Setting up home network for whole house NAS media sharing

mastaof420

Honorable
Aug 13, 2012
3
0
10,510
I currently have a cheapo time warner/Arriss modem router combo. I already have a laptop that I hook to my living room tv for video. I also have a 4TB hard drive hooked to my media player flatscreen in my bedroom. For Christmas I was going to get my daughter a smart tv and hook it up to our network. What I want to do is hook up my 4TB HDD via a NAS adapter so that I can watch the movies on it from all TVs in my house. I know that I would have to get a network media player for my bedroom tv and the smart tv should be able to stream them on its own. What NAS adapter is the best for streaming movies. And would I be able to watch more than one movie at a time via the network, cuz my kid would be watching her stuff at the same time I would be using the living room tv. What would be my best options, should I go with all wired connections for speed or would wireless be ok? Oh and my router does 802.11n
 
Solution
I could not agree more with Das_stig. Any unmodded NAS will rely on dnla to stream to your TV, meaning it will work only with some file formats and then only some versions of them. In my experience with dnla streaming from an NAS to my Vizio TV, the whole process was inflexible and forced poor choices on my encoding. A small PC that runs headless, a new low cost laptop($230), or even an old laptop, will run Plex server which can handle any file format you want to use.

Pooneil

Honorable
Apr 15, 2013
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11,960
I could not agree more with Das_stig. Any unmodded NAS will rely on dnla to stream to your TV, meaning it will work only with some file formats and then only some versions of them. In my experience with dnla streaming from an NAS to my Vizio TV, the whole process was inflexible and forced poor choices on my encoding. A small PC that runs headless, a new low cost laptop($230), or even an old laptop, will run Plex server which can handle any file format you want to use.
 
Solution