 Some of you understood my point, but from many others, I took a lot of flack over my recent video showing how you can buy older secondhand hardware to build yourself a more capable NAS or network attached storage box. Some of the criticism, very valid. Power consumption is a bigger consideration for people who live in areas where electricity is generated by burning dinosaur remains. Although I did address that in the video. But others seemed to be born out of an assumption that the only thing a NAS device or a file server does is store files for backup and occasional access. They can do that, and if that's all you could ever want, with limited room for growth, then even the cheapest Synology or QNAP or WD box will take care of you just fine. But there is a whole wide world of use cases out there beyond that, and I decided to make this video about one of my favorite things to do with a more robust NAS. Streaming media to portable devices both within and outside of my house. Corsair boasts unrivaled comfort and universal compatibility on its new Void Surround headset featuring a genuine Dolby 7.1 headphone USB adapter. Check the link in the video description to learn more. Unless everything that you watch is available on a streaming service of some kind, and the people in your house are considerate enough not to hog all the bandwidth, then you can't afford to buy a new NAS. But if you do, then you can afford it. And if you do, then you can afford it. Unless everything that you watch is available on a streaming service of some kind, and the people in your house are considerate enough not to hog all the bandwidth, it is not always convenient to transfer the media that you want to watch to your phone. I mean, depending on video codec compatibility and processing requirements, and even just file sizes on the limited storage capabilities of modern devices, it can be a bear to deal with. So, you can afford the device that you own, or a NAS, to transcode or convert from one video format to another on the fly, and stream it over Wi-Fi or even over the internet to your device. Number one, it's more functional, more widely recognized, and broadly compatible, but also the more complicated in some ways, Plex. To get started with Plex, you'll need to go through a few steps. Number one, get the Plex Media Server application. It's free and available for the PC, a wide variety of NAS vendors like Synology and Thicus, and standalone NAS operating systems like Unraid, which is where I'm using it. Then, you'll need the $5 Plex app installed on some kind of a client device, be it a Smart TV, an iPad, an Android phone, or whatever the case may be. Then, for the best possible experience, you're going to want to create a free Plex account, log in those devices, and as long as you are on the same network and you've installed a program before in your life, you should be pretty much good to go. So then, let's jump into what I like about Plex. It is beautiful, like just beautiful. Once you add your video content to it, Plex automagically pulls metadata for things like trailers, DVD covers, plot synopses, theme music, cast information, and more, and it looks awesome. In addition to that, for content that you don't already have, there's the channels. Some of these are strictly region locked, like the BBC iPlayer, which is kind of a bummer, but there is some great content in here that I would otherwise not have access to for nothing, like all the South Park episodes as well as Comedy Central's channel. And then finally, the best thing about Plex IMO is the broad compatibility. Music, movies, TV, pretty much any format of those things under the sun, and if you've got a modern device, the odds of there being a Plex server or a client for it, I mean, even if it's just a standard DLNA client with reduced functionality compared to the fully featured Plex app, is pretty darn good. Now we get into what I don't really like about Plex. It can be a bit of a bear to set up and maintain your media library. I mean, sure, if you can handle forwarding a port in your router and operating system, then remote access over the internet, which some apps I've used before, like Emitt, have trouble with for some reason, is easy. I'm in the office running this demo off of my 5 megabit uplink server at home. But remember that asterisk on automagically pulling show information before? If you're not diligent about where you put your media within the right library and you don't title things correctly, then this stuff can be wildly inaccurate. I mean, look at all these episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos that I... Wait a minute. I don't own any America's Funniest Home Videos DVDs. It got confused by a bunch of random video clips that were sitting in a TV show's folder. Oops. On top of that, there are some Plex features that don't work unless you're willing to fork out for a $40 yearly subscription. I mean, even ones that don't require Plex to use any storage or processing power on their side, like Mobile Sync, a fantastic feature that transcodes the video file to a mobile-friendly format and stores a copy of that on your device for use when you're stuck without internet access. Which I guess leads us pretty well into solution number 2 of the day, AirVideo HD. This one has a lot going for it. It's fully unlocked with a one-time app purchase, which... Okay, the asterisk again. They do offer early access features for another $4, and InMethod did pull that dick move of discontinuing the original AirVideo, forcing me to re-buy it in HD that one time. But its server is extremely light and easy to configure with meaningful errors if you have issues with Windows Firewall or port forwarding, and it's got a simple pick-the-folders-you-want-to-share interface. Going into the app, navigation and video buffer speed is freaking amazing with AirVideo. The real-time scrubbing preview is slick as hell, and actually still pretty much works if you can get past the darkening of the screen, even though I haven't paid for early access to it. And the transcode and preload to device feature is a great way to pack content with you on a vacation or business trip. You just pick the quality, press the button, and boom! It transfers over Wi-Fi or even over the internet to your phone. So in a nutshell, while it lacks support for music and doesn't pull thumbnails or plot synopsis information or whatever, it just plain works. Navigate the folder tree to the file you want, press play, no donking around. As for the disadvantages of AirVideo HD, hmm, I wonder where I would start with... Oh, I know! Compatibility! While video format support is stellar since it's actually powered by a separate installation of VLC, the server is only fully supported on Mac and Windows, and much worse than that, the client is only available on iOS. In method, what the hell? Your stupid app is my response to all those people pestering me on social media asking, hey Linus, why do you still have that nasty old iPhone 4 anyway? Well, because I need it as a beater AirVideo player. Please take care of this. With a web or Windows app and an Android app, I would happily buy both of them and use nothing else, including my very distant bronze metal solution, Emit. Emit is basically like a rusty broken down AirVideo on the Android side. It's the same kind of bare-bones server configuration pointed at the folder and share the folder, the same folder-based navigation and the same one-time purchase business model, but unfortunately it just works great for some people and is total arse for others. I've always had good luck with it in the past, which is why I included it in this video, but then when I went to put it on my test machine to get screen capture of using it to make this video, it completely cacked out on me. So I guess the two years of zero development on it have finally caught up with it, which I guess leads me into the part of the video that would normally be the conclusion, except there isn't really one here, so I'll address the elephant in the room instead. Linus, you've got a pretty public anti-piracy stance, and as a content creator I can understand that. So why are you showing us how to do this? Because, legality aside, I don't find anything morally wrong with this. My media server is accessible to me and my wife only, though frankly I don't think she knows how to use it anyway. So I think it's ridiculous that if I own a DVD of a show or a Blu-ray of a movie or whatever, that I have to hike up to my attic to go get it, since that's where optical discs belong, IMO, put it into a player, wait a bazillion years, then finally settle in to enjoy the content. What? Switching discs multiple times in the middle of a season? Or to watch the special features? No. I reject your reality, I substitute my own. So there you go. While I can't recommend it, I rip content using any DVD and make MKV, and I play it back using the software that I talked about today. It works awesome, it's a better experience for content that I paid for, and I frankly don't feel bad about it at all. And on that subject, Ting, the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction first. Get this, when you call them, there's no robot. Yes, my friends, a world where the humans talk to the other people. I was actually kind of blown away. I did it just to try it, and I was like, hello? And they were like, hello! Like, I almost didn't know what to do, because I expected to press 1 for sales and service, because that's the most important thing. Press 2 for something else, press 3 for this, press 9 for customer service. Nope, not that. And the other great thing about Ting is that you pay only for what you use, with an average bill totaling only about $24 per month per device. If you're stuck in a contract and you want to switch to Ting, they'll cover 25% of your cancellation fee, up to $75. So all you gotta do is head over to linus.ting.com to try out their savings calculator, where you enter your last few bills and how much you're paying, and find out how much you'd save on Ting. When you sign up at our link, you'll also get $25 in service credit or towards a new device. 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