All about home servers?

A home server is a server located in a private residence providing services to other devices inside or outside the household through a home network or the Internet. Such services may include file and printer serving, media center serving, web serving (on the network or Internet), web caching, account authentication and backup services. Because of the relatively low number of computers on a typical home network, a home server commonly does not require significant computing power and can be implemented with a re-purposed, older computer, or a plug computer. An uninterruptible power supply is sometimes used in case of power outages that can possibly corrupt data.

In essence, just a computer with plenty of available space and a directory (folder) created and set to be sharable (right-click -> share).

You need to set the workgroup name the same on that machine and every computer that should be able to see the files.

Once that's done, you should be able to go to "network" in my computer or windows explorer on any machine and see everything in that shared folder.

(Note that I always use "Work computer" as the network connection type and "Workgroup" for file sharing - Home computer / Homegroup have compatibility issues with some other machines & software I use).

Use those instead if you prefer.

For media software, get Emby (Media Browser - MB).

That is specifically for sharing, browsing and playing media of all types from a shared system

Install the "Server" on the shared drive machine and the Client on every machine or device you want to view media on (including the server, if you wish).

The server is configured using a web browser and you can also play media directly from a browser..

It will also play directly to any DLNA compatible device such as a smart TV & things like Google Chromecast.

Info here:

http://emby.media/

Make sure you look through the information on setting up how the files are organised on the server.

Basically make a directory each for Movies, TV Series and each other media type

In each of those create one subdirectory per movie or series, using the exact names as on the IMDB or TVDB movie/tv information sites & with the (year) in brackets at the end of movie titles.

Name the actual movie video file exactly the same but keeping the file type extension and put in it's own folder.

For info;

I have all it's internal data fetchers turned off and use Media Centre Master to organise the media.

That allows you copy all movie or TV episode files into a single directory and it moves them to the proper locations & also downloads all the descriptions and related artworks etc.

http://www.mediacentermaster.com/

Windows only includes a limited set of rather inefficient video & audio codecs.

If you find some things do not play, or "stutter", use the LAV filter pack

That has fully optimised codecs for just about every file format known..

Info:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4380/discrete-htpc-g...