I want to try to setup a small system for watching media content in my lounge. Some way of watching films from my collection on my downstairs TV using a combination of the equipment I have without spending any additional money (I'm a poor university student and this is more of a project for my spare time than actual home streaming system).
I don't want to have to have a PC on here. This is for my housemates too, I'd like an easy system which they could use without having to get into my room to turn my PC to stream from as I may be out and have my room locked. In a perfect world some way of being able to sync my media onto a NAS then have a system to access said NAS to watch the content.
Here is what I have:
Desktop PC
Raspberry Pi (Can be used for anything)
Xbox 360 (Located in Lounge)
Netgear DGN3700
Spare USB HDD
Now here is what I have currently tried:
My original plan was to use the USB port on the Router to have some form of Network storage. I mounted the drive on the desktop and streamed to RaspBMC to view the content. The router unfortunately would crash when trying to transfer my films onto the drive (my desktop is connected via ethernet). RaspBMC is also slow and clunky and means you HAVE to have some form of remote app on your phone to get it to work, this further confused some of my housemates.
I was looking into using the Rasp Pi as NAS of some sort, but i've heard it can sometimes drop frames under demand. It'd also be best if the Xbox was the way of viewing the files as it's the simplest to use and stays in the lounge nearly 100% of the time.
Use the USB hdd on the Raspberry Pi. then just make the drive network accessible so you can copy files to the external drive when you want to change on whats on it.
That will work in theory but I'll go ahead and warn y'all that's gonna be horribly slow. The USB and the Ethernet port on the Pi share bandwidth, so it'll be sluggish.
For media streaming I use my shield tablet. It has a mini HDMI port on it; I stream movies to my tablet which can play whatever the fuck you throw at it. It can do 1080 30fps upscaled to 4K and interpolated 60fps no problem thanks to the Tegra K1. I can plug it into a TV and watch streamed content from the PC with my WRT1900AC router or I can just buy stuff on google play and watch it from there.
Nvidia's shield line up is actually fantastic for media not just games. Nvidia said that it can replace a console, and they're right; it does literally everything a console does and does it better with the help of a PC.
I use Universal Media Server (UMS) and XBMC on an old computer. The computer stores everything and runs XBMC as the viewer, and UMS streams everything to my Android and iOS devices. My computers access the files via SMB when locally and SFTP when away. It works pretty well. I should be using FreeNAS, but I can't run XBMC very well on top of that. Especially not on an old laptop.