Home Media Server

My brothers swear by Plex. I just run MiniDLNA. My 13 year old Smart TV picks it up no problem. If that struggled my DVD player can also play DLNA streams. And if stuck a £30 Chromecast will provide all my media needs.

I have had a play with them all pretty well :-)

KODI on the TV Show loads an iso file of a DVD and treats it as a DVD so I get the menu etc. Despite the marketing blurb I couldn't find another player for Android TV that would do that.

My problem is that 13 year old Smart TVs dont understand FLAC

Neither does my car. I have to create separate MP3 archives for both

if you are able to access the home media server by IP address rather than by its FQDN (Fully qualified domain name) then you need to look at your DHCP server, more specifically the local DNS lookup table

Good thinking :-)

I have a Plusnet modem/router which doesn't flush it's cache when it's rebooted. I will down all the machines and go into it via laptop then delete all the entries one by one.

I find Plex to be pretty solid - running on a 2012 Mac Mini and a recent LG smart TV.

It struggles with high definition (4k) files and I'm not sure where the bottleneck is.

The most recent edition of Linux Magazine has an article on setting up a server using Uiniversal Media Server. Setting it up was easy, haven't tested it yet.

There is a Linux utility that does Flac to MP3 conversion on the fly. You can even set up two streams with different compression settings.

That creates MP3 copies of all of the flac files but eats disk-space unnecessarily. On the fly conversion costs some processing time but preserves disk-space.

It does exactly that because that is what I wanted. Flac is more accurate than MP3 and should be preserved for those platforms that can process it

I have about 32GB of audio files, That about 8 high def videos. The space exists