Pimp my network (and entertainment center)

[Eightball]

Good afternoon! It seems I've found another tech project to obsess over for the next few months. When I move to my new apartment, I want to set up a network that has a few more capabilities than I have now. That is, I want to be able to do a bit more than just connect multiple devices to the internet, print via USB, and have all of my files on just my HDD or USB-connected external HDD. I'm pretty sure I can accomplish most of these over a home network, and that it might actually be a smarter way to do it. I'll also be using this thread to talk about other devices I'll be purchasing soon. Here's a list of what I'm trying to accomplish by doing this.

Goals

• Store media in a central location, making it accessible from multiple devices on my network.
  
• Playback to an HDTV, preferably wirelessly.
  
• Secure files and media from physical theft.
  
• Torrent directly to and from the central server.
  
• Save precious HDD space (see above).
  
• Monitor & control my network, preferably using some sort of GUI.
  
• Access my printer from any computer on the network.
  

Okay, some of these are going to be pretty straightforward. However, I've never done anything more complex than plug & play, really. I was hoping I could pick your collective brains for some advice or guidance. How can I go about solving this?


Ideas & Questions
Home media server - Resolved!
I guess it makes sense that I can store all of my media and documents on another PC that's open to the network. But how, exactly? Must I build a new PC? What considerations should I have when buying parts? Once it's built, how can I access its files from another device? Really, all I need is a storage drive that's accessible via network. Is there such thing as a home media drive? Are they any good?

Television
I mentioned wanting to stream to my TV. I must first concede that I don't actually have a television set, as it's not super conducive to dorm living. But, I'm pretty sure I'll be getting one. I know there are "smart TVs" on the market now; can they connect to a network and playback media? Would a simpler set and a Roku or something similar be more versatile? And of course, what consumer points are important when buying a new set? LED/plasma, size, refresh rate, etcetc.

Printer
This is probably going to be the easiest thing to accomplish, seeing as I've already done it with my current printer. However, said printer is a pos HP inkjet, and it's got to go. All I know is that I'm going to pick up a laser printer that's either Wifi or Ethernet enabled, and keep it somewhere central in my apartment. Still, recommendations? Thoughts? Are color laser printers too prohibitive?

Network management
I'm pretty comfortable with my Router control panel now. But I must wonder, are there good software solutions for monitoring & managing your network, maybe with a graphical readout? It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it'd be nice to have, especially if I have a way to keep track of devices which keep getting new IPs reassigned and have nondescript names (eg "android-28ng9s478g9h8")

Home layout
Not really technical, but still worth mentioning. How do you guys like to arrange your workspaces? I'm pretty sure I'll keep my gaming rig near the hub (modem/router/printer). What if I need to snake an ethernet cable somewhere? What about Powerline; does anyone have experience with it?

Other considerations
Oh yeah, my actual router. I have a Linksys WRT54GL, aka "the ak47 of routers". Think that'll be enough for me? Should I upgrade to some fancy, dual-band n-enabled router?


Plans
Get a Roku Resolved!
I'm now in possession of a Roku 3. Wish it had broader media compatibility, but it works pretty well.

Get a NAS drive
Probably going to get the Synology DS213, with 2x3TB WD Red drives, in a RAID-1 configuration.

Get a "dumb" TV
With Roku and Plex handling everything I want on the TV end, a Smart TV would be redundant. Now I can look into getting a decent, vanilla HDTV. No 3D, please.

There's a fair bit to talk about here. But I won't really put things into action until after ACEN, to give me plenty of time to research and think through things.

[Versus]

look at this nerd




powerline worked pretty well when i was at home since our house is shit for wireless and my dad hated ethernet cords going to my room

[CaffeinePowered]

I think an HTPC would be a much better option than getting a "smart" TV, much more control over what gets played back, and you can use it as an emulation box.

[Eightball]

Well, I guess it was kind of obvious, but Network storage drives are certainly a thing, and a lot of consumer ones on the market seem to offer the sort of "cloud" functionality I'm talking about. At half or less of the cost of a full PC, and with probably easier management, they're what I'm gravitating towards.

Problem? They all have pretty poor reviews. Wonder if it's a flawed concept.

EDIT: Also, I'm worried that a simple storage drive like this, which leaves media playback to each individual device, might make for TV playback that is less robust with regards to what file formats it can handle. WHAT IF MY ANIME IS IN .MKV FORMAT???

[HeK]

Router: unless you are REALLY tight for space, bar none: pfSense. http://www.pfsense.org/
Runs on almost any x86 hardware, minimum requirements are a 100mhz CPU, 128mb ram and 1gb HDD. You can build one out of garbage. As with anything, the more CPU and ram the better; you'd really want 512mb and 266mhz or better for general use.
Make sure you won't cheap out on shitty ethernet cards. Doesn't have to be gigabit (unless you have a gigabit connection). Use Intel or 3Com cards if possible. Dlink works too.

TV: I'm a big fan of XBMC. I have it a on an older Pentium D with a PCI-E GeForce 210G card, which is the cheapest CUDA card available ~$30. It can playback above 1080p with 7.1 audio @ 5% CPU (due to CUDA).
Another option is a Raspberry Pi. If you want something with minimal work to setup, look at the Western Digital TV Live series players.

Printer: Laser. Only buy laser. Samsung or Brother are good bets. Colour is fine, but more costly than black-white. Get one with network support. I'd recommend wired over wireless, all the time.

Wireless: Take your old router, or buy a cheapo N TPLink or Asus and toss on WRT-DD. Setup as an access point. Don't use for routing.

Switches: Ah, get something gigabit and with jumbo-frame support. Try name brand if possible, TPLink is surprisingly decent. If you are overflowing with money, buy a Cisco.... but be prepared to learn their command line.

Server/Storage: Ah, this is a fun one. While I've heard good things about stand-alone NASs, such as Synology and Drobo, I have no experience. You'll want something that can accept at least four drives and offers a robust raid solution. I prefer RAID-6 (data striped across all drives, two parity backups. You loose two drives worth of space, but have to have three drives die before data is lost). If possible, see if there is support for chaining more drives off of external ports. Torrent client support, file permissions, etc. You'll have to do a bunch of reading here to see whats available on the market.

I personally run a linux server with a pile of SATA ports and internal as well as external port replicators. I currently have 15 drives in a RAID-6 with hot spares. This is overkill for most people, but I have made use of the extra-redundant drives. This also allows me to run different services within the house. I have both printer and scanning servers, a very robust torrent client (rTorrent w/ ruTorrent web front), IP telephony services, etc.

[Mission Difficult]

A Synology NAS will do everything on your list. You can install Plex on it and use a Roku to access media. Install Plex on your phone and you can stream media to that too. The only downside is price. Synologys aren't cheap, but I don't know anyone that has ever regretted purchasing one.

[Eightball]

Router: unless you are REALLY tight for space, bar none: pfSense. http://www.pfsense.org/
Runs on almost any x86 hardware, minimum requirements are a 100mhz CPU, 128mb ram and 1gb HDD. You can build one out of garbage. As with anything, the more CPU and ram the better; you'd really want 512mb and 266mhz or better for general use.
Make sure you won't cheap out on shitty ethernet cards. Doesn't have to be gigabit (unless you have a gigabit connection). Use Intel or 3Com cards if possible. Dlink works too.

I'll bear that in mind, but be aware that I don't currently have access to even the suckiest of old components. I would either have to order new parts or a barebones kit, or knock on the doors of labs around campus begging for old components. Not sure how well received that would be.

TV: I'm a big fan of XBMC. I have it a on an older Pentium D with a PCI-E GeForce 210G card, which is the cheapest CUDA card available ~$30. It can playback above 1080p with 7.1 audio @ 5% CPU (due to CUDA).
Another option is a Raspberry Pi. If you want something with minimal work to setup, look at the Western Digital TV Live series players.

I'll take a look at Plex for XBMC. Raspberry Pi sounds cool, if for no reason other than that I would have an excuse to get a Raspberry Pi.

_______

Server/Storage: Ah, this is a fun one. While I've heard good things about stand-alone NASs, such as Synology and Drobo, I have no experience. You'll want something that can accept at least four drives and offers a robust raid solution. I prefer RAID-6 (data striped across all drives, two parity backups. You loose two drives worth of space, but have to have three drives die before data is lost). If possible, see if there is support for chaining more drives off of external ports. Torrent client support, file permissions, etc. You'll have to do a bunch of reading here to see whats available on the market.

A Synology NAS will do everything on your list. You can install Plex on it and use a Roku to access media. Install Plex on your phone and you can stream media to that too. The only downside is price. Synologys aren't cheap, but I don't know anyone that has ever regretted purchasing one.

Indeed, it seems like a Synology is the way to go. I think that for my price point, I'll go with a 2-drive system and try RAID 1. I'll just need to look into what file formats the Roku can handle. Also, I should probably figure out how much storage I'll actually need. I have no idea how much I'll need to be storing in the near future. 3TB?

[Eightball]

After researching the Roku box for a while, this promising page and video show that the Roku does have a Plex app, which is probably officially available now as opposed to being in beta. Just need to make sure that Plex can run .mkv files... EDIT: Looks like playback is hit or miss. If the latter, I'll just suck it up and convert my library to something like h264

Furthermore, synology devices have some sort of native version of Plex media server; not sure if they ship with that or if I'll have to install it. Seems like this is the magic combo though. My next question: When accessing the NAS from a desktop or laptop, will I have to go through proprietary software? Or can I configure it to just show up as a drive in My Computer?

I'll probably buy a roku in the next few weeks so I can play with it in advance of the significantly more expensive purchase of the Synology box and drives.

[HeK]

Almost all nas devices have support for Windows file sharing or samba. That will allow you to natively access your files as a network drive.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

[Eightball]

Almost all nas devices have support for Windows file sharing or samba. That will allow you to natively access your files as a network drive.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

Great, I'll pick up a Synology after ACEN. Or maybe before? I'm wondering if I should jump on the hard drives now: The NAS drives I'm looking at cap at SATA 3.0 Gb/s, of which large drives are slowly disappearing. Wondering if I'll save in the long run getting a SATA 3.0 Gb/s drive now.

EDIT: So, it looks like playing .mkv files will require more than a nominal amount of power. Not sure exactly why this is the case, but I might look into the 213+ instead. Hopefully the extra $100 buys me enough hardware to play such files at 720p. But again, won't be put to action until May at the earliest.

[Mission Difficult]

Plex doesn't come pre-installed. Synology has what they call a package center where you can have it download and install from a list of officially supported applications. If you're feeling adventurous you can install things manually but you probably won't have a need to. My brother is running a 212j with a couple of Rokus, but he was running Plex off a desktop. He recently tried the version from the package center but I don't know that he's tried running media from it yet. I'll let you know when he does and how well it works. The server shouldn't need much power if it's not transcoding the files. That depends on the Roku. MKV playback was really sketchy but they've updated the Rokue Plex application a few times and now it's down to artifacts every once in a while. Not sure if it supports MKV subtitles yet though.

[Eightball]

Plex doesn't come pre-installed. Synology has what they call a package center where you can have it download and install from a list of officially supported applications. If you're feeling adventurous you can install things manually but you probably won't have a need to. My brother is running a 212j with a couple of Rokus, but he was running Plex off a desktop. He recently tried the version from the package center but I don't know that he's tried running media from it yet. I'll let you know when he does and how well it works. The server shouldn't need much power if it's not transcoding the files. That depends on the Roku. MKV playback was really sketchy but they've updated the Rokue Plex application a few times and now it's down to artifacts every once in a while. Not sure if it supports MKV subtitles yet though.

Wow, this information is what I was very specifically looking for. +1, will be eager to hear how it goes. From crawling around Roku/Plex forums, it looks like one of the causes for strain is if, say, you're streaming a 1080p video to a Roku 1 which can only handle 720p.

...That made more sense when I was reading it last night. At any rate, I've ordered a Roku 3 which will arrive sometime in April. If I install Plex media center on my desktop I should be able to play around with it then.

[Eightball]

Hmm. Looking at this Plex FAQ, it looks like the synology NAS devices aren't beefy enough to run PMS with transcoding. So either I'll have to run the software on my desktop (is this really a problem?) or have to invest in a device with at least a "Core 2 Duo 2.0Ghz [for 720p transcoding]".

If the former, I don't really see any point in investing in anything above the 212j.

If the latter, it's probably going to be the 713+, which costs a cool $500 without disks. Probably worth it to someone who understands it and has real use for it, but pretty steep for a head-first enthusiast.

EDIT: Again, of course, I could just suck it up and convert my library to something the client devices can play natively. Which means I can buy the cheaper NAS without running PMS on my desktop.

EDIT2: Yup. Guess it's either install PMS on my desktop, or don't transcode.

[HeK]

I installed Plex to play with the other day, it's still parsing my media library. It's actually slower than my Raspberry Pi XBMC 'HTPC' and much less accurate at recognizing my movies. It's only correctly parsed 1/3 of my 900+ movies. XBMC will correctly parse all but 3. My full HTPC will parse all my movies and tv shows in about an hour, and that's over the wire. The plex server is running directly on my file server.

Still reading up on Plex, but I don't yet understand when the transcoding is used. Their doc site is currently down, but is transcoding only used with DNLA? If I play media with a robust player, such as XBMC, will Plex still transcode? If that's the case, it's highly unnecessary as my players support practically every standard format.

[Mission Difficult]

You can configure when it will transcode on the player most of the time. It's typically used for mobile devices.

[Eightball]

Downloaded and played around with Plex today. Here's what I've experienced:

Installed Plex media center on my desktop. Imported two sets of videos; Season 1 of The Boondocks in 640x480 (24fps, .avi with MPEG-4 [DivX4?] video and MP3 audio), and an anime series in 1280x720 (24fps, .mkv with AVC video, AAC audio, and ASS subtitles). The Boondocks played perfectly on the media server, as well as streaming to my laptop, scrubbing quickly and looking about as good as the source files do in windows video player or VLC. Haven't tried with mobile yet, since Plex for Android is $5, which I should probably just suck it up and get. However, Plex parsed these files kinda weirdly, inserting imagery for the Boondock Saints and thinking one episode was The Matrix. In retrospect, this might be because I placed them in a "movies" section.

Got some odd behavior with the anime series though. Most of the episodes came out fine, with legible (if oversized, had to set them to "tiny") subtitles. But the seventh episode seemed to be missing. Interesting. I played the first episode, and selected to playback with no subtitles. Got the first episode, all looked good. Tried to play with subtitles, and there was the missing episode! Playing without subtitles of course. And with a weird green tint to it. wat. For the others, playback looked good, but doesn't scrub like butter. Subtitles also had some ugly color smudging "behind" them. Playing to my laptop was okay for the files that parsed properly (and subtitles suddenly didn't have the smudging), but it took a long time to figure out that you have to press "s" for subtitles in PMC.

Knowing that transcoding would be no good on a lower-end Synology, I grabbed Handbrake and tried converting some of the anime .mkv files to an .mp4 with burned-in subtitles. The result was all right; video quality was equivalent to the source file, and probably 98% of the subtitles were unaffected (I noticed a missing line and some weird text formatting). Still, I'd like to preserve 100% of the subtitle integrity. Playing this file through Plex to my laptop was great. I will probably convert my entire library if I use Plex.

Plex does seem to have some odd quirks though, and they almost all have to do with how it parses the library. I later cleared my library and reimported both series under the "TV Shows" type. After multiple restarts, they still haven't shown up. Importing them to Home Videos or Movies, though, works out. I'm guessing Plex tries to recognize TV Shows, and if it can't, it won't display them there? At any rate, if I decide to use Plex, I will need to be very precise in how I maintain my library. I'm open to other options at this point though.

So, here's what I need to know now: Is Roku the best choice for media playback to a TV? Are there other devices that people would recommend? HeK mentioned a Raspberry Pi, and I've also heard something about a "WDTV"? Before I get the file server, I need to know what the playback device is capable of handling. So, I need to actually choose a playback device.

[Mission Difficult]

Plex is kind of picky with file names. I used bulk rename utility for TV shows to make them all uniform. I also created one folder for movies and another for TV shows and had it parse them separately.

As for playback decives, I use an old Mac Mini, but the Roku 3 seems like the best option at that price point.

[Versus]

just use a computer to play them back nerd

[Eightball]

Okay, final solution is to get a Roku, a low-end Synology NAS, and to convert as much of my library to 720p mp4 with burned in subtitles as is necessary. I think that's all it will take for the Plex system to work, and the only remaining questions are: How beefy does the Synology have to be to run PMS and stream 720p video without transcoding, and how well can I manage my library either with Plex or Handbrake or manually (something I'll figure out myself).

[Mission Difficult]

Okay, final solution is to get a Roku, a low-end Synology NAS, and to convert as much of my library to 720p mp4 with burned in subtitles as is necessary. I think that's all it will take for the Plex system to work, and the only remaining questions are: How beefy does the Synology have to be to run PMS and stream 720p video without transcoding, and how well can I manage my library either with Plex or Handbrake or manually (something I'll figure out myself).

I don't know which server would be capable of playing without transcoding. It seems to max out the CPU on a DS212j just building the library. It still might playback fine, I won't know until it's done building. You would probably be safe on anything with dual cores though.

If you were to convert all of your media with Handbrake, it would take a very long time.

I like using Plex because it seems to find my media without too much hassle, and if I'm stuck waiting somewhere I can stream to my phone. Also, the interface is really slick and the artwork slideshow always looks super cool (but as far as I know the interface on the Roku is pretty standard and doesn't have a cool slideshow.)