# Building or buy a video server.



## Bryan6842003 (May 29, 2009)

I am looking for some knowledge on video servers.
I recently bought a Sony XBR6 TV and a Sony Blue ray Live player. 
I hooked the either net connection to my router, hoping to be able to access my media on my computer. (Laptop running XP) I guess nothing can be that simple, so I am looking for some more help. 
What I am going to be doing is saving movies (DVD's) to a hard drive and just use the TV to select what I want to play back. 
I thought about getting a NAS device for this, but I figure that I might want to someday be able to download movies from the internet or maybe watch streaming video something like Netflix. 
My thinking behind the NAS was that I could access it if I wasn’t at home. I also do a lot of photography and could use it to set up a FTP site for people to get their pic’s from. 

Can someone give me some suggestions as to what might work the best for what I am trying to do? :4-dontkno
I would consider building a system myself if it would save me some money. 
Thanks! 
Bryan


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## Raylo (Feb 12, 2006)

I'm not an expert on this but it seems like there are lots of ways to do parts of this but no way (yet) to have it all, at least simply. The thing I find most interesting is the convergence of TVs and PC functionality. My Samsung LCD TV has a network connection that can play media from computers on my network. My Blue Ray player also has a network connection that can stream NetFlix movies from the Internet over my home network to the TV. I think (hope?) they will keep building more functionality into the TVs' firmware, like a basic web browser to view web video-on-demand and a media player able to navigate to and play media located anywhere on the home network. I don't know why no one offers something likew this and hope it's just a matter of time.

Until that is available we have to set up some sort of media center PC, or media extender, and/or combine that with a NAS. Can be messy and expensive..... I haven't gone that route myself.


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