Economical and fast video streaming over local network?

July 13, 2021 10:36 PM

These days streaming rules everything around us, but I still have a collection of movies on my computer's HD that I'd like to be able to stream to my cell phone for ease of viewing. What are good options?

Right now, my media lives on OneDrive...honestly, OneDrive is pretty good and allows streaming, but sometimes it can be a little slow (probably because I have to use a VPN and stuff). As such, I'm interest in options over wifi, so I can move around the house and still watch stuff, and have it be fast.

My ideal setup is some sort of external harddrive attached to my laptop (which I essentially use as a desktop, so don't want to move it and the external around), and then stream to my phone over the local network. I imagine this isn't difficult--what are the best/fastest ways to do this? I'm willing to spend some money, but not like, a shitload...since the purpose of the setup is just to stream and not to backup (I'm hoping I don't need some fancy home NAS).

What software is best for this?

When I buy the external harddrive is there anything I need to make sure it has to support this? It's been ages since I've bought an external hard drive, my guess is they're all solid state now (?) so maybe this is sort of irrelevant, as in the past making sure it was fast enough to keep up with streaming was a thing (as well as affecting the time it would take to seek)

posted by wooh to Technology (10 answers total)

VLC Media Player for Android should be able to do this from any shared drive on your network. For free.
posted by transitional procedures at 11:18 PM on July 13, 2021 [2 favorites]

And any spinning rust hard drive available today should be able to keep up if you're not streaming multiple files at once. An SSD is overkill for a media drive, in my opinion.
posted by transitional procedures at 11:20 PM on July 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

Look into Plex - it’s pretty much exactly this use case!
posted by mathiu at 1:02 AM on July 14, 2021 [7 favorites]

I sliced this problem a few different ways before settling on Plex. It works super duper well and is designed exactly for what you're trying to do. It'll work great with the cheaper spinning iron hard drives. I have an older Synology NAS with two cheapo disks and it serves up my movies really nicely.
posted by thebigdeadwaltz at 1:12 AM on July 14, 2021

VLC works but it doesn't handle big directories very well (with a lot of subdirectories, that is). Plex is really the ideal here and is precisely what I used in the use-case you specified (i.e. computer to phone). In particular, the UI is pretty fantastic; as is the media metadata retrieval.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:05 AM on July 14, 2021

Plex server, free, gets a little involved as it requires a bit of port forwarding to punch through your firewall, but once configured it should work fine.
posted by kschang at 3:22 AM on July 14, 2021

I actually like my Nas (Synology) it actually runs Plex itself.

You could also run Plex on a $50 Raspberry Pi with the hard drive plugged into that if you’re comfortable setting up Plex through a Linux interface. That way you don’t have to have your laptop on to watch stuff on your phone.

My home system is a Synology Nas (2 TB) that probably cost me around $600 4 years ago and a Raspberry Pi running PiHole (whole home ad blocking - this actually blocks video ads to devices like my Apple TV ) and a VPN Server so I can actually access my media remotely (actually the VPN also allows me to take advantage of the DNS ad blocking from anywhere)


Anyway yeah, Plex on your laptop or Pi.
posted by bitdamaged at 6:19 AM on July 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Also came to mention Plex. I'm ripping some of our DVDs to store on a Synology NAS even as I write this.
posted by jquinby at 6:21 AM on July 14, 2021

Same; I've been using the free version of Plex for years for my media. It's one of those apps that shows up in the Roku menu, which is how I first discovered it. I'm a dolt when it comes to tech, for the most part, but I had no trouble setting it up myself and allowing a couple friends access.
posted by heyho at 6:24 AM on July 14, 2021

Plex is the standard. I use Emby which is pretty similar but you might prefer one interface over another.

I ended up buying myself a Synology NAS which I use for media streaming as well as photo backup. It may be overkill for your needs (looks like two-bay ones are around $300 without the drives) but could be something you might want to look into in the future if your needs end up including such things.
posted by softlord at 8:44 AM on July 14, 2021