Forum Discussion

suberec's avatar
suberec
Visitor
12 years ago

simple channel for family use

Hello All,
I have browsed this and other forums looking for a cheap, effective method of setting up a channel for personal use, but have not found something that fits my needs.
I have a son living a thousand miles away and a mother living several hours away. I have bought Roku's for each of them. My end goal is to set up a private channel that I can share home videos, family sporting event recordings and possibly videos of movies that I have paid for and ripped to have as a back-up.

Since this will not be used as a business or to generate income in any way, I would like to keep it as cost efficient as possible, but can also do without any bells and whistles as it pertains to end-user presentation.

Any ideas or suggestions? I will be doing most of the development work on a PPC mac G5, though I also have Windows machines if needed.

If this has been addressed before, I apologize for making a duplicate thread. Also, Thanks for any help you may offer.
Roku Developer Program

2 Replies

  • TheEndless's avatar
    TheEndless
    Roku Guru
    12 years ago
    Plex would probably be your best option for this. If you set up a free myPlex account, then everything indexed in your Plex server will be available to users who sign into the same myPlex account. Of course, as will a custom channel, you'd need to have a decent upstream internet link to be able to serve the videos from your home. If you don't then you might consider one of the channels that streams from a cloud storage service like Dropbox (or subscribe to PlexPass and use their CloudSync feature).

    The point, of course, being that you shouldn't need to develop a custom channel to accomplish what you want unless you really just want to.
  • marcelo_cabral's avatar
    marcelo_cabral
    Roku Guru
    12 years ago
    Another option is to purchase a storage drive based on the Hipserv system (Seagate GoFlex Home, Netgear Stora, etc.) and use my channel Hipmedia, that allows remote access, I personally use this way, my family in Brazil directly access my hard drive.

    The only downside is that they will be using your "upload" bandwidth, but the Plex solution has the same issue, and you will need to keep a computer always on, with Hipmedia only your Harddrive needs to be connected to the internet.