Stream your home media files away from home

some of you understood my point but from many others i took a lot of flack over my recent video showing how you can buy older second-hand hardware to build yourself a more capable nas or network attached storage box some of the criticism very valid power consumption is a bigger consideration for people who live in areas where electricity is generated by burning dinosaur remains although i did address that in the video but others seemed to be born out of an assumption that the only thing a nas device or a file server does is store files for backup and occasional access they can do that and if that's all you could ever want with limited room for growth then even the cheapest synology or qnap or wd box will take care of you just fine but there is a whole wide world of use cases out there beyond that and i decided to make this video about one of my favorite things to do with a more robust nas streaming media to portable devices both within and outside of my house [Music] corsair boasts unrivaled comfort and universal compatibility on its new void surround headset featuring a genuine dolby 7.1 headphone usb adapter check the link in the video description to learn more unless everything that you watch is available on a streaming service of some kind and the people in your house are considered enough not to hog all the bandwidth it is not always convenient to transfer the media that you want to watch to your phone i mean depending on video codec compatibility and processing requirements and even just file sizes on the limited storage capabilities of modern devices it can be a bear to deal with so let's check out a couple of solutions that use a computer that you own or nas to transcode or convert from one video format to another on the fly and stream it over wifi or even over the internet to your device number one it's more functional more widely recognized and broadly compatible but also the more complicated in some ways plex to get started with plex you'll need to go through a few steps number one get the plex media server application it's free and available for the pc a wide variety of nas vendors like synology and ficus and standalone nas operating systems like unraid which is where i'm using it then you'll need the 5 plex app installed on some kind of a client device be it a smart tv an ipad an android phone or whatever the case may be then for the best possible experience you're going to want to create a free plex account log in those devices and as long as you are on the same network and you've installed a program before in your life you should be pretty much good to go so then let's jump into what i like about plex it is beautiful like just beautiful once you add your video content to it plex automagically pulls metadata for things like trailers dvd covers plot synopsis theme music cast information and more and it looks awesome in addition to that for content that you don't already have there's the channels some of these are strictly region locked like the bbc iplayer which is kind of a bummer but there is some great content in here that i would otherwise not have access to for nothing like all the south park episodes as well as comedy central's channel and then finally the best thing about plex imo is the broad compatibility music movies tv pretty much any format of those things under the sun and if you've got a modern device the odds of there being a plex server or a client for it i mean even if it's just a standard dlna client with reduced functionality compared to the fully featured plex app is pretty darn good now we get into what i don't really like about plex it can be a bit of a bear to set up and maintain your media library i mean sure if you can handle forwarding a port in your router and operating system then remote access over the internet which some apps i've used before like emit have trouble with for some reason is easy i'm in the office running this demo off of my 5 megabit uplink server at home but remember that asterisk on automagically pulling show information before if you're not diligent about where you put your media within the right library and you don't title things correctly then this stuff can be wildly inaccurate i mean look at all these episodes of america's funniest home videos that uh wait a minute i don't own any america's funniest home videos dvds it got confused by a bunch of random video clips that were sitting in a tv shows folder oops on top of that there are some plex features that don't work unless you're willing to fork out for a 40 yearly subscription i mean even ones that don't require plex to use any storage or processing power on their side like mobile sync a fantastic feature that transcodes the video file to a mobile-friendly format and stores a copy of that on your device for use when you're stuck without internet access which i guess leads us pretty well into solution number two of the day air video hd this one has a lot going for it it's fully unlocked with a one-time app purchase which okay the asterisk again they do offer early access features for another four dollars and in method did pull that dick move of discontinuing the original air video forcing me to rebuy it in hd that one time but its server is extremely light and easy to configure with meaningful errors if you have issues with windows firewall or port forwarding and it's got a simple pick the folders you want to share interface going into the app navigation and video buffer speed is freaking amazing with their video the real time scrubbing preview is slick as hell and actually still pretty much works if you can get past the darkening of the screen even though i haven't paid for early access to it and the transcode and preload to device feature is a great way to pack content with you on a vacation or business trip you just pick the quality press the button and boom it transfers over wi-fi or even over the internet to your phone so in a nutshell while it lacks support for music and doesn't pull thumbnails or plot synopsis information or whatever it just plain works navigate the folder tree to the file you want press play no donking around as for the disadvantages of air video hd hmm i wonder where i would start with oh i know compatibility while video format support is stellar since it's actually powered by a separate installation of vlc the server is only fully supported on mac and windows and much worse than that the client is only available on ios in method what the hell your stupid app is my response to all those people pestering me on social media asking hey linus why do you still have that nasty old iphone 4 anyway well because i need it as a beater air video player please take care of this with a web or windows app and an android app i would happily buy both of them and use nothing else including my very distant bronze metal solution emit emit is basically like a rusty broken down air video on the android side it's the same kind of bare bone server configuration pointed at the folder and share the folder the same folder-based navigation and the same one-time purchase business model but unfortunately it just works great for some people and is total arse for others i've always had good luck with it in the past which is why i included it in this video but then when i went to put it on my test machine to get screen capture of using it to make this video it completely cacked out on me so i guess the two years of zero development on it have finally caught up with it which i guess leads me into the part of the video that would normally be the conclusion except there isn't really one here so i'll address the elephant in the room instead linus you've got a pretty public anti-piracy stance and as a content creator i can understand that so why are you showing us how to do this because legality aside i don't find anything morally wrong with this my media server is accessible to me and my wife only though frankly i don't think she knows how to use it anyway so i think it's ridiculous that if i own a dvd of a show or a blu-ray of a movie or whatever that i have to hike up to my attic to go get it since that's where optical discs belong imo put it into a player wait a bazillion years then finally settle in to enjoy the content what switching disks multiple times in the middle of a season or to watch the special features no i reject your reality i substitute my own so there you go while i can't recommend it i rip content using any dvd and make mkv and i play it back using the software that i talked about today it works awesome it's a better experience for content that i paid for and i frankly don't feel bad about it at all and on that subject ting the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first get this when you call them there's no robot yes my friends a world where the humans talk to the other people i was actually kind of blown away i did it just to try it and i was like hello and they were like hello like i almost didn't know what to do because i expected to press one for sales and service because that's the most important thing press two for something else press three for this press nine for customer service nope not that and the other great thing about ting is that you pay only for what you use with an average bill totaling only about 24 per month per device if you're stuck in a contract and you want to switch to ting they'll cover 25 of your cancellation fee up to 75 dollars so all you got gotta do is head over to linus.ting.com to try out their savings calculator where you enter your last few bills and how much you're paying and find out how much you'd save on ting when you sign up at our link you'll also get 25 in service credit or towards a new device so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at amazon instructions up there by buying a cool shirt like this one link down below or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum which is full of helpful community members where you can chat tech or anime or pretty much anything and just kind of hang out over at linustechtips.com now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click the little button in the top right corner where we've got another video lined up for you

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 774,136

Keywords: steam, home, media, files, dvd, series, tv show, content, owned, plex, android, ios, server, nas, network attached storage

Id: GYf9m1Ck8u0

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2016