Home media servers

[joestifff]

Firstly ... are these still a thing?

I have so many DVDs & Blu rays, and I find myself not watching them because I am lazy and they're upstairs. Instead I watch whatever films I have on my hard drive plugged into my Sony TV.

However, the interface Sony has isn't so good, plus I will be running out of space soon.

Now I used to pride myself on being very tech savvy, used to build and sell PCs at uni, massively into my hifi and home cinema, but for some reason, the whole media server has left me bemused.

Is it as simple as build a fairly high spec small PC with huge hard drive and get some software?? This already sounds awful and clunky, turning on a PC ... waiting... etc.

Are there all in one units you can buy whathifi.co.uk doesn't throw up anything really? I don't trust Google and reviews, far to many paid reviews!

Any help would be much appreciated from anyone in the know!

[joestifff]

Thanks for all your quick replies.

Yes my main gripe is the interface on the TV. Was great when I had say less than 100 films, but it takes an age to scroll through them all, and all series, all in alphabetical order. I am looking for something that would allow me folders, possibly a thumbnail, easier to read, sort tv series' into folders etc etc

As for audio, this is also an issue current TV only outputs linear PCM. Dolby digital/trueHD would be great. have the speaker setup and amp ready to go. I believe the files are ready to go for this, it is just the TV that wont allow it.

[joestifff]

wormus said:

I bought one of these http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_0724.html...

SSD boots into Windows 10 in less than 10 seconds from cold. 3 internal 5TB drives and all my films are ripped to MKV and played through KODI to my AV using the on board HDMI. Music is ripped to ALAC and played through iTunes simply because it has an easy interface. You need to set Windows up so it does no music processing and plays everything in raw digital format. The added benefit is you can play YouTube and other steamed web content.

Forget all your stupid fire sticks etc. Do it properly!

Edited by wormus on Friday 1st July 18:51

That looks really nice, so you've put a motherboard etc etc inside that, and turned it into a PC basically, run 15tb of storage, loaded Kodi up and away you go? What sound card do you have in it to output full dolby?