I am kinda new with Raspberry just ordered it yesterday. I have some
free times during holidays and as an engineering student, I want to try
cool things !
Today, I have a Samsung Television and my PC. Each time I wanna see a
movie with friends on the TV, I have to plug / play USB Stick.
Is it possible to use the RaspBerry Pi as a media Center AND also NAS ?
Like:
-For the NAS: R-Pi NAS - eLinux.org
-And OSMC for media center ?
In that way, I could transfer all my movies / series into my 1Tb HD plugged in my RPi and also watch it from OSMC ?
As Iām kinda new to this world I donāt want to flash my RPi with bad manipulation
Oh, and one last question, if this architecture is good. Do you
think it is possible to use it like a āreal NASā ? For instance : watch a
movie on TV. Then switch on a computer and resume at the time I paused
on TV ?
You can use OSMC itself for NAS functionality. There is a Samba server in the OSMC āApp storeā and thatāll do what you want.
For instance i plug a hard drive directly into my Pi and play my films from there but also i can read/write to this hard drive from the PC on my network.
Do you have any benchmarks for reading / writing file with this NAS functionality ? Like what is the working time for c/c a 8Gb film to HDD via OSMC NAS ?
Also, is there any possibility to use OSMC from a PC ?
Like the example I gave : playing a movie on TV, stopping at 30mn, resuming on PC at 30mn ?
Itās slow as hell but thatās more down to the Piās network implementation than OSMC i.e. itās be slow on any Pi distribution.
You canāt use OSMC on your PC yet but you can install Kodi (The Media Centre part of OSMC) directly onto your PC and then if you use a shared MySQL database itāll keep track of whatās watched and whatās not (Resume from the same place should also work then). I donāt do this second part so canāt help with it but there have been discussions of the forum here about it. If you want to have a shared library then youāll need shared storage and a shared MySQL database, most people will use a real NAS or a PC to host these and use the Pi as the client.
In fact, I just want to make something for fun. Thatās why I will keep the idea of RPi and OSMC + integrated Samba on it.
If my requirements change like I really want speed for writing PC -> RPi. I think I will go with Synology + RPi reading from Synology (is that possible ? Without any lag for 1080p movie ?)
Other question, if I want to use RPi for domotics purpose. Would it be possible to use also OSMC with domotics app in RPi ? Or itās just 1 app functioning ?
Something like a Synology in the middle would be the perfect fix for you (As i understand it).
Fast data transfer from the PC to the NAS over a PC friendly protocol (SMB/CIFS) as well as fast data transfer from the NAS to the Pi over a Pi friendly protocol (NFS). You could have the Synology hosting a shared MySQL database too so that it tracks what is watched/not-watched and your progress in films you can then pick up where you left off in films and have the same library from Kodi on the PC and OSMC on the Pi.
You can probably do all that on the Pi (Maybe need a second Pi to host the MySQL/Films) but a āproperā NAS would do it better. If you have an old PC knocking around you could easily turn that into a NAS.
NTFS and EXFAT are both quite a bit slower than EXT4 and FAT32 on OSMC because the are implemented as user-mode FUSE file systems. For best performance use EXT4.
Itās a standard Linux computer (Ok, not quite āstandardā but not too special) so yes, OSMC can do other things as well as run Kodi. People have them doing all sorts of things like hosting webpages, downloading stuff via Bittorrent and acting as VPN servers. If you can setup your ādomoticsā (Iāve never heard this term) via command line with something like SSH and then run it āheadlessā then there should be no reason why the Pi couldnāt do it. What the Pi does not currently have is a desktop environment so youāll have to install/config your stuff via the command line.
Sorry for ādomoticsā. I thought it was called like in french ! The right term is āhome automationā.
The thing is not to run an home automation app. I know it could work. But running home automation app AND OSMC in the same time. So that I could use media-center on TV and put the light on/off in the same time !
It depends how you control it. If the Pi is acting as the automation server then yes, this should be able to run at the same time as OSMC. You wonāt (I donāt think) be able to use the Pi itself to turn the light on/off as there is no interface to do so. If however you have a client on your phone for example and connect that to the server (Pi) then youāll be able to use your phone to turn the light on/off whilst using the Pi to watch a film.
Iām intending to ditch my old DLink NAS 320L and switch to Raspberry Pi2. Iāve been testing OSMC on a friendās RB P1, however, I would like to ask you whether I would be able to do the following as well?
So far I know that I can have a kick-ass media centre with OSMC, but I would like also to have my HDD attached to the RB P2 and access on the network.
Also, I am looking forward if I could install somekind of a torrent client (like Transmission)?
Last I was wondering if I can access the storage and the eventual torrent client from outside home network?
The right term is āhome automationā.