Talk to me about these NAS drive thingies.

[Hetzer]

My external HD died a few months ago, lost my huge movie collection. Currently I download onto my PC and transfer to a stick that goes into the TV's USB slot. A bit of a PITA.

These NAS things, I kind of understand they plug into the router (as do my PC and TV) and movies can then be downloaded directly onto the NAS and played from the NAS to the TV?

What's the coup?
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"

[nowhere.elysium]

Provided your TV can deal with the video container and encoding type, yes.
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'10 SV650SF, '83 GS650GT (it lives!), Questionable DIY dash project, 3D Printer project, Lasercutter project

[Hetzer]

My TV handles 90% of everything I download without re-coding (I use Freemake for that) but it's not a 'Smart TV'. It's an LG and has 'Netcast' on it, which allows streaming from Youtube and iPlayer etc.

I use its USB slot for movies and have no idea if it would see a NAS box via the router. Would I be able to stream movies from a NAS via USB at both ends?
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"

[CaNsA]

I'll just leave this here
<spam>
https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=293466
</spam>

[nowhere.elysium]

It's unlikely, unless the NAS specifies it in the sales spiel. It sounds like something running XBMC (or whatever it's called these days) is more up your street.
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'10 SV650SF, '83 GS650GT (it lives!), Questionable DIY dash project, 3D Printer project, Lasercutter project

[GhostRider]

XBMC running off a Raspberry Pi for the motherfucking win.

GhostRider
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I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

[Pigeon]

I use Mythbuntu, but that (like xbmc) requires another piece of hardware. I took the guts of my old PC in 2006 and stuck it in a shiny box and bought a couple of TV tuners.
Being a PC, you get full internet, watch any video format, listen to any music format. And it can record 8 channels at once.......not that there has ever been that amount of interesting stuff on in a week, let alone at once.
Got my 200+ DVD's + 300+ albums onto 1 little HD.

This might be of use, although I can't speak from experience:

[Seb]

Nothing out there (be it free or subscription based) compares to the combination of a smart TV and a reasonably powerful server running Serviio or the like.

The only downside is that it gets expensive once you move past 8 bays
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2010 Triumph 1050 Sprint ST

[Hetzer]

Hmm. I've been messing about and my TV can see the 'My Videos' folder on my PC and play movies from it. But I can't get it to see past the C drive, even after adding the other drive to the library and setting it to share with the HomeGroup.

Is this a limitation of the LG TV's software?

Even so, this is a far better setup than using the stick. I just don't want to store all my movies on the C drive, it's a 250GB SSD and space is limited. It's a lot quicker and easier to transfer movies from the D drive (HHD) to the C drive though. Bye bye USB stick.

DNLA by the way.
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"There's the horizon! Ride hard, ride fast and cut down all who stand in your way!"

[panrider_uk]

Synology NAS boxes work as DLNA servers so your TV should see all the video files no problem.

You could install a DLNA server such as Plex on the pc to do the same thing.


Mark
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Current bikes: Honda ST1100 Pan European. Moto Guzzi V85 TT Travel

[bugeye_bob]

[Hetzer]

[t121anf]

I found mine to restrictive I'm comparison to a micro server.

[Seb]

Depending on how you get on with Plex, Serviio is also worth a look.
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2010 Triumph 1050 Sprint ST

[fatjames]

I use an old PC as my NAS. It runs FreeNAS on a 256mb usb stick and I have a 2TB drive in it. The content will show on the TV, as well on my ATV/PC/Laptop etc.

Having a set up like this means I can leave torrents to download, run an itunes server (if I wanted to).

I just like being able to see my S: drive from all devices in the house and I only had to buy the hdd, the rest I found around the house.

[sickpup]

It would quite likely be cheaper to buy and configure an N54L with whatever you want (FreeNas for example) than buy a NAS box. In fact the N54L would without a doubt be considerably faster and more configurable than anything else available at present for the price.

[Hetzer]

[sickpup]

[Hetzer]

[sickpup]

Well iirc an N54L will pull something like a maximum of 47watts so lets assume it is doing that at all hours.

47 x 24 x 364 = 410592watts or 410.592 Kw

Kw priced at 16.02p = £65.78

A standard PC pulls iirc 120w+ when idle and even more if a decent graphics card is fitted, pulls even more off idle lets say 200W (which is a low estimate) so over 4x the cost of an N54L which would create a fair saving after purchase and even after upgrading to 8gb of memory and thats in the first year of use alone.

<note>calculations may be incorrect due to lack of sleep</note>

Just took a look at my N54L and shifted it into Power save mode which will also help it save power.