PrinzPiuz

Software Engineer | Nuventure | Cochin

My Media Server Set-up

Published June 13, 2020 🕐 4 Mins

The reason I’m writing this blog because I learned lot of things while setting up my media server to current configuration, so this is kinda experience sharing, may be useful for those who trying one.

Little History 🕜

From my teenage itself I’m a binge movie watcher, at that time I saves money and buy DVDs of movies I like and I had a small collection of DVDs, then I brought a desktop PC, and it was time of USB sticks and it became little more easy and cheap to collect movies, still somebody need to download movies from torrent (thanks The Pirate Bay) or rip from DVDs,but still network speed was very low then(I had a BSNL bradband connection which had only 512kbps), With the arrival of 4G. everybody having lot of data and every body was downloading lot of movies, TV series, Documentaries..etc. and I set-up a Kodi server in pc and kodi client in mobile and streaming movies from pc to mobile through LAN, which changed a lot of things in my movie watching experience. like now I can watch movies from where ever I want, also I can watch in whatever style I want. Then I moved to Banglore for my intership and work. And it changed lot of things like it was an end to first era of my pc, after i went to Banglore nobody used my PC and it was turning to an E-waste, and I am forced to watch movies in my laptop (I always hated saving media files in my work machine). But I had to, But within year due to some personal issues I had to relocate to my home town. Also we had a new smart TV in home. Also a Fibre optic internet connection @ 50MbPS 😆 and I have got a plan for my old PC, Turning it to media server 🎦. so the set-up is like my old pc as emby server streaming contents to my TV through my Home LAN.and for performance i changed it to a minimal debian machine and all access through ssh from lap or phone through termux since there is no GUI I can save lot of memory.

That’s not the end. ❗

we need to put movies to server, TV shows and movies to their respective folders. These are the set-ups i tried so far….

  • scp its a secure file copying protocol for transferring file between two machines

    scp -r user@host:directory/SourceFolder TargetFolder

  • sshfs Basically it helps to mount file system from server in to our local machine, which gives us a GUI based interaction to server, so that we can edit files and move them to server like normal GUI thing,I created the following alias for the easy access of same

    alias mov="sudo sshfs user@host:directory/SourceFolder TargetFolder"

    this should be added to your corresponding rc file.

  • Custom Media Server Manager so this is a custom minimal server built with python and flask, flask is minimal python framework to build web application, and I run this in my server with uWSGI and nginx Features

    • Uploading to selected folder
    • Multi uploads
    • New folder creation
    • File listing
    • Multiple file deletion

    Limitations

    • Server management(on top of media i also need to watch this)
    • Chance of browser to crash while handling larger files(especially in mobile browser) *solution(upload in chunks)
    • No background task support
    • Hard to set-up for non technical people

    So I planned to build a dedicated Mobile application for the same which solves all above problem

  • MSM This is a dedicated mobile application for managing media server built with dart and flutter works on top of ssh, so no other dedicated set-up needed for this, only need to enable ssh connections to your server Features

    • Dedicated manager for Media servers
    • Works on top of ssh
    • Support background tasks
    • CRUD operations on files
    • Live shell(you can access server from mobile through terminal in application)
    • Save and run frequently used commands

    latest stable release can be Downloaded from here And this was very useful for me since I usually download movies in my phone. Ios version not yet available….