[nissyack]

I'm looking into creating a private media server for my home. I want the ability to play media files from any device on my home network. The hardware piece is pretty straightforward.

Does anyone have recommendations for the software side? I've seen "Plex" mentioned in a few articles/forums, but I haven't heard of it until now.

[soltahepsu]

Depends on your hardware (what architecture are you using i.e. ARM?) and what your infrastructure looks like. Do you host your media files on a NAS or directly on the media server?

[UnknownRabbit]

speneds how complex your setup is. If you have a NAS and don't want to pay for plex or just care about free software jellyfinn seems to be the way to go. If you're running something other than linux/windows you might have to run a community build but otherwise it's fine. Beware that it is kind of resource intensive.
When I tried to use it my NAS ground to a halt getting metadata but my NAS is ancient so experience may vary.

[triiisk]

I've been working on the same thing for a while now lol. I ended up going with PLEX, real-debrid and the Nvidia Shield Pro (can host it's own plex server) plus the shield pro supports the higher end audio codecs that many of the other streaming boxes couldn't handle (namely Dolby TrueHD) so really depends on your situation. 

Hope that helped a bit!

Feel free to pm me if you have any other questions or just want to talk about it, I've spent way too much time learning about all that over the past half year or so ?

[Omega Ictos]

Personally, I just use a NAS for storage & access the files remotely. I use Samba under Windows and NFS under Linux. I can mount the share with my music on it & play the files back in WinAMP.