Perfect home setup?

[Beamboat]

Hello 

 

First of all this is my first post (I have read the beginner's guide), sorry in advance if I'm in the wrong section.

 

After years with a simple macbook pro, I'm considering the options to build the perfect home setup, where all my data is centralized in a hub that can be accessed through a laptop, TV, tablet... I have no budget or deadline for now, and I am more interested in knowing if my idea is feasible (even if for that I have to spend a bit more time through settings and stuff) than choosing gear today. My data would mainly be:

- Movies/music that would be streamed, sometimes at the same time if 2/3 people are watching separately

- Pictures

- Personal stuff

- OneDrive backup

- Games

 

My questions are mostly basic, as I don't know anything about what I want to build, but any help is appreciated  

 

1) From what I gathered, having a NAS and use Plex would allow me to stream my media on the TV, but also on any other device connected to my network. Is this considered a reliable solution? Movies would be 1080p.

 

2) Do I need to encode all my media a certain way if I want everything to run smoothly?

 

3) After 5 years on a macbook, I long for gaming, and would like to play some games when I'm at home and not studying. From what I head, it's possible to stream games from a desktop computer to a TV or weaker laptop without a hassle. Do you think it can be achieved with a NAS, or is it not flexible enough? 

 

4) Would using SSDs instead of hard drives improve the global setup?  

 

5) In order to connect everything like this, would I need an AppleTV/Chromecast/whatever?

 

The way I see it, I would like to use my computer/phone/tablet (if/when I have one) to launch a movie from the NAS to the TV, for instance. I'd also like to add further down the line some multi room speakers, so I can also control (again, from my phone, tablet or computer) where the sounds goes as well. 

 

Anyway, this is how I imagined my perfect home set up as a newbie. Although I don't know much regarding how to set up properly all of this, I'm eager to learn. I'd be happy to hear what you think about it  and if you have beter ideas about how to set up something like this in a house, there are very welcome!

[Ketterer]

Ok, So depending how hardcore you would want to go there a few options. 

My recomendation is to use kodi and steam on a well speced gaming rig with a nas to store your media.

You could build a highend gaming rig and run it as a nas server, or in addtion to the nas. You could use Kodi for an amazing way to present your media around the house, or plex for going outside your LAN. 

building a good large storage nas with a few TB with raid will be a huge benifit, and then run kodi on your gaming rig. Kodi works really well, its open source and you can leave it up and have a place to launch steam big picture mode. streaming Games is pretty easy with steam. 

If you use a nas you can add it to kodi on the gaming rig and then kodi can easily be used to serve your LAn with media, including stop and play in anther room, watched and un watched and pretty much anything you would need, it also runs on almost anything these days.

 

Your other option would be loosing the games and just have a file nas with plex 

[Djole123]

Maybe you should get something like those 2 rigs in one video that Linus made, and than hook up the PC with a TV tuner card to a TV, and than run Windows Media Center on the TV (since WMC has support for TV cards). Though you will need 2 GPUs plus a CPU with an iGPU. You can look at Linus' video to see how can you do it. SSD's will make your experience better. You will also need a strong CPU like an i7

Edit: you can use RDP to have your games on the go

[Beamboat]

@Ketterer : I just looked at the differences between kodi and plex on this website. Wouldn't Plex be more relevant Kobi, as I want all my media to be centralized in the NAS, and then run several plex clients through my different devices? Or is Kobi (if I got your message correctly) able to mix databases into a single interface, which could allow me to launch games in my tv/laptop/whatever by streaming them from my rig? 

 

@Djole123 : My main concern would be that from a central database that gather both media and games, I could access them on as many different devices as possible. 

Also, let's say I build what Linus did in his video, a NAS with two VMs on the side. Would that mean I have to configure the TV recognise only one VM, or could I change that as easily as switching channels? 

[Ketterer]

Kodi can do movies, music, pictures, and can also launch external apllications like steam, which if launched in big picture mode, can can then stream games. Kodi, In my Opinion has a better front end and looks nicer, and is more customizable and works great for sharing on LAN (not out tho then plex has them beat) Plex originally was built from Kodi. 
Kodi works as a really great tenfoot interface for everything you could ever want a computer to do in a livingroom, and scales really well all the way down to phones.

Last time i checked out plex its interface was pretty lacking, but I havent tried it for any length of time for a while

[Ketterer]

you can still technically use plaex to serve the media to kodi around your house also, kodi just works really well as a client and interface and it does have serving capabilities of its own for Lan that work really well

Kodi is kind of the orginal and free opensource version with more bells and wilstles but a little less polish, its versitile and free, 

[Djole123]

You just have to configure the actual VM. You can use Homegroup to connect all Windows devices with Windows 7 or better. So that means if you have, for example, those VM's and a Windows tablet/laptop, you'd be able to access all of the contents of each device, as long as they are connected to the same router over WiFi or LAN.