Cheap and Easy Media Server

Do you want a cheap and easy way to make a home media server? Then you have come to the right place. Upgrading an old PC to do this will actually cost more, which BTW I’ll be doing with Ubuntu sometime in the near future; I’m a glutton for punishment.

A buddy of mine was telling me about having all his DVD’s being served up from his Winders (the hillbilly version of Windows Vista) PC and served the media to different TV’s throughout his house which I thought was well and good but I did not want to occupy the resources of one machine to accomplish this task. Having a background in Unix and Linux and at that present time to make one of these machines be a media server didn’t seem practical... So my quest began and I’ll try to make this as painless as possible to the reader.

Media servers are not cheap by any imagination and having a different device that can serve up the media was another dilemma. In one room I have an XBox 360, in the living room I have a PS3, in our bedroom we still have a tube type TV (I know like living in the stone age, huh!), the family room is in planning phase so anything is possible. This turned my attention to the Western Digital My Book World Edition 1TB for a whooping $176 at Best Buy non-the-less (you might have read about this nifty little machine in my MacBook Hard Drive Upgrade via Time Capsule over a wireless network post). It is essentially a Unix based system that is trying like hell to be a Windows Media Server along with an iTunes Server but instead it’s using Twonky Media Server (now damit don’t run away yet, hear me out).

After doing some homework on what kind of media can be dished up on a XBox 360 and PS3 as far as video, audio, and pictures; the audio & pictures were no problem what-so-ever, video on the other hand was a little more of a problem. Here is what I had to resort to in a nut shell:

• Audio is all in WMA format, you can get into the PS3 settings and have it stream WMA.
• Pictures are all JPEG format (thats a big give-me).
• Video, I resorted to H. 264 video codex in a MP4 format which has served us very well with very little loss.
  

Why this video format? I have a mess load of video’s and if I was to follow the advice of my friend each DVD would have occupied approximately 7GB of space. When the file(s) are converted to MP4 format they usually come out at approximately 1-2GB, that is a considerable amount of space savings compared to 7GB, you can get at least 3-7 video’s at the cost of one.

One thing I discovered and will have to follow-up with the reader at a later time this is coming at a small cost to me because I’m left with having to hard wire, this is primarily due to the PS3. I ventured to guess this latest and greatest router the Linksys Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router WRT610N would be able to accomplish my goal, but the PS3 does not see the 5 Ghz band only the 2.4 Ghz band. The XBox 360 can stream the video without a problem (it also can see the 5 Ghz band) and it’s the furthest device from the router. The computers all stream the video without a hitch anywhere in the house but the PS3 which is the device located nearest the router does not like streaming video which left me deciding to buy a 24 position switch and start plumbing the house with CAT 6 cable. So if your working on a wired network you’ll have it made.

So to give you an idea of what my dream system is going to look like once I buy a switch will take a considerable load off the router. The only two device that will be plugged into the gray matter of the system will be the Vonage VOIP converter and the 24 position network switch. The dream switch will be a 10/100/1000Mbps so if you have some advice for me on the BEST network switch to buy... Please leave a comment below!

Now to touch on our archaic TV in the bedroom, and since the wife is not likely to read my blog post I plan on getting her a newer TV. She is warming up to the idea of looking through a menu of movies and selecting whatever her heart desires I’m considering in obtaining a Mac Mini to accomplish this task. At first I was considering the Apple TV but this device seems to confining, the Mini on the other hand is the way to go.

Now about all you Linux users out there, you have to have Samba installed and running then open Nautilus and in the address bar type “smb:// and the IP address of the WD World Book on your network” (leave out the quotes). I really haven’t had time to make this process easier but when I do... Yea, I’ll update the post. If you have this WD My Book World Edition and come up with a way please fill me in with the particulars.


If your into file swapping, or your into finding stuff relating to one machine while surfing on the other this media server has a "download" directory that makes file swapping a breeze.

On the next post I’ll tell you how I rip and convert my DVD’s to MP4 format.