UNSUBSCRIBE from Streaming Services | START YOUR OWN Media Server!

Hello everyone, welcome back to the channel. I'm Logan and here at Two Guys Tech it's pretty well established that we believe the

media

you watch in

your

home should be in

your

home and if you've ever subscribed to a

streaming

service like Netflix or Prime Video only to have them remove a show you wanted to see. I'm sure you can understand where we're coming from and especially as

streaming

services

are implementing increasingly intrusive methods to control your access and secure it. spend more money on the same service, it's

start

ing to get to the point where it's like the old cable TV subscriptions that so many people were trying to get rid of in the first place, almost everyone is raising prices.

Prime Video will introduce ads. at its current paid tier and Netflix is ​​dropping something like 31 different movies and several seasons of TV shows in February alone, so if you haven't gotten a good look at them yet, it's time to get to work or you can look for some alternative alternatives. If you're interested in seeing what it would look like to cut the cord forever and gain real control over your ability to access the content you want to watch in your own home, that's what I'll try to cover. In this video and although we have done some videos like this in the past, the solutions we have covered have been a bit expensive or more of a DIY project that might not suit most people's needs very well to replace the streaming

services

.

Without too much cost or complexity, you'll need a few things, first of all, a place to store your movies and TV shows, like a computer hard drive

server

or a Naz, as well as a place to get your movies and TV shows, like a DVD. or a Blu-ray disc and a way to burn your movies and TV shows to its storage like a Blu-ray optical drive that your computer may already have built in for your

media

storage while you can use any type of parts you want. want and there are plenty of great options on the market right now, today we'll tackle this task with the terramaster F2 2212 network attached storage for a couple of reasons: it's very reasonably priced at $170, it's extremely powerfully efficient and we think it'll fit the bill. fits most people's needs very well and in full disclosure Terramaster provided us with this Nest to review so we want to thank them for New Zealand being the heart of their entire streaming system this is the place where your media collection will be stored on your storage drives, where your storage is configured to access your network and where you can run some software to organize those media files and play them on different devices such as your phone's computer or your smart tv.

The F2 212 is a fairly basic option, offering a quad-core ARM processor with hardware video encoding, 1GB of DDR4 RAM and a single GB Ethernet port, and while it's nothing to write home about with a fully built plastic and a very minimalist design, the advantage here is that the F2 212 is really efficient, so you can leave it running all the time and have it available 20 247 to play your media, just hide this next to your modem or internet router and you'll basically be ready to go with the 2 3 and the 1 12. Each of the hard drive bays on the front can accept up to a 22 terb drive, so in theory you could have 44 terabs of storage running on your media

server

, which is roughly equivalent to something like 1,760 Blu-ray movies, all in this compact box.

More realistically though, some of the best deals you can get for hard drives right now are in the 8-16 tab capacity range and you'll want to protect your data by mirroring those drives that the nas manages automatically, that way if one of your hard drives simply gives up the ghost without warning, you won't be left without any of your data on the subject of data, although the other big elephant in the room is how you can get popular movies and TV shows in your home. without the help of streaming services, and in reality, the answer is probably a lot more than you think.

Just go to eBay, search for something you want to watch, and see if you can find it on physical Blu-ray. iCal media is by far the best way to get access to a movie or TV show in my opinion because you can get simple 1080p Blu-Rays for very little money and once you have that disc you can watch it as many times as you like. you want, it doesn't use any of your Internet bandwidth. looks better thanks to higher bitrates and typically offer more advanced lossless audio codecs. You can even use the special features on the disc if you want, but I would also say that discs are not really the best way to watch that content, especially for a TV show, a single season can be split across multiple discs and each season usually has its own separate release, so you could probably end up with a ton of discs, and Blu-ray players aren't the most reliable discs on the planet either. they themselves can even get scratched or dropped potentially unusable and that's where media extraction comes in, take an optical drive, plug it into your computer and use software like make MKV which is a free download on Windows, Mac OS and Linux , copy the video from the disc to a file that you can host over the network for 1080p Blu-rays.

This is a plug-and-playy process with most Blu-ray drives you can get on Amazon and this process will maintain the full quality of the movie as it is on the disc. 4K Blu-rays like this can be more complicated, but in any case we've already made several videos on this exact topic and I'll leave a link to our most recent guide in the description so you can get an idea of ​​how it works, but first, Let's configure our Nas to store our media. I'm going to put in a couple of hard drives that I already had on hand and once that's done, hook up power and an Ethernet.

Plug in and turn on the NAS. Our terramaster unit here uses an app called Taz PC app to automatically discover the nas on your network and make it accessible on any regular PC or Mac, so we went ahead, grabbed it and it quickly found the configuration interface for our Naas so we could configure the software, these were some pretty generic things, like installing the Terramaster OS, creating user accounts, overall it only took about 15 minutes and voila, we were done with it and created a shared folder on our Naz. which is a network location you can use to access NZ files from a desktop or phone, for example, and that was done quite easily from the Terramaster web control panel.

You can customize the settings here by creating more user accounts and restricting folder access to certain ones, but for simplicity's sake we're just running everything through the same account, you don't really need anything more than that in most scenarios, inside that i created a couple of folders to hold my tv shows and movies, then you can mount this on any regular windows computer very easily and get access to the nas file structure over the network. The next thing we did was install the terramaster DLNA media server, which is a free download from the built-in tasters. App Store and when it comes to media server software, Plex and Jellyfin are the two options that we have discussed at length here on our channel and each of them has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Overall we would recommend using the Jellyfin media server in most cases as it is fast and has a lot of customization options but again for the sake of simplicity I wanted to explore the tas DLNA media server and the reason is that DLNA is a technology that has been around for a long time, so it is compatible with almost every device out there and is a more basic method of serving content compared to something like Jelly Fer Plex, which has to host a website streaming video within your network only for devices to access it; On the contrary, the DLNA server only tells the devices on your network what files are on the server and how to access them, so after installing the DLNA server, head to the general tab and here you will want to enable the server multimedia to be able to use it and then access the option to configure. directory for media index check the box to enable media indexing and then add your two movies and TV shows folders in the media indexing location, leave everything else as default, apply the changes and head to the tab compatibility and here, if you want, you can enable the video transcoder as well as 4K video transcoding and real-time transcoding to make sure that the media on your server plays on more devices that require transcoding.

In our case, we are using a smart TV that doesn't need this feature, so we prefer the higher quality of a direct stream rather than transcoding and that all has to do when it comes to software settings, if you are heading to a computer and copy your ripped media in MKV format to New Zealand folders, they should become accessible via any DLNA streaming app such as the VLC app which is available for Android TV, Apple TV and many other devices, as long as As far as we're concerned, this is probably one of the easiest ways to get

start

ed with media streaming and should give you enough storage space to start your media collection with a robust server that you could expand over time if you so choose, if You want to get started with streaming media the right way without making too much initial investment I think. the solution is pretty good now.

I will say, as a matter of personal opinion, that I prefer Jelly Fin to something like this, as Jelly Fin has a much better system for organizing and tracking your media. It feels a lot more like Netflix when you're actually there. use it, but I also think it's outside the scope of this video as I wanted to demonstrate how easy it could be to get started with a cheap setup like this. I also feel like Jelly Fin is better suited to a much more powerful system with more storage and RAM, as the benefits really start to add up when you have a larger media collection, but of course you also need somewhere to store it. and that's a lot of money and units either way if you're interested in checking it out. the terramaster F2 212 I will be sure to leave a link to their website as well as a link to a store page on Amazon where you can go ahead and learn more about this particular model and any of the other Nas devices that the terramaster sells on . their website and with that I think I'm almost done here, so if you found this video helpful, don't forget to like, comment and subscribe so you don't miss any future content and as always, have an amazing day.