NAS / HTPC with AV Receiver

[nanook]

I currently have a Marantz SR 5005 AV Receiver that is connected to my TV.

I play my movies by connecting my laptop to the receiver by HDMI and wirelessly stream my music via Airport Express which is also connected to the AV Receiver.

Obviously, playing movies via the laptop is not just cumbersome but am also running into storage issues. I would ideally like to have a NAS server connected to the AV receiver but the standard Synology ones don't have HDMI ports and my AV receiver doesn't have ethernet.

1. Are there any easy solutions that would allow me to connect a standard NAS like Synology to my AV via HDMI or something else ?

2. Is building a HTPC + NAS server overkill given that I will be connecting it via the AV receiver ?

3. Is building a NAS server with HDMI the most optimum solution ? If yes, are there any howtos ?

thanks

 

[ukjeyaraj]

I am afraid there is no straight answer. It depends on the usage.

I am currently using NAS+HTPC+AV Receiver. The reason I went for HTPC is to have a player which can play any kind of file now and in near future too. I do own HDD Media Player, so that my parents does not need to have the hassle of operating PC.

Now the reason for having NAS is to have higher storage with reliable redundancy. Also many times movies/songs are played from different devices(HTPC/Media Player/Laptop/Tablet) by different members in family simultaneously. NAS Box is performing this job.

 

[nanook]

What about FreeNAS + XBMC for playing all sorts of files ?

 

[dheerajjotwani]

I am using a hp n36l microserver with ubuntu and xbmc. It has a gt210 for xbmc. However i have no redundancy programmed. Its quiet and efficient enough and does the job beautifully. On the side it does Torrenting with Flexget. Hosts a blog. Runs Squeezebox server and dlna server. Ftp nfs etc. I also use it for hosting a vortexbox virtual machine to rip my cds to flac using an external dvd drive. Great performer

tapped on Note II cdma

 

[vaibhavyagnik]

For RAID, you could try AMD board + processor which support RAID.
For software side, you could use Ubuntu + XBMC or windows + XBMC. Both the options will work well and both OS supporting exporting shares on SAMBA.

If you want to novell, you could try FreeBSD based ZFS storage box + XBMC. This will be very tough to configure. (I kid you not!!)