Helping A Friend With Media.

[The3rdWalker 1,279]

So I'm ready to make some recommendations but I'd like to pass it by y'all first for opinions. A good friend of mine and rugby team mate has had issues with streaming media from his MacBook so he purchased a cheap HP for extra storage space.

I instantly wondered why he did not store things on an external which he has and says still isn't very smooth or can't even access it all.

What I found out was all media other than photos is stored on iTunes, iCloud. I asked him to send me an email so I can get everything he expects on paper.

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- Looking to be able to store all of my media in one place

- Looking to have easy, smooth access to all media

- External hard drive doesn't seem to work for me because most of my music is downloaded through iTunes

- I like the idea of having a SSD... they are quicker and less prone to break (I'm told this is because of less moving parts???)

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Now I'm going to be under the assumption the issues is going to be with buying music and media through Apple and their death grip style DCMA with media. It would make sense for me who torrents movies and music to store and run them from an external as oppose to him who goes through iTunes and purchases them.

I explained RPM speeds for externals, hard drives and hybrid/ SSD hard drives.

He was planning on buying another Windows OS laptop that has more storage. What I wanted to recommend was just increasing cloud and iTunes storage.

TL:DR my friend is running out of media storage and is discouraged by external devices and has purchased a Windows laptop with higher hard drive space.

How would you handle this?

[Plumbers Crack 4,083]

I have an external NAS drive for media with iTunes set to use it for storage which works quite well.

A few years back Didds got me part way through ripping my DVD's as well but that is a bit more problematical and has had a limited success.

I stream the music through a laptop and also a Sonos Play 3 which worked reasonably well until they fecked up the app that controls it.

Videos are streamed through a WD TV Live unit reasonably successfully, mainly because the house is wired with a CAT5 system. Is your friend trying to stream videos wirelessly as that may be a cause of his video problems

[Diddums 4,350]

Get a Synology NAS and install Plex on it. 

 

Synology for storage, Plex will automagically transform any films or TV shows into a wonderful interface, adding cast, credits, the lot. XBMC is also an option, but it's recently been renamed to Kodi.