some of you understood my point but from many others I took a lot of flak over my
recent video showing how you can buy older secondhand Hardware to build
yourself a more capable NZ or network attached storage box some of the
criticism very valid power consumption
is a bigger consideration for people who live in areas where electricity is
generated by burning dinosaur remains although I did address that in the video
but others seemed to be born out of an assumption
that the only thing a Nas device or a file server does is store files for
backup and occasional access they can do
that and if that's all you could ever want with limited room for growth then
even the cheapest Synology or qap or WD
Box will take care of you just fine but
there is a whole wide world of use cases out there beyond that and I decided to
make this video about one of my favorite things to do with a more robust NZ
streaming media to Portable devices both within and outside of my
house Corsair boasts unrivaled comfort
and Universal compatibility on its new void surround headset featuring a
genuine Dolby 7.1 headphone USB adapter check the link in the video description
to learn learn more unless everything that you watch is available on a
streaming service of some kind and the people in your house are considered
enough not to hog all the bandwidth it is not always convenient to transfer the
media that you want to watch to your phone I mean depending on video Codec
compatibility and processing requirements and even just file sizes on
the limited storage capabilities of modern devices it can be a bear to deal
with so let's check out a couple of solutions that use a computer that you
own or a NZ to transcode or convert from
one video format to another on the Fly and stream it over Wi-Fi or even over
the internet to your device number one
it's more functional more widely recognized and broadly compatible but
also the more complicated in some ways
Plex to get started with Plex you'll need to go through a few steps number
one get the Plex Media Server application it's free and available for
the PC a wide variety of Nas vendors like sonology and Theus and Standalone
Nas operating systems like unraid which is where I'm using it then you'll need
the $5 Plex app installed on some kind of a client device be it a smart TV an
iPad an Android phone or whatever the case may be then for the best possible
experience you're going to want to create a free Plex account log in those
devices and as long as you are on the same network and you've installed a pro
program before in your life you should be pretty much good to go so then let's
jump into what I like about plex it is
beautiful like just beautiful once you add your video content to it Plex
automatically pulls metadata for things like trailers DVD covers plot synopses
theme music cast information and more and it looks awesome in addition to that
for Content that you don't already have there's the channels some of these are
strictly region locked like the bbci player which is kind of a bummer but
there is some great content in here that I would otherwise not have access to for
nothing like all the South Park episodes as well as Comedy centrals Channel and
then finally the best thing about plex IMO is the broad compatibility music
movies TV pretty much any format of
those things under the sun and if you've got a modern device the odds of there
being a Plex server or a client for it I mean even if it's just a standard DLNA
client with reduced functionality compared to the fully featured Plex app
is pretty darn good now we get into what
I don't really like about plex it can be a bit of a bear to set up and maintain
your media library I mean sure if you can handle forwarding a port in your
router and operating system then remote access over the Internet which some apps
I've used before like ID have trouble with for some reason is easy I'm in the
office running this demo off of my 5 megabit Uplink server at home but
remember that asterisk on automatically pulling show information before if
you're not diligent about where you put your media within the right library and
you don't title things correctly then this stuff can be wildly inaccurate I
mean look at all these episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos that I
wait a minute I don't own any America's Funniest Home Videos DVDs it got
confused by a bunch of random video clips that were sitting in a TV show's
folder oops on top of that there are
some Plex features that don't work unless you're willing to Fork out for a
$40 yearly subscription I mean even ones
that don't require Plex to use any storage or processing power on their
side like mobile sync a fantastic feature that transcodes the video file
to a mobile friendly format and stores a copy of that on your device for use when
you're stuck without internet access which I guess leads us pretty well into
solution number two of the day air video HD this one has a lot going for it it's
fully unlocked with a one-time app purchase which okay the asterisk again
they do offer Early Access features for another $4 and in method did pull that
dick move of discontinuing the original Air Video forcing me to rebi it in HD
that one time but its server is extremely light and easy to configure
with meaningful errors if you have issues with Windows Firewall or port
forwarding and it's got a simple pick the folders you want to share interface
going into the app navigation and video buffer speed is freaking amazing with
air video the realtime scrubbing preview is slick as hell and actually still
pretty much works if you can get past the darkening of the screen even though
I haven't paid for early access to it and the transcode and preload to device
feature is a great way to pack content
with you on a vacation or business trip you just pick the quality press the
button and boom it transfers over Wi-Fi or even over the internet to your phone
so in a nutshell while it lacks support for music and doesn't pull thumbnails or
plot synopsis information or whatever it just plain works now the folder tree to
the file you want Press Play No donking
around as for the disadvantages of air video HD hm I wonder where I would start
with oh I know compatibility while video format support
is Stellar since it's actually powered by a separate installation of VLC the
server is only fully supported on Mac and Windows and much worse than that the
client is only available on iOS in
method what the hell your stupid app is
my response to all those people pestering me on social media asking hey
lonus um why do you still have that nasty old iPhone 4 anyway well because I
needed as a beater air video player
please take care of this with a web or
Windows app and an Android app I would happily buy both of them and use nothing
else including my my very distant bronze
metal solution emit emit is basically
like a rusty broken down Air Video on
the Android side it's the same kind of barebone server configuration pointed at
the folder and share the folder the same folder-based navigation and the same
one-time purchase business model but unfortunately it just works great for
some people and is total ARS for others
I've always had good luck with it in the past which is why I included it in this
video but then when I went to put it on my test machine to get screen capture of
using it to make this video it completely cacked out on me so I guess
the two years of zero development on it have finally caught up with it which I
guess leads me into the part of the video that would normally be the
conclusion except there isn't really one here so I'll address the elephant in the
room instead lonus you've got a pretty
public anti-pirate iracy stance and as a content creator I can understand that so
why are you showing us how to do this because legality aside I don't find
anything morally wrong with this my media server is accessible to me and my
wife only though frankly I don't think she knows how to use it anyway so I
think it's ridiculous that if I own a DVD of a show or a Blu-ray of a movie or
whatever that I have to hike up to my atct to go get it since that's where
Optical discs belong IMO put it into a player wait a bazillion years then
finally settle in to enjoy the content what switching discs multiple
times in the middle of a season or to watch the special features no I reject
your reality I substitute my own so there you go while I can't recommend it
I rip content using any DVD and make MKV
and I play it back using the software that I talked about today it works
awesome it's a better experience for Content that I paid for and I frankly
don't feel bad about it at all and on that subject Ting the mobile carrier
that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first get this
when you call them there's no robot yes
my friends a world where the humans talk to the other people I was actually kind
of Blown Away I did it just to try it and I was like hello and they were like
hello like I almost didn't know what to do because I expected to press one for
sales and service because that's the most important thing press two for
something else press three for this press nine for customer service nope not
that and the other great thing about Ting is that you pay only for what you
use with an average bill totaling only about $24 per month per device if you're
stuck in a contract and you want to switch to Ting that'll cover 25% of your
cancellation fee up to $75 so all you got to is head over to
lin.com to try out their savings calculator where you enter your last few
bills and how much you're paying and find out how much you'd save on Ting
when you sign up at our link you'll also get $25 in service credit or towards a
new device so thanks for watching guys if
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