How best to watch my movies on external hard drives in other rooms?

[nightrider1470]

I have a Htpc upstairs which 2 large external hard drives, which have bluray iso and Mkv files on it.

I dont want to be running usb cables around my house to other media players. Is there something I can buy, hardware or software that would allow me to play these movies all over my house?. I would prefer to not have the Htpc running to be able to do this as will eat a lot of electricity.

Some magic network box maybe?

 

[Captain]

If you don't want to have the HTPC running while streaming films then you need either a NAS drive that you can access with either an app on your Smart TV if you have one, or a streaming device such as an WDTV, Amazon FireTV, Roku 3 or Raspberry PI, or any that is capable of using either Wifi/Ethernet for home streaming.

The other option is to Install Plex and subscribing to a Plexpass which allows you to stream content while the Media server is off.

Another option would be to unplug the External HDD from the HTPC and plug straight into your TV via USB if it allows you to?

 

[Tealc]

Using a Pi as a NAS may result in slower than you'd expect file access due to its shared USB2/network interface. The Pi2 may work better than a B/B+ but for bluray isos you may struggle.

I used to get 4-5MB/s on my Pi B across the network.

I now use an odroid c1 and get 12MB/s as for the moment I have needed to limit the network to 100Mbit.

I don't use it as a nas though so not sure if that would also have some overhead.