The Best Home Media Server

If you are like me you probably have stacks of CD's in boxes in various locations around your house and probably haven't listened to many of them for years!

You may even have old vinyl records stashed away somewhere waiting to be resurrected from the dust..

If so I can hopefully help you make the right decision on getting your music in one place, accessible at the touch of a button and no longer locked away in a dark cupboard.

To begin with lets see what a home media server consists of:

Basically it's an electronic box that enables you to play all your music (and video) files through your hifi or tv. The best examples cover all bases and can handle every kind of music file you throw at it, whether it's from your itunes library, amazon or high quality lossless format like FLAC. (For those who don't know what a lossless format is, it's a file that is the same as the original file but just smaller. Think of a zipped file on your computer and you'll get the idea. This is very different to a compressed file like an mp3, which throws away a lot of the information in the audio file to save space - more of this later)

So you can think of a media server as a glorified iPod.

The rough calculation for estimating how big a hard drive you need is:

400 CD's will take up roughly 200Gb's of storage. So a 1Terabyte drive should easily hold your entire music collection and probably a fair few videos and photos too!

Next you will need some kind of screen to view your album art and to flick through your music collection (unless it has one built in or you are using software on your computer to access your media library).

I decided to go for a small and cheap 3.5 inch monitor (sold for the car market, and found on ebay) as I don't want to watch videos but just be able to see my box's menu system and album art.

Now I would love to be able to by the Olive Opus 4HD (Black, 2TB). HD music server, which has a built-in cd drive, so rips your cd's straight to it's hard drive and downloads the album covers, but it's a little out of my price range so I have decided to buy the Western Digital WD TV Live Plus 1080p HD Media Player

Ten Media Servers

Here's a list of the top media servers out there, starting with the cheapest:

What Home Media Server Do you Use?

Tell me about your choice of hardware or software and why you like it.

What Other Visitors Have Said

Click below to see contributions from other visitors to this page...