The utilization of my server currently is relative low. Besides running the webserver, which takes 4 cores and 10GB memory, I still have 4 cores and 10GB mem left. Recently I am not playing MUOnline, so the gameserver is not running. Even for the webserver, most of time it is still idling.
So I am thinking to build something else that can better utilize my server. I now have a personal blog wordpress, a file sync Seafile, and a cloud storage Owncloud. They are dedicated for journey, work docs and photos. What now missing is an entertainment system. I have several TB multimedia storage accumulated since my colleague. Most of time they are just sitting in the my hard drive and not being visited. Indeed, it is quite inconvenient to access those files. Just imagining every time you need to plugin the hard drive enclosure and search for the file you are looking for. I can only access it from one place and I cannot watch it on my smartphone.
Now it is time to change the case with my server. I used to think setting up a multimedia streamer would be difficult because I tried to do that before during my undergraduate. The setup is complicated and backend clients are not well supported. This is also the case when I first start by using some opensource software. But later I find a software, called Plex.
It is just amazing. It does everything I have dreamed of, having very nice web and smartphone clients. It organizes the media files pretty and automatically downloads metadata from external source. It performs online conversion so that any video can be easily played back in portable device.
With it, you can visit your movie, music and even photo virtually from anywhere.
- The preface
- Movie page
- Movie information
- Playing a movie
- Music albums
- Photos
- EXIF of photo
