SPCR

I am building a new PC/file server to host all of my music/movie/pics and would like to access them in the living room on Xbox One. What's the easiest/best way to achieve this? Both would be on the same network, PC [win8] connected via Ethernet, Xbox via Wifi.

Thanks

Hi Alex, I'm sorry you haven't had any (useful, or at all) replies yet.

I'm not so sure about "best" solutions but what you would choose depends on what you want to have.

Back in the day I had a real PC running Debian. It was my router (had 2 nics) and my file server and my webserver and my editing station and a lot more.

And if you like real messing about with such systems, these days a home-built mini-ITX system is probably the way to go.

Then we get the ready-made solutions, some of which are still pretty DIY, like some device I don't remember that needed serial access and soldering and what not. Then at the top tier of those solutions you have QNAP and Synology and Buffalo. I personally own a Synology. The big benefit is (or will be for me) that it is a real Linux system that is highly customizable and can actually be put to use as a real mini server.

And then of course there is a wide array of consumer-oriented devices from the likes of Western Digital and perhaps Logitech and other companies that want in on the big volumes to people who don't care as much and don't care to spend real energy and love on their set-ups.

So it all depends on what category you see yourself falling into to in the near future.

You need a wired/wireless router anyway as the root hub of your home network. So wi-fi is not an issue. Preferably your NAS is wired and located close to your router/hub. It can stream to your Xbox via your wireless router. For big data your connection needs to be 1-gigabit so likely you want a gigabit router anyway.

I personally do not recommend looking for your NAS to be anything other than a server. Attaching printers and usb soundcards is not really the way to go, at least for me.

When all that is decided, you just need to know the protocols for your Xbox. It can definitely speak Samba (SMB) which is the default Windows network filesharing language. Any NAS you can possibly buy or construct will always have support for this. There is also a thing called DLNA, which is not very suitable for music but reasonably okay for video. A low-cost NAS will not be able to do on-the-fly video conversion in case your TV cannot handle all the formats. In that case you either need a modern smart-TV or a streamlined way to just re-encode everything on your PC before you put it in the NAS' media server library.

I have no info on your set-ups so I will leave it at this.