Raspberry Pi - $35 Linux computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter daz
  • Start date Start date
Pretty sure I can do this but just wanted to see what others thought.

I have a vast movie collection from all my ripped DVDs and BluRays, which I have stored on my Pi4 Plex Server, which serves multiple Xbox One's in my house.

I'd like to share this movie collection with my parents at a separate house.

No issue on getting them a Pi and HDD to store all my collection on and drop it to their house - But how would I add new movies?

My thought was having my parents Pi run Open VPN, I connect to that through my PC at home, then when I rip a new movie, I simply copy and paste it, and it'll send it over the internet to their Pi?
 
jrwagh333 said:
Quick PiHole question.

Kids are meant to be doing school work at home but get distracted by YouTube. Can I block YouTube on a per device basis on command? So I can quickly unblock it once I see they have done their homework?
Click to expand...

Late response, but Adguard does this very easily. All the popular services (YT, FB, Instagram, etc etc) have a toggle that you can just flip on each device, or group of devices.

I made the move over to Adguard as i found PiHole's development getting slower and slower - lacking in features compared to alternatives.

jrwagh333 said:
Pretty sure I can do this but just wanted to see what others thought.

I have a vast movie collection from all my ripped DVDs and BluRays, which I have stored on my Pi4 Plex Server, which serves multiple Xbox One's in my house.

I'd like to share this movie collection with my parents at a separate house.

No issue on getting them a Pi and HDD to store all my collection on and drop it to their house - But how would I add new movies?

My thought was having my parents Pi run Open VPN, I connect to that through my PC at home, then when I rip a new movie, I simply copy and paste it, and it'll send it over the internet to their Pi?
Click to expand...

If your upload speed is good, why not just do plex sharing. That way you don't need to faff around with moving media files around?
 
jrwagh333 said:
That was my first thought, but upload is only 20mbps and I've encoded some stuff at around 30mbps.

Pi won't be strong enough to downsample.
Click to expand...

Sometimes just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Ditch the Pi and use something that can transcode, you’ll use 4-8Mbit of upload (720/4 and 1080/8) and only when they actually want to watch something. Replicating the hardware at both ends is largely pointless as you still need to saturate your uplink with every single movie you upload, regardless of it being wanted or watched, the legality of your approach is also highly dubious unless you are buying them a copy of each DVD/BR which kind of makes it pointless.

Just realised you’re the person who didn’t want to drop any more cash on hardware in the thread where you had issues with buffering. Now you can drop money on replicating a set-up, consider a cheap low power SFF/NUC style devices that would do transcoding easily and give both you and your parents a much better experience, you can use the pi as a client for them.
 
Last edited:
I'm looking to centralise my home media - it's all already stored on an external HDD which is connected to a ShieldTV running Kodi but wanted to get the drive on the network so that it can be accessed by other devices. Rather than dropping a few hundred quid on a dedicated NAS, I'm thinking about using a Pi running OpenMediaVault and connecting the HDD to that. Wired network connection, of course.

Can't see many people on here using their Pi as a NAS server, so wanted to get thoughts on whether this is a good/bad idea or whether there might be a better solution?

Security and redundancy aren't primary concerns, nor do I specifically need to access media outside of the home network.
 
Avalon said:
Obvious question first, why not just share it from the Shield?
Click to expand...

I suppose I could if that was a possibility. I've not specifically looked into this so don't know what software is out there for the Shield. I guess I was concerned whether the Shield could do this properly, whether power consumption might be an issue, whether the network drive would still be accessible in sleep mode and whether it would switch the TV on (via HDMI) when it does wake up due to the network accessing the attached drive.
 
Seearbe said:
I suppose I could if that was a possibility. I've not specifically looked into this so don't know what software is out there for the Shield. I guess I was concerned whether the Shield could do this properly, whether power consumption might be an issue, whether the network drive would still be accessible in sleep mode and whether it would switch the TV on (via HDMI) when it does wake up due to the network accessing the attached drive.
Click to expand...

The Shield can act as a Plex server. You can either attach a USB drive with the files on or point to a network share but essentially the Shield with Plex serer will do the sharing for you
See here: https://shield.nvidia.com/blog/how-to-setup-plex-media-server
 
Seearbe said:
I suppose I could if that was a possibility. I've not specifically looked into this so don't know what software is out there for the Shield. I guess I was concerned whether the Shield could do this properly, whether power consumption might be an issue, whether the network drive would still be accessible in sleep mode and whether it would switch the TV on (via HDMI) when it does wake up due to the network accessing the attached drive.
Click to expand...

It's free and easy to share a drive from a Shield, it runs android which is based on Linux, it's not really massively different to the Pi, you can even run android on a Pi if you wanted to. In terms of spinning up the drive, it's again easily done. If you're worried about the power consumption on a Shield, you're going to find the Pi is essentially the same, 3.4w in standby and 5-8w when streaming video (depends on app) on ShieldTV v1, the Pi4 tops out about 8w.
 
Avalon said:
It's free and easy to share a drive from a Shield, it runs android which is based on Linux, it's not really massively different to the Pi, you can even run android on a Pi if you wanted to. In terms of spinning up the drive, it's again easily done. If you're worried about the power consumption on a Shield, you're going to find the Pi is essentially the same, 3.4w in standby and 5-8w when streaming video (depends on app) on ShieldTV v1, the Pi4 tops out about 8w.
Click to expand...

Yeah, turned out it wasn't too much of a pain once I'd updated Plex on the Shield so we're all up and running.

I did remember that I also wanted to have the NAS set up so that I could store flac files from CD rips and have those streaming to my hifi. Plex integration on these sorts of devices isn't great it seems, so might have to fall back on the Pi for that, although streaming flac files shouldn't be too intensive!
 
careful with that if you do buy it, the jmiron usb to sata chip it uses is known to be flaky think the guys behind that board were looking to update it with more reliable chip
 
Yaka said:
careful with that if you do buy it, the jmiron usb to sata chip it uses is known to be flaky think the guys behind that board were looking to update it with more reliable chip
Click to expand...

Use Quirks to disable UASP, things get a lot better, but it’s easier to just buy something ASMedia based.
 
jrwagh333 said:
Do you have a recommendation?
Click to expand...

I can’t really post a link as the marketplace in question is a competitor. The Benfei I got is listed at £6.54, StarTech and Ugreen a few pounds more, but anything that states it has an ASMedia chipset is better than a JMicron.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom