How to setup a home entertainment network for cheap??
This is another quick 2 minute read in the series of post Feb posts on my blog, Live More For Less. I'm sure you'll find it to be quite helpful for your home/office audio-video ecosystem.
When one hears terms such as DNLA, home networking, multimedia streaming devices, etc one usually gives up in the first few seconds into the conversation unless he/she is technically sound person. However, doing is surprisingly cheap and easy!
Here, I'm going to tell you how you could go about creating a home entertainment network where in you could dump all your movies, sitcoms, photos, documents, etc. on a network linked storage drive and access all of this content on ANY TV screen/mobile device/computer in the house or even from outside the house in some cases. This whole thing can be setup in your existing ecosystem at an additional one time cost of about 5-10k only!
Things you will need (if you already don't have):
OK, so lets get to it. First let me tell you what is a NAS drive. It's nothing but a hard drive with a LAN output (like the internet terminal on your laptop) instead of the traditional USB out. Unlike the traditional HDD's a NAS drive isn't portable; it works on power and is to be kept connected to your wifi router.
How to setup the NAS drive?
STEP 1: Connect the NAS drive in one of the 4 output slots on your router using a LAN cable.
STEP 2: Join your home wifi network using a laptop/computer.
STEP 3: You'd see the drive magically appear in your 'My Computer/Finder' under network devices.
STEP 4: Copy all your content to the NAS drive.
STEP 5: Seamlessly access all your content from 'source' menu on your smart TV (connected to your wifi network) or from your mobile device via an app
Note: If you live in a big house you might wanna install two wifi routers instead of one to ensure smooth functioning on all TV screens.
A NAS drive takes home entertainment to another level. Over weekends, you could have family movie nights in blu-ray print (downloaded from the web) right on the TVs without any kind of buffering or attaching pen drives etc. It also let's you keep your laptops/computers decluttered at all times by storing all your data on the NAS drive. You can even set new downloads to be directly saved to the NAS drive instead of your computer. Not only that, you can remotely access all of this data too from anywhere in the world. It's like a personal cloud!
There are some great NAS drives on the market today with some of them also usable directly as media players. They range from 5-10k depending the capacity. In my home, I'm using a WD 3TB NAS. It works wonders! Below are some recommendations for you guys.
Looking forward to reading your feedback :)
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