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A side note: I owned a Synology and a qnap, synology has a small advantage on the software, but qnap beat them largely on the hardware side. The nexus player has really a great end user experience, and since it's only the beginning, I know it will improve over the time

Just a small feedback: I ended by buying a Qnap Ts-253 with 8 GB of ram, + imported the google nexus player, and well, I made jealous every person coming to my house since. The QNAP is very powerfull(not as powerfull that could have been a custom server), but it allows me to easily admin the NAS(Watching the current status, getting email when anything could have an issue, installed an openVpn and downloaded the certificate easily, configure transmission). Plex scans the different folder every 15minutes and the user experience with plex on the nexus player is unmatched with everything I tried right now. In addition I can use the Nexus Player as a chromecast, which is a nice addition. The only bottleneck I had was with the default download tool(impossible to select the destination folder properly), but I replaced it by transmission, which work like a charm.

I may have found a solution which would match my needs: Use a NAS without GUI Buy a Google Nexus player to have the FrontEnd So now I'm looking on which case to use to make my NAS, since I have to fit it in a space where I've only 20cm of height(width and depth isn't an issue). For now, I didn't found any matching case, something to advise me?

Well, this is my issue, because if I have to ask all the other people using the tv to bring their laptop to just check their series, no way they will be happy, which is the point. I saw their is a "Plex Home Theater", is there any way to install it on OpenMediaVault/... ? which would be directly connected to the TV?

The thing is, you take by example my wife, she doesn't have a smartphone, so with what will she launch the movie? Another thing: I've the impression that the media does the way: Plex server -> Android Plex -> Plex Theater, instead of having the android plex binding the server and theater(in my case, theater and server are the two wired, but the android is on wifi(and far from the router), was lagging

Yeah, the ideal case would be to build myself the hardware while having the software provided by a third party(free/paid)

Thank you for your messages, I love your disks, but I don't see how your proposal can fits my needs: The Cloud Mirror doesn't offers any bittorrent capabilities, the cloud Ex2 doesn't to even offer DLNA(and event if it was, its 1.2Ghz CPU will not be up to the task). Or did I miss something?

Thank you very much for all your responses! Ideally I would like to put between 600 and 800$(depending on what I get in the end). What would bet the advantage of using a HP microserver? It will just cost more for the same thing? I'm really not affraid on having to build a custom thing(just don't know what kind of material to get to be compatible with the OS I choose). I'm not very familiar with the combo Plex+chromecast, but can this be used with only the NAS + the chromecast? Without a computer/phone/whatever that says that I want to stream to the tv? Because it's what I would like to avoid: I'm not the only one in the house, and it has to be easily usable for the other people which have all very different kind of devices. Currently I've a synology DS212, but I've a TV which has already 6 years and isn't supporting most of the AVI codecs, so I had to make transcoding, and the synology was just not up to the task, and additionally, the user experience through the menu of the television was very bad(slow, no informations/descriptions, no cover, ...). One of my goal of moving from my "old" synology is to get a better end user experience(no matters if it is hard to configure), so I thought that XBMC was a nice idea since it doesn't rely on the TV functionalities. As I was saying to TheGeekster, I'm not familiar with this, but how do you indicate to the chromecast that it has to read the media X? Is there some kind of devices which would allow me to get the Plex experience on the TV with a chromecast without having to start another computer to stream to the device?

Hi, It makes one week that I'm searching and making some tests but I can't figure out which would be the better solution. I'm looking for a device(either a standalone box, either a custom thing), which would cover: Raid(mirroring), with 2 disk(far enough for me) Share with windows Share with Mac Act as time machine Allow me to downloads bittorents files Allowing me to specify some seeding options(duration+ratio) Allow me to specify at the moment that I add the torrent, in which subdirectory it has to download the file Allow me to connect the NAS to the television through HDMI and present those media folders(XBMC/...) (= act as HTPC) I know that usually, it's not recommended to have an HTPC + NAS on the same machine, but in my case: I feel like having two different devices is slower than access directly on the disk I've not huge needs, either for NAS, either for the HTPC part It will take less space, less money, less power to have this at one place I can live if the System crash(as far as some shares(not the one used by the HTPC) are not impacted Currently I've a Synology, which gives access to my television(that is not so smart), but I've to transcode most of the format, which puts the NAS on his knees. For now I checked: Synology: Doesn't have the HTPC part QNAP (in my case, the TS-253): Seems to fill my needs, but it looks like expensive compared to the same hardware that I can get with the same money FreeNas: Currently in my tests with a Virtualmachine, I got a lot of errors, and I wasn't able to create the HTPC part, in addition I'm not very familiar with FreeBSD OpenMediaVault: I wasn't able to test the HTPC part, since it requires a Graphic acceleration that I wasn't able to setup with VirtualBox, I had issues with the installation of transmission(Errors on activation). So: Do you see any other distribution/system/box? Any advice on what to choose? Thank you very much for your time