OSMC access to NAS from outside home network?

Help and Support
1

Hi all, is it possible for OSMC to access and stream media on my RPi NAS from outside my home network? Our little village has joined the gigabit revolution and we had the idea of creating a village-wide Netflix-style streaming service involving OSMC heads at various locations around the village all accessing my home RPi NAS…is this possible with OSMC?

Thanks

Rob

2

Possible? Yes. But you’re going to have to get a pretty deep understanding of the network setup to understand what security and firewall changes you might have to make both to your home and everyone else’s. And without significant though doing this would definitely expose your home network to more security threats from the other folks in the village (intentional or not).

If you are in the US, you will likely run afoul of copyright law (probably in other countries too, but I can only speak for my corner of the world). You would, in essence, be a streaming service provider and would need to acquire the necessary streaming rights for any copyrighted content you share. Honestly, you’ll never get those. So unless your sharing only home videos and public domain content, you will be violating copyright law and could end up on the wrong end of a very expensive lawsuit (and/or have your internet access terminated by your provider).

2 Likes
3

Ignoring any copyright issues, you could self-host a VPN. There are 3 possible solutions. Two would access the storage directly, ignoring Kodi completely and 1 would use the capabilities of a different tool.

Running a VPN on a raspberry pi isn’t something I would do. CPU is very limited. That’s the 1st possible solution.

The 2nd possible solution is to use NFSv4 with encryption and Kerberos for authentication. Again, the limited CPU of a raspberry-pi would be the limiting problem. I use NFS all the time, but never over the internet - or even across different LANs.

The last possible answer I know, commonly used, is NOT to use OSMC as the server, but to use Plex Media Center and Plex clients. This can also be used over a VPN or you can pay the Plex guys to have access to your media from anywhere on the internet. There are privacy considerations when using PMS and when allowing any devices outside your network to have access to that media. I have doubts that PMS will run well on a raspberry pi. I find the Plex clients to be crap, so prefer to use other clients. Mine is on a 6 yr old Intel G3258 box, but even that very low-end CPU has vastly more processing power than any of the ARM-based systems. It is physically larger and uses about 10x more power. It comes down to picking the right tool for the right task.
I use a SSH-based SOCKS proxy to access PMS from anywhere in the world through the built-in web streaming interface. Nobody else is allowed access to the media. PMS can transcode huge Hidef videos to lower resolutions for when the remote network cannot handle the required bandwidth. It can also transcode based on the playback device, into using both audio and video codecs supported. For example, some playback devices cannot play mpeg2/AC3 recorded TV shows. Those need to be transcode to h.264/aac or h.264/ogg.

Sorry. Didn’t mean to ramble. Hopefully, this provides some leads for others to follow.

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You might want to consider Mezzmo too. It can do all of the things described above, has a built-in web interface allows setting individual transcoding parameters for each web user, runs fine on Raspberry Pis / Kodi with a Mezzmo addon,. has mobile device clients for Android etc. You will need to figure out the copyright issues and it does require a Windows machine to run the server software on but Ive had 5 clients streaming native BluRay quality videos in my house at the same time and it never broke sweat.

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Thanks for your answer, I wanted to use OSMC as the client only, at the moment I run 2 OSMC clients at home, connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 (4Gb) which is powered by Raspbian, the idea was to expand the number of clients, and have them connect outside my home network, while still retaining the RPi4 on Raspbian…

6

Thanks for your answer, I did toy with the idea of a Windows server, but I would prefer to do it all by Raspberry Pis for the low running cost aspect, but I’ll take a look Mezzmo, it sounds interesting…

7

Thanks for your answer, the copyright issues are another topic for another day, I was just curious whether such a streaming service would be possible with OSMC and Raspberry Pis, if/how it could be done etc…