Any plans for a All Media Server ?

I worship the turnkey concept in appliances as being a fast and brilliant way for hosting it myself and have the full control, but I am missing the image with a full media (display/streaming/coding/encoding) functionality.

I am thinking in terms of: one place for all media in original fomats (video, music, pictures) in all sorts of encoding (MKV, VOB, MP3, MP4, JPG, TIFF aso.) with lots of integration possibilities.

As a former WHS (uuuhh) user I liked the concept of being able to access the media via different methods: SMB, DNLA, WEB, RDP, DVR, radio broadcasts with the possibility of lots of plugins and functionalities aso.

There must be a way to freely make a similar build that could easily expand into lots of specific use cases like for TVguide, HDHomeRun, Free WebTV, Galleries, Plex, HTPC, Playstation, Xbox aso.

Of course this should be able to be stored on an easily expandable redundant storage solution (NAS, iSCSI, NFS)

Everything running virtually of course.....

Am I too old fashioned or is this just a no go in terms of licenses and time spend on building such image ?

Just curious..

Replies (3)

Is this what you are after?

Reply 1 2016-03-30

One of our awesome community members; Jonathan Strubel has created a "Mediaserver" appliance that uses Emby server to provide DLNA streaming and on-the-fly transcoding; as well as a youtube-esque web browser media player. IMO it's pretty damn cool! TBH I'm not 100% whether it ticks all of your boxes but I think it should go pretty close!

We have imported it into the library and are just giving the new v14.1 release the final finishing touches prior to release. Mediaserver will be a new appliance for the v14.1 release. In the meantime, you can have a look a read and a look at the build code via it's GitHub repo. Actually the v14.1 images should be up on our mirror if you want to download and take it for a spin... :)

Constructive feedback of any sort warmly welcomed!

Have a look at Kodi.tv

Reply 2 2016-04-05

I've been using Kodi for a while now. Take a look. You won't regret it. It even plays ISO files. I would say that Turnkey could come out with a Kodi appliance, but they already have one on their site for various platforms.

But doesn't Kodi require a GUI?

Reply 3 2016-04-07

Last time I checked Kodi doesn't really work as a server because it requires a GUI to fully function. I know that it can serve content across the network (via DLNA AFAIK) but Windows Media Player does that too and you'd hardly call that a media server! :) Please correct me though if I've got something wrong...

The other really cool thing about Emby (as included in our mediaserver appliance) is that it can provide the database backend for Kodi so you can have multiple instances of Kodi on your network which all share the same library of media.

Also I don't think that Kodi provides a streaming media player that any web browser on the network can access...

Regardless, thanks for your input and I hope I don't sound like too much of a smartie pants.