, age ratings, the ability to say "what else was this actor in, that I have?", etc.

But it's a perfectly solid solution.

2020-ish onwards

For the last five years or so I've used a NAS. A NAS is basically a networked computer dedicated to storing files: basically it's a hard drive that you can plug into your network and your other devices can connect to it.

I built my own because (a) I wanted something more-heavyweight than I could get pre-built on a budget, (b) I wanted control of it: open-source software, hardware that I could understand and pick apart and upgrade, etc., and (c) I wanted it to be more than just a NAS: I wanted it to run a variety of services for my household, too! You don't need to do this. Just hook up a Raspberry Pi or something to any kind of networked storage and you'll get something that's almost as good. But anyway, the spec of my NAS right now is:

• 8 × 12TB hard disks, plus a 4TB solid state disk, for a total of 100TB of storage space (though with parity/redundancy protection and a cache drive the usable space is closer to 72TB)
• 18-core i9 processor and 64GB RAM, to help it do heavy lifting by running a ton of virtual machines/Docker images
• Some old Nvidia GPU that just gets used for high-speed transcoding: I forget what it is, but it's like one of the earliest ones that could do H.264 hardware encoding

It's called Fox.

It's running Unraid, an open-source but not cost-free Linux distribution that makes running a NAS really easy: it boots from a pendrive and turns however-many-hard-drives into however-many-shares and you don't need to think about it too hard. But it also makes it easy to install applications as Docker containers, which means it can do other things to.

So I have it running all kinds of tools. Sonarr, CouchPotato, a bittorrent client, SabNZBd etc. for media collection and management, Calibre to keep my family ebook collection centrally-managed, Syncthing to help other computers on my network "back up" to it (and then separate backup software to back up the NAS), FreshRSS for my RSS feed collation, a webserver so I've just got a folder on my network that I can drag files onto and they're on the Web, instantly (I've got a static IP address and a few domain names pointing at my house), and - of course - a media centre.

There's a Docker image for everything now. And where there isn't, you can have it spin up a virtual machine running an operating system of your choice and run what you want on that: that's how e.g. I've got a tool running that checks the RSS feeds for YouTube and Nebula channels I care about and uses yt-dlp to download everything they produce, dumping it onto my NAS just like they were traditional TV shows.

I run Jellyfin as my media centre and I love it. It's like running your own Netflix! It's possible to expose it directly to the Internet (password-protected, probably!) but instead I just run a VPN server and I "VPN to home" from wherever I am when I want to use Jellyfin elsewhere: e.g. the other day I was in a hotel in Helsinki and wanted to re-watch an episode of something, so I just "connected home" and watched it! Jellyfin was smart enough to see that I was on a slower, cellular, (and international!) connection, so it transcoded the media down to 720p to keep it buttery smooth.

So yeah, I've been doing this for five or six years and I absolutely love it.

I'm sure it sounds intimidating, but don't start with something like I've got! Start like I did: just with a shared folder, from your computer, accessible to your network (like Melooon says!). Then, consider getting or building a NAS and putting the shared folder on that instead. Then consider installing a media server like Jellyfin (or one of the others) on either your computer, your NAS, or some tertiary device like a spare RPi. One step at a time and you can build your own digital ecosystem, and it's freakin' marvellous.

(Happy to dig deeper into any part of my set-up, but I suggest that it's done in different threads about the different parts!)

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

QUESTION: Whats the difference between SMB sharing and a workgroup? im kinda confused about the difference between media streaming and file sharing since theyre so similar sometimes

[Dan Q]

QUESTION: Whats the difference between SMB sharing and a workgroup? im kinda confused about the difference between media streaming and file sharing since theyre so similar sometimes

SMB (you'll also hear it called "Samba", which is an open-source implementation of it) is a LAN file-sharing protocol best-known for its integration into Windows Explorer (although nowadays all operating systems can speak it; sometimes natively, sometimes with a driver installed).

In the attached screenshots I'm using Explorer to browse to a directory on my NAS, 'cos I'm about to watch an episode of Futurama I guess!

"Workgroup" is Microsoft-specific terminology for a set of computers that are configured to share resources with one another over SMB (including files, but could also include e.g. printers), but which do not have a central server to manage authentication. If you work on a big corporate Windows network and your username and password will work on any of the computers on it (and you'll have access to the same files from the servers when you do), you're on a "Domain". Your home network is a "Workgroup": each computer is responsible for its own authentication provision (there's no central place where you can control who has access to what; you do it on each individual computer).

To make managing workgroups easier (it doesn't), Microsoft allows you to name a Workgroup (screenshot #3), but this is a pointless affordance that is for the most part irrelevant: computers with different Workgroup names can still absolutely share with one another.

The crucial things you need are:

1. Your connection network must be set to "Trusted" ("Private"); this differentiates it from e.g. public WiFi (on which many operating systems will refuse to share anything with their peers).
2. "File and Printer Sharing" must be enabled on your device.
3. Now you can set up "shares": folders that can be accessed from other computers on the network; by default these will be password-protected (so you have to use the same login as you would if you were on the computer they're shared from), but with some hackery (on Windows; it's much easier on e.g. Linux or with old versions of Windows!) you can make "public" shares (folders that people on your network can connect to without authentication).

Hope that helps!