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Recently I have been moving my media collection into the 21st century. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you what it means to me. It means I should be able to easily access my ENTIRE collection from anywhere in the world and with ease.
So how does one do this?
With an investment of time and some money for sure, but the output is awesome! You will need the following:
1.) A computer with A LOT of storage
2.) Move all your media to a digital format on your computer hard drive
3.) A high-speed Internet connection
4.) A laptop, iPhone, iPad, or any mobile smartphone device
5.) A configurable router to enable a remote connection
6.) Some software for your computer and smartphone (I went through and reviewed quite a few and my final decision was to stick with ServeToMe / StreamToMe).
The emergence of all this will result in our very own YouTube, Google Video, Picasa Web, and Hulu all in one. You will create your own personal media cloud!
Step ONE – a computer with A LOT of storage
I recommend a desktop PC that you can just leave somewhere turned on with all your media loaded up on it. A laptop can be used as well, but getting the storage we need, will probably mean purchasing external HD cases and that just gets too messy. A nice tall desktop machine with bays to hold our HD's works best. So if you already have a desktop machine go buy yourself a nice 2TB drive. 2TB is equal to 2000GB. This should be enough to hold all your media files. These drives are extremely cheap nowdays (2011), going for roughly 60-80 USD.
Step TWO – Digitizing your media
We need to move all our media onto our computer. I'm sure most of you already have iTunes music, videos, and photos on your hard drives. So you are probably already half way done. Now you want to take all your DVDs, CDs, and any other media that you have that is NOT on your computer and copy it to your computer's hard drive. You can download free software that will rip your DVDs and CDs. If you have old family videos on VHS tapes, this is a bit more of a challenge but can definitely be done, and I highly recommend it! You will wish you had digitized those VHS tapes later in life when you can no longer watch them. I'm not going to go over this stuff in this write up, but you can Google search ways to get your media onto your computer. There are just too many options to go over in this article. Once you get all your media onto your computer, you will want to spend some time to organize and categorize it so that it's easy to navigate. Also clean up file names, etc. Let's assume you have completed this and move on to step 3.
Step THREE – An Internet connection
We will want a high-speed reliable Internet connection so that we can access our media anywhere we go. Get one, although I'm pretty sure you already have one, just make sure it's a fast connection.
Step FOUR – A mobile device or laptop to access your collection
Any modern smartphone will probably do (iPhone or Android recommended). For the purpose of this article, I will be using my iPhone.
Step FIVE – Configure your router
In order to access your media remotely you will need to use software on your computer and enable that software to communicate through your router. This is where things get a little technical and you will need to know how to setup port forwarding on your router. This is not as difficult as it sounds. You can easily find tutorials online on how to do this as well as in your router's instruction manual. Most software will communicate on specific ports and once you open those ports, communication can occur between your computer and your mobile device (through your router). If you do not open these ports your router (who is between you and your computer) will block the communication.
You will want to use WOL (wake on LAN) to send a WOL packet to your computer to remotely turn on your computer. This way you can easily turn on / off your computer and access your media anytime you want.
It gets a bit technical and if you do not want to worry about this, there is an easy solution … just leave your computer on 24/7. I like the WOL because this allows me to leave my PC off when it's not needed and then turn if on with the click of a button, regardless where I am in the world. I recommend a free iPhone app called iWake. All you need to do is configure your router to allow communication on UDP port 9 to the broadcast IP address (ie 192.168.1.255) and then you can send that wake up magic packet.
You just install the iWake iPhone app. Then provide it with your global IP address and your computer's MAC address … and viola you're done. Now just click on your computer in the app, and within seconds your PC at home will turn on. Awesome right?
Step SIX – Configuring your software to access your media
So I went and tried out a few of the iPhone app / media servers available in iTunes. I tried the following:
Orb
Air Video
StreamToMe / ServeToMe
Here are my findings:
Orb was bloated, glitchy, and their iPhone app was 10 USD. Why is it always the companies that look big and legit always have the most expensive and buggy software on iTunes?
Air Video was nice and easy to setup. They have a paid version and a free version. The free version is useless for normal use, but good enough to test out the software and their media server (limits you to only a few video files). The interface was OOOOOKAY, StreamToMe blows them out of the water, but my main problem with Air Video was that it only supports video files?!?! Why!?!? Why bother making any media software these days if they can not handle our music, videos, and pictures? Stay on the bench if you do not plan to play the right way.
StreamToMe turned out to be the best software. The iPhone app is BEAUTIFUL and it loads your folders (even those with hundreds of items) instantly and the video thumbnails load EXTREMELY fast as well. This is all over my DSL connection for my PC and my 3G network for my iPhone. My computer is a Intel Core 2 Duo so it can render the video files fairly quickly. But I was impressed how fast the videos started after clicking on them. It only takes 2-3 seconds from clicking on the video file to it actually playing. Which is really impressive!
The server software (ServeToMe) is completely free and very easy to setup. It's basically just one window that allows you to add media folders that you want to share and tells you what port it's communicating on. So you just need to configure your router to forward that port to your computer and you should be all set. It also gives you the option of setting your own port to use (I recommend this so that others do not know what you are using, always good to NOT use the default ports applications use) as well as a username and password to access your media library (definitely do this!)
So once I got the server setup, then it was time to download the iPhone app, which is called StreamToMe. This app is sold in the iTunes store for 2.99 USD. Just load it up and then click edit to add your media server. You'll need to put in your global IP address and the port you configured on the server. Odds are your global IP address is always changing and you will want to setup a Dynamic DNS service. Check out my write up on how to do this on my blog site.
After you get the connection details added, click on the server to connect, and it will prompt you for your username / password. Then once your credentials are confirmed you will see all your media folders you added to the server. Then you can browse through and click on any of your files to play. That's it! Now you have your entire media collection at your disposal ANYWHERE and at ANYTIME. Is not that cool!
I was waiting for my wife the other day at the train station and got bored. So I opened up my iPhone app "iWake", turned on my computer with the app, then opened up StreamToMe and started watching an episode of Cheers!
Gotta love technology!
*** Note one thing about my setup. I am able to remotely turn on my PC with my iPhone app and then immediately access my media collection through the StreamToMe app. This is possible because I have setup the ServeToMe software to automatically start when Windows boots up (prior to a having a user logon). As far as I know, the ServeToMe can only run when the user logs in. You can get around this by setting up a task in Windows Task Scheduler to launch upon Windows start up. How to do this is really a tutorial in itself. If you would like to know how, please check out my Author Bio.
Another software that I saw some people reviewed was Remote Potato, but because it had a $ 7 price tag versus a 3 $ one like StreamToMe, I tested out StreamToMe first. And since StreamToMe did everything I needed … flawlessly, I did not bother to mess with Remote Potato. Advice to app developers, ALWAYS have a free version, especially with something like this, at least then people will give your app a try and see if it's something they like. Software makers have always given out demo versions, and with stupid Apple's policy of ALL SALES ARE FINAL, you need this demo / free version more now than ever.
I hope you found this article helpful in setting up your access ANYWHERE / ANYTIME media server !! I love the fact that I can be relaxing on a beach anywhere in the world and have the ability to turn on my computer and fire up an old movie, family video, tv show, or photo album … all with a few taps of my iPhone.
Written by Josh R Bellendir, 2/27/2011
Check out http://jbelendir.com for more articles, stories, tutorials, and reviews!
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