Question New Member Needing Advice and Help

May 11, 2019
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Hello everyone. First, I have no idea if I am in the right place and posting the right question in the right place. If I have misposted....Please accept my apologies.

The precursor to my question and what I am doing...

For the last 4 years, I have been digitally converting my DVDs to MP4 formats. Originally started off as something to watch on my laptop while I was out of state. Today its morphed into several families worth of DVD collections converted and placed on external hard drives.

My current set up is rather very simple. I have 3.5T of digitally converted movies. These movies are placed on 2 separate 2T external hard drives that have been formatted for FAT32. The external hard drives have been formatted to FAT32 because I am using Sony DVD players that act as the intermediary. This is how I get playback from drives to TV. It works well because the remote control for the DVD player can quickly scroll through movies. Any other format of the drives leaves no files available for playback.

None of the programs I have used will format any storage device larger than 2T. I can take larger storage devices, partition them, and format each side. But only one side will be detected by the DVD player.

Since I am 4 years in and in no way slowing down with this, I am trying to find a different way to save my movies(NOT ON A CLOUD) that can be played back without internet connection.

Ideas I have had is something like a server. Something reasonably inexpensive. Gotta keep in mind...Its just for movie storage and playback for personal use. I would prefer the system to be all enclosed and through one system. Right now, I have 2 external hard drives and depending on what you want to watch, would have to get up and manually switch drives. But no one has been able to offer ways to go about it. One person offered a server similar to a streaming TV service but at a cost of $25,000. This is not an idea I am willing to entertain.

So, my question is after that intro is....What would the fine folks here recommend for creating a storage system capable of playing back movie files to a television either directly(if the TV is capable) or through another means(DVD player PS3) without using the internet?

Thanks for reading my post.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Any low to medium grade PC can do this. The PC sees the TV as just another monitor.
My current HTPC is based on an i5-3570k CPU, from 2012. 8GB RAM, and an AMD 6670 GPU.

Play movies direct off DVD, or that which exists on the hard drive(s), your mp4 files.
My movie library lives on my NAS box, but could just as well be internal drives in that PC.

The only semi-hassle is controlling it. I use TeamViewer, and control it using my main PC, or a laptop, or a Windows tablet.