Hi there,
I’m thinking about what kind of opportunities there is for a portable media center you can have with you in the car, train or whatever.
I imagine that the media center would create its own WiFi, so that devices would be able to connect to it and access the media.
I know you could do something with a Raspberry Pi, but how could this work in practice? What would be an easy way to access the media from an iPad fx? What software could be used?
As a bonus, it would be pretty cool if the media center could connect to a hotel WiFi and then create a hotspot from that.
Edit: This would be used when on the move. So you would have the media with you on the media center.
As others already wrote, I would go with the Plex server at home and using the “Download” feature to have some content available offline for the times you don’t have internet. You can actually set a limit for the size of the download library and individually set video and audio quality for the files.
Seen raspberry pi mentioned some times, I don’t have one, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there would be an easy way to power it up on a train for example.
You could fairly easily power it from a USB power bank. At least up until the Raspberry Pi 4. The Pi 5 with its weird 5 V / 5 A power requirement is a different beast. They should have gone with something standard like 9 V / 3 A PD. It might still work ok if you don’t power lots of peripherals with it.
Peripherals are one thing, handling concurrent streams, transcoding… is another one.
So in theory, a Pi can be kept alive with a power bank, but OP is expecting (as I understood) multiple hours of streaming (with “local” only access) , which includes the above tasks for multiple concurrent streams. How big of a power bank we’re talking about and how long will it last?
When you use a typical 74 Wh (“20000 mAh”) power bank, you can expect more than 12 hours of runtime, if your average power draw stays at or below 5 W. Of course you aren’t going to do much transcoding with a Pi in any case, but multiple concurrent streams shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Yeah, I was also wondering about the transcoding. And thanks for the power draw comment, great to know. Sounds manageable.
It’s true I want hours of playback, but in the car, it’s possible to draw up to 100 watt from the outlet and in trains you have 230 volt outlets. At least in Denmark.
On a plane, you usually only have USB, but I’m not sure I like the idea of setting up WiFi on a plane 😅
Maybe I’m just bad at setting up Plex, but I have never had its download feature work properly.
But also, the storage is limited on the device, so we always end up with a very small library of media, that’s quickly consumed.
I still think you should give this one a try. Unless, you’re goal is not like having an actual solution, but doing this project as a hobby, and throwing some money at it. Which is also fine, I’ve done the same before.
Testing one or two of these media severs will cost you some hours of your time. Anything other will take much more time, effort and money.
Your suggestion is “good enough” and what I do now, but as you say, it could be fun to make a little project out of it. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t.