How to watch movies from unraid server

[AshesAndWool]

Hey guys, stupid question. I am planning to build an unraid server, but there is one thing I don't get. If I were to transfer a library of ripped 4k blue ray movies and music over to the unraid server and organise it neatly in unraid or file explorer, is it possible to just click on the movie on my desktop pc and stream them live from my server? I see that everyone is using plex, but what exactly is the purpose of plex, why can't you just use the server as a video player and a library? 

[ColeIsDaBest]

The purpose of plex is to help you organize your media and view it on devices that do not support downloading the file from file explorer (like a phone). Movies are huge so it makes no sense for a phone to download a 40GB movie to internal storage and then play it, it needs to download part of it, play it, delete it and repeat. The server does this via a client app or web-page and the server also does some transcoding in order to take some work off of the client device.

 

I personally use Nextcloud and JellyFin. I encourage you to check them out .

[Jarsky]

You can direct play from your PC's by just opening it via a network share, same as you would any movie on your desktop. For mobile devices you can do this as well through more advanced File Explorers like ES File Explorer that support samba.  

 

Plex and Emby allow you to build libraries and stream direct to devices through the app or a browser, and allow more advanced features like being able to transcode (convert video on the fly) to devices that dont support the video format or cannot play off the network share.