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Comment by trome | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, can vouch for Owncloud (although I've moved to the NextCloud fork), its a convenient replacement for Dropbox, just thrown an OrangePi Zero ($7), a JMS567 USB 3.0 to Sata adapter ($3) and any old HDD and you've got yourself a libre Dropbox that uses just a few watts and works consistently on all platforms.

Note that the Wifi drivers aren't libre, but besides that everything else on the OrangePi Zero, from audio to ethernet is in kernel 4.10 under GPLv2.

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Do you think something like this is feasible for a home media server? I suspect things like video streaming from this would be slow, am I wrong?

Am not OP, and not speaking from direct experience,

but a coworker was using a Pi-2 as a home media server without issue in some situations - basically he did the math on the bitrates per second and determined that the disk/wifi I/O (on the shared USB bus) was fast enough for his use case (IIRC streaming to main TV, possibly 1-2 more devices)

I do know he was looking at upgrading to another mini-arm board with a dedicated PCI Nic or separate SATA due to the bus contention on the USB limiting data/network I/O because he wanted to serve more clients (family of 5 and associated devices)

so I guess the short answer is 'maybe, depending on use case'..

The OrangePis have much better IO (with the exception of the OrangePi+ 2, which is a bad buy), with each USB port being direct wired & capable of 40MB/s, and an onboard 100mbps PHY. Comparatively, the Raspi shoves all that over 1 USB port, ethernet included, so 4 to 5MB/s is about the best your gonna get with it.

>Do you think something like this is feasible for a home media server?

Absolutely. It's easy to install, works great, the only problem you need to solve is DNS. Either you need to use a service to point the domain to your dynamic IP or rent a static IP for your home address, which could pot expose your home network to attacks.

>things like video streaming from this would be slow

Depends on your uplink. Probably. If your home internet is fast you can stream for yourself or even a couple of people, but you can't really run a video streaming operation. It's easy math, just watch your bandwidth while your stream a video. On private customer plans, uplinks are usually artificially made a fraction of the bandwidth of downlinks by ISPs because they want businesses to be unable to run on them and buy the more expensive options instead

Well, you're probably not going to push 4K reliably. I have a feeling that tech will actually catch on, as opposed to 3D.

If you get an OrangePi 2e ($35) or an OrangePi PC2 ($20) both have gigabit that performs well, you could easily push 4k reliably from either. They also have libre VPU support so you can playback 4k content if you plug in an HDMI cable.

You don't need to stream the data from the OPi, that is the wrong way for watching video because it would transcode the data on a light processor then send it unpacked on the network, which would consume a lot more bandwidth.

Once you have the files on the disk attached to the board just set up a NFS and/or SMB server on it and let the clients players mount it as a network drive and suck the data. This way you can for example have all home TV sets playing each one a different movie at the same time.

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