Free Your Media: How to Build a Home Media Server | Level One Techs

Nice, video. Probably going to do something similar when i replace my 2600k in my main system.

That’s correct. If it were in IT mode the raw disks would just get passed through to the OS, I don’t even think you can get into the config screen at boot unless you reflash the card.

Some cards support JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) in which it’ll pass through the disks without reflashing the card with an IT mode firmware.

I love FreeNAS, used it for years, but the plugins are not particularly normie friendly. I would run into many issues, like permission problems or services not set to start automatically by default that required me to tinker with jails manually.

Never used unraid personally, but I have the impression that it’s a bit more seamless in that respect.

Does anyone have experience with plex and being able to play .vob files??

I am interesting in building a home Media Server. I have built a few using Raspberry Pis: Plex and Home Assistant. I am not familiar with servers. I have built several PCs over the years, but those are insert tab A into slot B. I am wanting to learn. I see others have asked about the viability of servers sold in their area, so here is mine:

Dell PowerEdge R710 L
2x X5650 6C 2.66Ghz CPUs
96GB of RAM
3x Dell 1TB 7.2K 3Gbps ENT 3.5’’ SATA Drives
Perc 6/I Raid Controller
2x 870W Redundant Power Supplies
$400

Wendell has mentioned from another reply to look for Xeons of or newer than X56xx, check. I have web search around and the price doesn’t seem out of line, but I have no idea if would be a good for a home media server.

Regards.

Im running plex as a centos7 VM on proxmox.
Vm has 3 cpu cores and 4 GB of ram.

The Proxmox machine has a 6th gen i7 6700.

Im sure that setup you’re getting will run real nice.

I built my media server about 8 years ago and now today (had to rebuild it once) i am sitting on 32gigs of ram and 38 tb of storage (half is back up). I have wired my whole house in cat6 running through a dlink 8 port switch to mini pcs i have built off of each tv. Then i used a wifi extender to give my sister access to it who lives about 300 feet away. The most addicting part, for me, is adding new content and having to spend way too much on large hard drives.

In order to free your media files, there are so many ways for you to do this.
Method 1. Subscribe some cloud service like Google drive, Dropbox, and others.
Method 2. If you purchased media files from iTunes store, you are allowed to share iTunes purchases and rentals at up to five Apple devices. Also, if you allows to remove DRM from iTunes files, you can rip it with DRmare M4V Converter. And then you can watch them anywhere and share them with your family freely.
Method 3. Use some streaming boxes, like Chromecast, Apple TV, and others to stream media videos to destination devices directly.

If that is your definition of “freeing” your files, then that definition differs wildly from a lot of people’s here.

4 Likes

Well my server deal fell apart, so I thought I would try out FreeNAS and Plex on something I already had; to get some experience. I took an old Toshiba laptop (with a failed keyboard) and turned it into a “server”. I installed FreeNAS and Plex. I found several videos that helped me figure out how to install FreeNAS here and here and here. Being slow, it took me a while to understand that I should make the FreeNAS share user and group name the same as my main computer’s Linux user name so that I would have permissions to the shares when I mount them.

So my “server” is now in my basement “server” room. The FreeNAS reporting tab showed that the “server’s” processor was running a bit hot, so I added a fan on top of the laptop’s standard fan.

For installing Plex I found this video helpful. I downloaded my music and few video onto Plex and it works.

Well, I think I have a Dell R710 server coming, so if it gets here, I think I know how to set up FreeNAS and Plex. Does anyone have a suggestion for an enterprise level switch? I have been checking Ebay and there’s a bunch. I am not sure what features the switch must have to help cull my decision.

h

2 Likes

Old laptops make fantastic home servers; they’re low-power, compact, and have a UPS, keyboard, and trackpad built-in. Great for running Kodi/Plex frontends and the Plex Media Server backend alongside any other home network stuff you may want like Pi-hole to block ads and VPN routing without OpenVPN speed constraints you find on SOHO routers.

They’re terrible for media servers because you can’t stuff a bunch of drives in them, and poor options for routing as they have 0 or 1 ethernet ports and you probably don’t want to run your entire network hanging off a USB3 ethernet adapter.

You don’t need an enterprise switch. In fact you don’t even need a managed switch unless you plan to setup VLANs with 802.1Q, which is fairly advanced stuff. But managed switches are pretty cheap these days, so why not?

i know this is an old post but does any one have a good solution for a mythtv front end that does not require setting up a pc at every tv. I hear the amazon fire stick is good but i am not sure if its worth the $ vers other ways.

Cheapest would be a firetv stick 2nd gen running Kodi, yes. FireTV non-stick 3rd gen would be really snappy, but it costs twice as much. Worth it for a TV you use often, but maybe not for a guest room.

You could also use a Raspberry Pi running Kodi, but then you’d lose all the various streaming androidTV apps with 10ft UIs like Netflix and such. Also a bit more expensive once you pay for a case and remote control.