[UncleBerty]

Hello everyone,

Firstly my apologies, I'm new to forums and not 100% how this all works. Secondly I'm not sure if I've chosen the correct catagory but it's a bit of a mixed question.

I've recently become a bit obsessed with the amazing amount of technology available, but my knowledge is still stuck back in the 90's when I did IT at college. So here's what I'm trying to do.

I've ripped my entire DVD collection to mpeg format and put it all on a 2TB external harddrive on my desktop PC, with something like 700 files. I've made this a shared drive so that we can access the films from our tablets. I've now also purchased a chromecast, so from sitting on the sofa I can use my tablet to send a film from the PC to the TV. This is some kind of black magic in my mind, but I love it and am wanting to take it one step further.

Because I want the films to be available 24/7 but don't want to leave the PC running nonstop (plus its very noisy), I was thinking about setting up a NAS server, but unfortunately they're not something I know anything about. On my tablet and phone I use ES explorer, which I have downloaded the chromecast plugin for, but it says the media type isn't valid when i try sending one of my mpegs to the TV, so I have installed VideoStream for Chromecast (which is a google chrome plugin) on the PC, both our tablets and phones. It works brilliantly and it's fool proof for my wife. But, if I was to set up a NAS server would I still be able to install Chrome and VideoStream on it so that the android apps can access it? Or are they purely data storage and can't run software? I've seen the WD personal cloud NAS which comes with it's own software for android that allows you to access the files from anywhere, but apparently the software is rubbish and I don't think it works with Chromecast.

So, sorry about my long rant, but what I'm wanting to know is, if you were trying to set up a video library that is available 24/7 and compatible with Chromecast, what would you do?

Thanks in advance, Bert.

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a NAS is basically just a bunch of hard drives connected to the network. they typically allow for file permissions and things like that. most of them aren't going to be able to run other software at the same time though as they're typically not running an OS you can manipulate that way.

 

you might check into a setup with XBMC, or RaspBMC (http://www.raspbmc.com/index.html which has actually changed names, but....same diff) if you can get a raspberry pi instead of the chrome cast.

 

https://productforum...ast/QbL215Ldfyo  here is a post on a google product forum that lists several options if you want to stick with the chromecast though. these suggestions seem to revolve around making sure your NAS supports DLNA

[dsenette]

a NAS is basically just a bunch of hard drives connected to the network. they typically allow for file permissions and things like that. most of them aren't going to be able to run other software at the same time though as they're typically not running an OS you can manipulate that way.

 

you might check into a setup with XBMC, or RaspBMC (http://www.raspbmc.com/index.html which has actually changed names, but....same diff) if you can get a raspberry pi instead of the chrome cast.

 

https://productforum...ast/QbL215Ldfyo  here is a post on a google product forum that lists several options if you want to stick with the chromecast though. these suggestions seem to revolve around making sure your NAS supports DLNA