[ale] home media/file server

[Ted W.]

On 09/11/2013 08:35 AM, Damon L. Chesser wrote:
> On 09/10/2013 02:29 PM, Sparr wrote:
>> I haven't kept up with media streaming technology for the past 5-10
>> years (UPNP is still hot stuff to me), especially proprietary stuff
>> (like how an XBox360 gets media from a Windows desktop on a home
>> network). However, I now find myself in a house full of people who
>> want to share all of our media with each other, and do all of our
>> media acquisition, with a centralized server.
>>
>> I do not want to spend more than a few days tinkering with
>> configuration files and network daemons and such. Is there a good
>> mostly-Free mostly-free solution to this problem?
>>
>>
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> 
> 
> Hak5 did a episode segment for owncloud.  Install it on (ubuntu) and you
> have a "personal cloud drop box" and there are at least two android apps
> you can use to access it from droid (one paid, one free).
> http://software.opensuse.org/download/package?project=isv:ownCloud:community&package=owncloud
> 
> 
> They made it look drop dead easy.  go to hak5.org or youtube and search
> for that episode (or guess use your $SEARCHENGINEfoo) to see if it is
> for you.
> 
> 
> 

I'll stick my neck out for Owncloud. I've managed two instances of it at
the office for about 8 months now and while it has been bumpy at times
(We're sort of pushing the limits of what it can do) a home installation
should work just fine. Most of the issues we've encountered have been
related to extraordinarily large uploads and LDAP integration. The
latter issue turned out to be an SELinux issue (so don't worry about it
on Ubuntu) and the former is a limit of the 32bit memory buffer in most
(all?) web browsers; You can work around the issue by using the desktop
application.

The Owncloud dev team is very responsive as well. I've filed a half
dozen bugs with them on Github and all of them (that were really bugs)
were fixed within one or two updates of being filed.

That being said, Owncloud is not a "media server" in and of itself. You
can certainly use it as the way you load your media server with new
videos and music but it's not very good at playing those back. You'll
still need a front-end solution to play the media on your TV. It does
have a web player for videos and music but in my experience they are not
very good (and often buggy). For the front-end, however, you don't need
much in the way of power or storage. I would recommend a RaspberryPi
running XBMC (RaspBMC, http://www.raspbmc.com/) connected to the file
server (owncloud) via an NFS share.

--
Good luck,
Ted W.