[Raspberry Pi General] Cab121:
I finished my initial RasPi mission.

Problem:

To share media across an entire home via streaming from a single source you typically need multiple computers working. This scope of this setup is usually to host entire media libraries including terabytes of movies, music, and pictures on the fly to any digital media player. The standard architecture for a media network is as follows.

File server: Setup with raid and file sharing.

Media server: This manages the media database, file locations, artwork, meta data, and transcode to your media streaming device.

DVR server: Mostly self explanatory. Slap in a bunch of tuners and all your TV streaming can be recorded and redistributed by this.

Media player: DLNA or other. Pulls your media and plays it on your TV.

I know what your thinking. "But Cab121 why cant you just do some of those tasks on one server? Thats just silly to have all that going on." Bottom line is you can interchange most of the above tasks and reduce the amount of servers yes. Some of them however cant be done together. Its ridiculous I know but I literally have tried almost every solution available and every one source solution has overwhelming issues in one form or another. The biggest problem I ran in to is Media management, database management , and transcending wont happen on the same machine. Not in a stable or desirable manner. Again tons of solutions that claim to do it but its just simply not going to work. Unless your a Linux god and know exactly what your doing and have a lot of time to stitch it all together. I have nether.

Up until recently my current configuration has been

Media/File Server: a WHM server with MyMovies Media server handling all the tasks except transcodeing.

Small Media Server: Win7 and Media center to handle all the transcodeing and codecs for media playing. Even had to use PS3 Server aka* PMS to handle Sony stuff. It worked fine but always a PITA to make changes or trace issues on setups like this. Forget about updates cause that will throw all your stuff out of whack.

This whole thing was driving me nuts because its a wast of power to run multiple servers and I keep looking at it thinking why do I need a semi truck to tow a bass boat.

Enter The Raspberry Pi

So I had orders one to play around with a few ideas. I very quickly stumbled on XBMC for Raspberry Pi. So I started to play with it as a media player just for kicks. I then noticed with a "HOLY CRAP!" this thing can host and transcode on the fly. It had media management and scrapers to modify and change media database as you and, move or remove media. I about felll out of my chair. Technically the RasPi can play media and host it at the same time but this proves to be a little to much task wise. It is excellent at ether task though.

Fast forward a montage and some trials..........!

I ended up with a Raspberry Pi, 8gig Class10 SD, with Rasbmc.

Still have one machine as a lone file server running the raid drives.

This setup has been running great for over a month and has been serving up multiple rooms at the same time with no issues.

Next step is to get rid of the file sever and replace it with a multi drive NAS raid. Simple to do and the RasPi handles everything else. This will take 1000w off my power bill, reduce the noise and making management a cake walk.