Noob home network media share (non-RISC OS)

Long time, no see! Home network media share opinions/experience/advice (non-RISC OS) sought.

We’re moving into the 21st century at home with a networked music system.¹ After much deliberation, followed by a product withdrawal scare… we now have the unit, a pair of conventional (wired) speakers and (so far) one Wi-Fi speaker. Legacy sources look to be easily workable.

(If you’ve bothered to read this far and are already wondering why we don’t use a Raspberry Pi, that’s a good thought. But us being able to control practically everything with ease from the mobile phone app and also the included remote control is one reason why this wasn’t seriously considered.)

I intend to format-shift some music to FLAC, to be stored/accessed from a physical source under local control, probably network attached.² This is relatively new territory and we’ve yet to purchase the NAS. It would appear that (after ripping with Exact Audio Copy, dBpoweramp or similar) running BubbleUPnP and MinimServer should do the trick. The system is networked via Ethernet cable and I don’t intend to provide it with the Wi-Fi password.

My NAS criteria³ are:

• reliable
• low power, i.e. likely ARM
• low noise
• overabundant storage capacity/speed for audio⁴
• auto backup/redundancy (I’ve read a few things about different RAID options but am not at all familiar with this)

I figured you peeps might be knowledgeable and willing to provide a few pointers, or suitable links elsewhere.

¹ just 12 months after actually buying a TV

² cheaper and simpler to start with a USB stick or external HDD – might it be prudent for me to trial things this way, despite wasted time/effort?

³ WIP

⁴ may be replaced with larger drive(s) in future, e.g. if usage ultimately evolves to encompass videos

I have an Orange Pi Zero with the USB expansion board so it can have a couple of hard drives plugged in. Probably better hardware choices out there. But it’s running Armbian with a mainline kernel and currently has a couple of 2TB Seagate hard drives plugged in.
It serves media through MiniDLNA. It is also set up for SMB, NFS, pi hole DNS, Git, svn, sometimes Calibre book server and probably other things.
The Android devices and Ps4 see the DLNA server on the network. Can’t comment on PCs.
Of all of them, calibre is the The real resource hog. I also recommend having a swap file or partition set up on a hard drive too for just in case.

I don’t have a backup strategy in place for media though.

E: Don’t use NTFS on the hard drive. It’s slow and CPU hungry in Linux.

My general purpose Pi3 is happily running Moonfish under RISCOS, serving up a 160GB hard drive salvaged out of a laptop and a 320GB Sonnics hard drive, visible on my Mac & various family laptops with various ages of Windoze on them. Working beautifully. No reason to doubt it would manage much bigger drives happily.

Thanks. I’ll have to try MiniDLNA and Moonfish too when I get things sorted out. :-)

I installed Emby on my server, which hosts all my movies, TV series, music etc. There’s front ends for it, for most platforms and smart apps for some TV’s, so it makes access very easy via a nice interface.

For devices that have no direct support, it has a web site GUI and streams whatever you attempt to play in a format the browser supports. It also provides DLNA if you’re really desperate.

I’d also recommend using Emby, it’s very straightforward to setup and there’s apps for most major platforms – Android, iOS, the major games consoles etc.

If you have an old PC knocking about, you could turn that into a NAS to save a few pennies. Chuck a few hard drives into it, stick something like FreeNAS on it (or FreeBSD if you’ve got less than 8GB of RAM on the machine) then install Emby and you’re off and running.

My home server (based on an 8 year old AMD-based PC) has been running FreeBSD with 3TB of storage (using RAID for redundancy) on it for many years now and it does everything I need. It’s a media server, file server, DNS server and quite a bit more. The benefit of using an old machine instead of a NAS is you get full control of it, whereas the Western Digital NAS I had a few years ago would allow command-line access but it was so locked down that I couldn’t do much with it.

What’s the electricity consumption of your PC? How long would it take to spend the price of a Pi?

Not to mention the space it takes up.

It’s been a few years since I’ve worked out exactly how much it uses, but I do remember that it amounted up to something like a pound or two’s worth of electricity per year. It has a 450W power supply, so in terms of consumption it will be hungrier in the grand scheme of things compared with a Pi, but it’s not costing me enough to make me really want to change.

Another point I forgot to mention in my previous post, if OP ends up going for an out-of-the-box NAS system, it’s worth really reading up on the security side of it if you’re planning on connecting to it from outside your home network. The WD NAS I had was terrible security-wise, even with up-to-date firmware it was running a version of ProFTPd from 2005 coupled with an ancient version of the Linux kernel.

Don’t forget that many NAS boxes also come with the ability to run ‘apps’ such as music servers, backup devices, CCTV monitoring, etc. I run LMS (Logitech Media Server) on my QNAP NAS which feeds a number of Squeezebox devices around the house with FLAC music files, internet radio and other audio streaming services. I also access the audio files on the RISC OS devices via Sunfish. There are other music server app options that can be installed on the NAS, such as Kodi and I think Emby is available too. The NAS is going to be running full time, so it makes sense to use it as the host filing system for your media files and as the music/video server too.

It has a 450W power supply

But is obviously not using 450W continuously – that would be costing you a pound or so a day! I have to say I’m very surprised if it’s only costing you a pound or two a year. The Pi would cost you more than that, running continuously.

like a pound or two’s worth of electricity per year. It has a 450W power supply

No.

Let’s assume the supply is 500W to keep the maths simple. A unit of electricity is a “kilowatt hour”, or in other words a steady consumption of a kilowatt over the course of an hour. If your power supply is 500W, then that’s a unit every two hours. Let’s now assume a unit is 10p (with tax and stuff added; actual figures vary wildly). Every two hours of use will cost you 10p. If it is left on for 24h, that’s £1.20 per day. In the course of a year, that’s going to run you to a figure in the ballpark of £435.

That’s why I don’t like running my PC too much. It plus monitor come to ~250W so halve that figure.

The Pi, on the other hand, runs off a little USB power supply and it’s super-efficient. I think I calculated Pi and Vonets left on 24/7 for a year would cost me around €10 (say eight quid).

Eight quid versus maybe four hundred and something.

<mic drop>

ROFL

Rick’s iron fist or my velvet glove? Saying the same thing, of course :-)

I think you might be overstating the case a little though Rick – surely no-one would leave the monitor running all the time on their server? And an idling PC with its hard discs sensibly not spinning most of the time will be using a fair bit less than 250W. But one hell of a lot more than a Pi, certainly – which itself costs, as you say, more like £8 a year than one or two.

Sadly, Moonfish doesn’t automagically act as a raid. But two Pis running Moonfish (still only ~£16 a year to run…) coupled up to TimeMachine on the Mac does admirably.

Keep in mind that I originally stated I was going off memory, so common sense would dictate not to take such a figure as gospel ;)

You’re also not taking into account how long a system might be in use for, let alone if it runs at full load when it’s in use. Also, if a system is running headless with no GUI at all installed, then power consumption will also be considerably less.

I’d be surprised if my server is running anything higher than 180-200W when in use – it also runs most of its tasks in the early hours when I get a cheaper electricity rate, but let’s not get into that.

So if a server is in use for say, 20 minutes worth of file transfers a day, and 2 hours worth of streaming – which still doesn’t constitute anything near full load, the costs will be much, much lower per year than that 400 figure. Yes probably more than a pound or two, but considering my entire home costs about £750 a year electricity-wise, it’s cheap enough to not make me want to switch to something like a Pi.

You’re also not taking into account how long a system might be in use for, let alone if it runs at full load when it’s in use.

I was – hence my comment about Rick overstating the case a little.

You’d save the price of a Pi in less than a year, pretty certainly. And the Pi makes a very capable server – although it would be hard pressed to stream video at any decent resolution, obviously. But then so would an old PC.

But of course not everyone needs to save pennies quite as assiduously as Rick & I do.

You’re also not taking into account how long a system might be in use for, let alone if it runs at full load when it’s in use. Also, if a system is running headless with no GUI at all installed, then power consumption will also be considerably less.

It doesn’t really work like that, though. A computer running headless as a server isn’t going to use significantly less power when it’s idle, unless you spin the drives down.

I also happen to know that a PC built for such a purpose, using an efficient PSU, low power motherboard, two RAID discs plus a single backup disc, and so on, runs headless at a fairly constant 60-70W.

That works out at around £80 per year, give or take. That’s around ten of Rick’s Pi’s.

And the difference pays for my two Pi solution in under two years. But two Pis aren’t a RAID, although the difference is minor if what you’re mainly doing is backing up a Mac running Timemachine.

And the difference pays for my two Pi solution in under two years.

Indeed. You would certainly need another reason, on top of storing files and serving media, to use a full PC over something like a Pi.

But two Pis aren’t a RAID, although the difference is minor if what you’re mainly doing is backing up a Mac running Timemachine.

Two discs are not RAID. The difference is actually quite key, which is why my setup uses both: RAID for the main storage, and a simple disc for the backup.

Out of interest, anyone happen to know how many Watts an ArmX6 consumes?

considering my entire home costs about £750 a year electricity-wise

It costs me about that per quarter! The thought of running a PC based server makes me feel ill. With the hard drives on my little ARM server they are set up with a fairly aggressive 10 minute spindown.
Its worth pointing out that the Orange Pi Zero uses a quad core SoC. So it does have a little grunt behind it when needed. Only 512MB max and 100Mbit ethernet so not great if you need high speeds. As for RAM, not having xorg running leaves most of it free.

The thought of running a PC based server makes me feel ill.

I did the sums and figured out that running a Windows Web server 24/7 was cheaper than what I was paying a hosting company. Now that I have the server at home, I’ve started using it for other things too (mass storage for ripped DVDs etc!)

Two discs are not RAID. The difference is actually quite key, which is why my setup uses both: RAID for the main storage, and a simple disc for the backup.

All true, but only true if your RAID really is your main storage, directly attached to the machine you’re working on. If the single hard drive built in to your Mac mini (or attached to your Pi) is really your main storage, and your RAID is an NAS that TimeMachine (or you) back up to, then the advantage over two separate Pi NASes is minimal. Real, but minimal.

There is an issue with accessing Moonfish shares in Linux. Many Linux programs, most notably UI based ones seem to create temporary files using a certain algorithm for generating filenames. The filename format is incompatible with the translated Moonfish filenames.
I had to resort to using mc to copy files back and forth.

Ah, sad. I’m mainly accessing the Pi’s Moonfish from a Mac, occasionally from Windoze. And all the filenames are things I’ve written myself.

It’s the transient temporary files which are the stumbling point. For some reason xorg applications love them. They can be there and then gone in a heartbeat. They can flick into existence while saving, or copying files. I couldn’t find a way to disable them or change the way they ar generated. Such a shame because I like using the Geany IDE on remote files.