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Originally Posted by AnotherMike
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I've been following this thread and like the idea of a NAS. I'm planning on copying a friend who picked up a second hand 5-drive Drobo unit (model 5N2) off of craigslist and loaded it up with large drives. He loaded a bunch of DVDs he owns as video files and it works fine. Any computer can access that directory on the Drobo and play a video file using VLC.
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I'm not too familiar with that product line, but it should work fine. It seems a bit large size and cost wise for most RVs to me, but if you have the space it should be OK. For anyone following along, keep in mind you will need a wired ethernet connection for most NAS devices. For most this means installing a wireless router in the same location as the NAS. The NAS then connects to the wireless router via ethernet cable and "clients"(TVs or media players) connect via wireless.
I'm sure there are tons of alternatives, but I've been very pleased with the Western Digital My Cloud NAS drives. Not to be confused with the "My Cloud Home" line of products. Very similarly named, but very different products. The My Cloud
Home are truly cloud based products that require Internet and a connection to Western Digital's cloud servers to work. To me, those are completely useless. However, the original My Cloud line,
https://smile.amazon.com/Cloud-Perso...dp/B00EVVGAC6/, do not require Internet to function and work well as local NAS storage. The single drive units are fairly compact. They are still a bit pricey, around $320 for 3TB, but can be found on EBAY for around $100 used.
If you only have one TV, you could get by with any USB direct attached hard drive. This requires a special cable and an additional app for use on the FireStick, but other media players and some TVs will support this directly. As others have suggested, you could use a USB "thumb" drive as well, but this would limit your size considerably.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AnotherMike
Quote trimmed for brevity...
Now how to play those on a TV... Some TVs can access a shared directory on a computer. Those should just play the file. Other TVs have an unused HDMI input connector. In that case I would use VLC on a laptop to play files stored on the Drobo, with a HDMI cable from the laptop to the TV.
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You can connect a laptop to the TV and use VLC, PLAYON, or another media player on the laptop. Personally, I find it to be clumsy and kludgy. The best "user experience" I've found so far is a media player, like the FireStick, loaded with Kodi. The FireStick plugs directly into the HDMI port. Kodi will play DVD ISO files as well as most media formats and you have access to FireStick "native" Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc... apps when Internet is available. I do find the FireStick interface to be rather clumsy when it can't connect to the Internet. You can still launch local apps like Kodi and VLC, but it's not at all intuitive. I still find it to be better than dragging out the laptop, dealing with two screens (the laptop and the TV), having to use a keyboard and mouse to navigate, no remote, finding a place to set the laptop so it can reach the TV and not be in danger of falling, etc...
A few TV's have Android OS built in and may support KODI or VLC directly, but the majority don't. Samsung smart TVs, for instance, use their proprietary OS and only support a handful of apps. As far as I can tell, none of the apps available to Samsung TVs will play network attached media.
As I previously suggested, you could use the laptop as a network hard drive instead of the NAS, external drive, or thumb drive. You would just make sure the laptop and TVs or media players were connected to the same network and share the media folder from the laptop.
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