How to Set Up a Home Media Server

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos streaming content from the Internet is fantastic today's higher internet speeds mean that you can watch or listen to nearly anything you want from almost anywhere you want I mean 30 years ago it was practically unthinkable to watch an Indian cricket match from the northern reaches of Canada and yet here we are but even though streaming services like Spotify Netflix and YouTube have totally changed the way that we consume media that doesn't mean that there aren't still major advantages to keeping your own copies of the music movies shows and podcasts that you enjoy and one of the best ways to do this is with a home media server so Seagate reached out to sponsor a video about how to set one up having a server that you own as a central hub for your media not only prevents you from being at the mercy of a slow or finicky internet connection it also avoids the folks that run these streaming services removing something you've been wanting to check out without warning and since a local network can frequently move data at speeds that are much faster than your average internet connection even wirelessly you won't have to compromise on visual quality or worry about buffering even if you're watching 4k videos with full blu-ray quality or you have a lot of users on your network at once this setup can also help you avoid storing individual copies of everything on each of your devices hogging up a ton of space over and over so how should you get started then well another upside to having a whole media server is that you don't need a fully blown PC to house this data while you can repurpose an old computer as a server if you'd like I actually did a video about that very thing on our other channel a more elegant solution is to use a home network attached storage device or a Nazz these are bare-bones PC like devices that are dedicated solely to delivering files as fast as possible a typical mass usually includes its own lightweight operating system and easily accessible drive base so that you can add more hard drives as your content library grows some compact desktop units can support nearly a hundred terabytes of raw storage today bear in mind of course that if you're using raid or a similar scheme to protect against a disk failure some of that space will be consumed by redundancy you can learn more about raid here now many NAS units ship with felt pre-installed storage so you can actually choose your own configuration depending on your budget some special use cases might benefit from solid-state drives to cache your data or hold virtual machines but for file and media streaming duty on a gigabit network which is what you're probably running hard drives are more than fast enough if you're in a pinch typical desktop drives will serve you just fine though for a little more money you can get Nazz optimized hard drives that are normally more power efficient and that are designed for all these on operation in close proximity to other spinning drives another thing you'll need for your NAS is a good enough CPU if you want it to handle transcoding your media to different formats for seamless operation with all of your devices like your PC television smartphone or tablet and this requires more processing power than a small arm CPU can handle a reasonably modern quad-core desktop CPU should suffice for this but you might be able to get away with a dual-core if you're not running too many streams at once the lack of CPU power is actually one of the reasons that many folks decide not to simply plug an external hard drive into their home wireless router many of those do have file server functionality built in and this Netgear one even supports Plex a popular tool for managing and streaming media but most of them will suffer from one bottleneck or another so let's say you're going for the Cadillac experi if I stand alone as plugged into your router and you've just turned it on they all set up a little differently so the manufacturer website is the place to start or if you're running something DIY then the project website for something like on raid or a free OS like freenas will have plenty of community getting started guides once your nas is visible on the network your next step is to fill it up with your favorite content this usually means transferring files over the network but if your collection is as disorganized as ours was when we upgraded many of them also support plugging external media in directly but you don't want to just dump your files on to it willy-nilly instead make sure to organize your media into a folder structure that breaks your TV episodes down by season for example or your songs by artists and album popular media server software like plex will provide instructions online about how best to do this speaking of plex your next step will be to download the server software that you'd like to use through your nas itself or your web browser and the client software for your devices from the web or the appropriate app store this will allow you to easily access your media kind of like your own personal Netflix Plex as we've mentioned before is a very popular option although others such as Cody and ambi are also fine choices configuration after this point is mostly a matter of following the on-screen instructions and opening up some router ports for remote access and then you're ready to enjoy your content from anywhere in the world whatever that content might be now if you're interested in setting up a private multimedia server then check out Seagate and Synology the bar has been raised officially with 12 terabyte capacity options in the Seagate iron wolf Pro family and that is Seagate's specialty nas drive it's built for Nass by working closely with leading nas vendors such as Synology the result is a drive that works perfectly even in enclosures with lots of drives stacked right next to each other where heat and vibration can become a concern for lesser drives and it's got iron wolf health built-in which allows you to easily monitor your drive through your NAS OS for peace of mind on top of that they've got a five year limited warranty and iron wolf pro includes two years of data recover services that cover data corruption viruses user error and even natural disasters such as fire and flood so build your own private cloud with Seagate and Synology by checking out the links below so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other channels leave a comment with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow so you don't miss any of our videos

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 2,662,726

Rating: 4.824512 out of 5

Keywords: home, media, server, nas, network attached storage, plex, kodi, emby, xbmc, streaming, hard drive, video, library, audio, content, remote access, internet

Id: _RlxCc0M6Ko

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2017