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Project 3 - Plex and HomeBridge Server

Finally, some movement on this project!

Bottom line, I'd like to have a single machine, located somewhere in the house, which houses all of our media - Music, TV shows, movies - and can stream it to our home theater rooms and wireless devices. I'd also like this system to handle backups, to a redundant hard drive in the same box.

We initially decided to go with a Synology 4-drive Diskstation NAS - it has AirPlay capabilities, and can act as an iTunes Server.

Specifically, the Synology 415 Play - which can push 1080p video to our home theater wirelessly or via ethernet.

However, we ended up going with the QNAP TS 451+ 4-bay NAS, which has a little bit more horsepower for pushing 1080p content.

For now, our primary music library is located on the iMac, with backups done to a connected Time Machine hard drive. I'd like to disassociate all of our media libraries from the iMac, in favor of an always-on server.

UPDATE - This project has evolved, as our basement renovation moved forward, and Plex became available on the AppleTV.

Right now, the server's primary purpose is running HomeBridge. This allows most of our smart home devices to work with HomeKit and Siri. 

The server also runs Plex, which serves movies to our Apple TVs. Most of what we want to see is on one streaming service or another, but we have managed to get most of our Blu-Rays ripped into the server, which means our favorite movies are always around.

Comments

  1. Currently I have a Mac Mini with a 4-bay RAID 10 connected via USB 3.0 running OS X Server 10.8. It does a great job of file sharing, VPN, etc. I plan to expand on this to a more power/robust/redudant system once I move from an apartment to a house.

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  2. Matt~ Like the site and I will return to see updates on your various projects. Give us a layout of your technology in your home starting with router and all of your devices. What kind of a router do you use, what type of backup do you have, etc.... Keep up the good work. ~ James

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