Mediasoup, a Windows 10 Homeserver

I run a small (Windows 10) home-server that provides everyone in my household with pictures, movies, shows and music.

To be honest: mostly music (Squeezebox). On my hard-drive I've kept a few (very old or forgotten) series which are no longer available, neither on Netflix nor in retail. My days of endless torrenting are long gone.


Movies and chocolate fingerprints

There's still old stuff on that server I never watch. Oh well. Whenever I run out of disk space I find myself deleting more and more stuff, except for the aforementioned exotics. 

These days Netflix and physical DVDs / UHDs take care of my movie needs (and my money, at that). Besides, there is so much content these days, and some of it is pretty good too 😀

On top of that: I don't mind paying for my entertainment. It's just a pity that sometimes I just cannot buy what I want, simply because it isn't available in the Netherlands, or not available at all. For example buying digital music is pretty much impossible outside iTunes. I hate iTunes. I'm forced to buy physical disks then rip them. That's silly.

But perhaps you are still a collector, like to browse through your files like a post stamp collector, then yes. And if you have kids then a server is a great idea... no more failing discs due to chocolate smudges and kiddy fingerprints.

So, Plex to the rescue...

Help

If you want to know how to install Plex, TVersity, UMS, SqeezeBox Server, AirVideo HD and so forth you just might find some help on these pages:

• Server software here.
• Hardware here and here and here.

Drop me a line if there is a specific issue you run into for which you could use some help, or leave a comment if you spot any mistakes.


Plex

In the past Plex caused me plenty of problems, but now (for some unknown reason) it is working fine these days. It looks good but isn't perfect.

Some files don't play well in Plex, even though both TVersity and UMS can handle them. Is my server too slow, or is there some kind of bug in Plex? (It seems to be limited to certain .MKV files with internal subtitling, but it's rare enough that I haven't been bothered to investigate any further.)

If you have an NVidia Shield and Plex then you can stream 4k, HDR, 5.1 and Atmos. There may be some other media players that can do all that, but I haven't seen them yet in real life.

So yes. Give Plex a spin.

Update. Latest versions of Plex have some issues with .m2ts files. In case of troubles try a recent version of Kodi, which now also does Atmos.