Which N5200 should I buy?

[manaspen]

To the thecus community,

I have been researching NAS drives for some time now and have a good feeling about buying a thecus, but wanted to get some community feedback on which one i should buy.

Here is my situation:
I have about 1 TB of music and about 50 gigs of photos and videos
I am looking to have a nas device that can serve my music library and photo/video collection to the computers on my network. the computers will be both PC and MAC and serving about 175,000 songs which tends to choke iTunes...

Any advice? Which N5200 would be best?

Thanks.
J

[Funkstar]

Doesn't sound like you need the router option, so no need for the BR models.

What are you goung to use for serving up your music? SqueezeCenter and Twonky will run better on the extra memory and faster processor of the Pro models.

[pit234a]

Let me ask a question, I don't want to start an extra thread, it may fit here, but is a bit off topic, I know.
I often hear about such stuff like “SqueezeCenter and Twonky” and I don't understand, what they do and what they are useful for.
My music and films are stored somewhere in my network (almost on the Thecus 5200) and I can reach them from every place I configured so and that is it. What else should I want? What ever I want hear or see, I start one appropriate program locally and play it over the net, as it would be locally present. Thats almost ever done with a mouse click or two or I have to chose it via remote control and this because I use also digital sat receivers in the same manner, not only MAC and PC ( I don't use any of Microsoft's Operating Systems however).
Therefore, I really wonder, what piece of software I would need or what it could help me with.
The only thing I know, is the chance to convert a high compressed video stream to one, that my sat receiver could play, so that I am able to watch this movies not only on a PC or MAC and this could be done with VLC, but not directly on the Thecus, because it therefore will be to slow, at least do I believe it would be to slow for that. But this is a task, that is given with the very special environment I have with this sat receivers.
In common, I have no idea what a music server should be good for or what it even is doing. Maybe, you can explain that for me.

[Funkstar]

SqueezeCenter (formerly known as SlimServer) is the servier software required to control the SlimDevices/Logitec range of networked music streamers. See http://www.slimdevices.com/ for details.

Twonky is a UPnP server that makes your media available to uPnP capable devices. These are usually small, relatively cheap networked boxes wth oudio and video output. There are loads of these around.

Hope that clears if up.

[pit234a]

@Funkstar: yes, this helps. Thank you for the explanation, I didn't even know that such devices exist.

[Funkstar]

They are awsome devices!

I've been a long time follower of the SlimDevices products. I have a bit of a collection going on

[manaspen]

Thanks for thhe tips and the thread on music devices, software. I currently have a Roku sound bridge but am going to replace that with a mac mini i think, and then use the sound bridge for my sons room (he's 18 months and loves music).

as for the music piece of software, can i install both the Twonky and SlimCenter stuff or do I have to choose one?

Take care and hope everyone had a good weekend.

[manaspen]

Pitt, what os do you use? I am thinking of an entire home switch to mac mini as media machines and computers connected to the tv's. serving the music and photos through the thecus. is that what you basically have or are you running some sort of linux box?

[pit234a]

http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/
http://www.transtec.de/D/D/products/...c/mini_pc.html

My situation is that: I have one TV in my room and some PCs around plus one dreambox sat-receiver. I only have one of the first models they build, 7000S. My N5200 plus my main PC and the dreambox are all time up (7x24 except some scheduled downtime or loss of electrical power). In the living room is a further dreambox, but no TV anymore. Instead, we use a beamer when we want to watch a movie or pictures. We do not want TV playing all day long and it is easier to handle without giving the kids a chance to watch whenever they want. Than, I have PCs in the living room and two kids have their own one in their rooms, the third has only one account on my wifes PC. She also has a MAC-Book. All PCs run GNU/Linux or FreeBSD and the dreambox has busybox/Linux and the MAC-Book some OS-X. All PCs are connected over wired Ethernet, 100MB almost, only between my PC and the N5200 I have 1GB LAN.
My collection of mp3 is what I converted from my own CDs, I don't load files over WWW or listen Internet-radio. The dreambox is a digital sat-receiver and can play radio in CD quality and there are plenty of stations that have nice programs, plus, I could also record this music (mp2) as well as movies. The dreambox can play mp3, ogg and mpg1 and mpg2 (that is DVD like quality) via hardware decoder. It cannot play mpg4, DivX, XviD, X.264, ASF, WMF. But, all the movies that I keep are stored in one of the higher compression modes, almost XviD and X.264. To play that on the dreambox, I operate VLC on my PC and use a plugin for the dreambox, that can access that VLC as client and chose the movie I want and play that. Conversion takes place on my PC and the stream gets send to the dreambox that asks for it. That is necessary, because the dreambox is pretty week as PC and can not do software decoding. Quality is acceptable, with some smaller jumps in some movies (of course, that's no good idea taking the movies from NAS (over LAN), decoding them and send them back in the web. I would better want the VLC run on the NAS directly).
One further plugin for the dreambox can show pictures in jpg. I mean, the box can that itself with no plugin, but as with music, where a “jukebox” exists as player-plugin, these are more comfortable to use and offer further options.
My music and movie collection is hosted on the N5200, what is one NFS-server in my network and dreambox is client to the music share, as are the PCs. Some PCs are client to the movie share also, not the kids PCs. The dreambox records to the NAS, where my PC takes the files for conversion in mp3 or XviD.
So, basically, my dreambox is my “mediacenter”, even when it has some powerful file conversions and storage area not build in, but takes that from the network. The dreambox has 250MHz PPC and I believe 32MB RAM, you may easy find its limits by reading those numbers. It runs and is stable (busybox/Linux), but it could well have got some faster architecture. There are better such boxes available today, but my oldies still do their job.
Thats why I basically once bought that little mini PC from Transtec, because I wanted to add it in a way you want to use the mini-MAC. Compare price to hardware relation and consider my love for Free Operating-Systems and you see, why this and no MAC. I once found one further product of that size and even cheaper, but I can tell from my experience, that Transtec products are high quality in view of construction and parts used inside. I never used that mini-PC in the way I thought, my wifes PC died just at that time and she took the small device and made her point clear: I never got it back. It runs GNU/Linux and could also serve the beamer as file and picture player easy, but the dreambox got a cable to the living rooms sound engine and is therefore easier to handle. Oh, I use only stereo sound, but the box could handle AC3 also. Instead of both, mini-PC or dreambox, my wife likes presenting pictures directly from her MAC-book, hooked on beamer and over Lan to the NAS. I don't remember how I realized access with the MAC, but I think not as NFS, but with a MAC-share. Don't remember, but it works.
What I put to the beamer now from the dreambox had earlier be on the TV screen, so that worked good and needed no extra cabling, just pressing switches on the remote control to either watch Satellite TV or listen radio or playing mp3 or recorded movies, even converted to XviD or DivX or X.264, or seeing pictures from a given folder as slide show. From all that, the later offers the poorest performance, sometimes conversion from high resolution images to TV-norm needs long and sometimes it even hangs, specially when images have to be rotated also.
When I tested the usage of a PC directly connected to TV, I found quality not as really good. Best worked the DVI connector. I don't know, why this is, but considering the common resolution of TVs, they are low compared to todays PC-graphic and thus, probably not optimized. Results on the even lower resolution beamer is better, also with DVI. But generally, you could use any PC to do all of that, what my dreambox does, but you would have to get a remote control working with it to get it comfortably done.
But I thought about this too, as you see, only hadn't found the time for further testing and than, dreambox still does it...

[manaspen]

Thanks...will need one of my tech friends to help with translation but I think I get the jist.

[pit234a]

Thanks...will need one of my tech friends to help with translation but I think I get the jist.

please ask for more details.
I am native German an my English is poor.

[Saracen]

..... I am native German an my English is poor.

Actually, I'd say your English is fairly good. Oh the grammar maybe needs a little work to be technically correct, but despite that, you're perfectly understandable. For a second language, it's certainly not poor.

[manaspen]

I also think your english is great. it was deffinately not a language problem but more of a technical challenge that I face. I have bid tech dreams, but am a CEO with limited tech knowledge, which means I will prbably have to get someone to help me set all this up...

[Ksmgangsta]

hmm, thnx this topic helped me