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.
You don’t need anything as elaborate as you appear to be contemplating.
Insert a large capacity microSD card into your mobile phone and load it up with media.
Share as required.
I use iPhone and the kids have iPads, but let’s say I had a phone with expandable storage. How would I share the content from the phone to the iPads?
How much storage do they have these days? Personally I’d just load a bunch of media directly on to the devices and not worry about additional hardware or networks.
If you’re carrying your media with you, you could run Jellyfin on the server to provide access to the media to anyone connected to its wifi.
Exactly. The point is to carry the media with you and access it without an actual internet connection. Especially on the go.
If I understand you correctly, I could install Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi, setup a local WiFi on it and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?
and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?
In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.
That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.
Yes, I’ve done almost exactly this while traveling. You can even carry around a couple variously configured sd cards for different use cases. I had one with jellyfin for sharing locally and also Kodi for direct HDMI connection to TVs. There is a in app on Android for jellyfin called findroid that allows offline copies from the media server, which allowed me to not need the thing powered the entire time I wanted to watch something on my phone, just long enough to download it. Adding samba shares adds a other layer of accessibility. I had another SD Card with video game ROMs for retro gaming, but this one got left at home because it requires controllers and I didn’t think I’d use it that much. I had another with “little backup box” installed for automatically backing up my photos and videos after a day out exploring with my camera.
I used a Raspberry pi 5 for all of this, running from a battery backup, because I didn’t really need a keyboard once I had remote connections to my phone sorted out. Pick a rugged case and you case just toss it in your bag of chargers. It took up about as much space as a pack of cigarettes. Another option would be the Raspberry Pi 400, built into a keyboard. A little bulkier, but maybe more resilient in the face of technical difficulties.
Yup. If the sd card doesnt have enough space for everything, you could attach an m.2 hat to it as well. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/using-m-2-hat-with-raspberry-pi-5/
Basically, jellyfin on the pi, with the wifi setup as an access point, and whatever amount of storage you need. The pi requires 5v/5a, so you’ll probably run into issues running off the car usb power, but a cheap 30amp hour battery should run it for 6-10 hours if my napkin math is right.
My Plex server runs in my home and all my media is available outside my home. A travel server seems like a solution for a problem that doesn’t really exist.
If you are on the road or simply travelling a place with bad internet, then what?
When I know I’m travelling, I always download a few select movies and the next few episodes of whatever we’re currently watching to my devices.
Plex allows me to download using my PlexPass. My family/everyone else that uses my server download the media they want via my JellyFin server (serving the same media as my Plex server).
At least in the case of a Jellyfin server, you can download media locally when you know you’ll be without internet
Not sure if this helps, but e-sims are extremely cheap and can be set up on the go through an app these days. You could get a 5g plan in the area with bad internet and use it as a hotspot to download content to your other devices. I use Nomad, but there are a lot of providers with plans that are unlimited or pay by the gig—all affordable with time periods as short as 7 days.
A $10 solution, in a pinch, is a good choice.
It’s not a bad solution and I have used eSIMs before when I was traveling in Asia. However, all of these “unlimited” eSIM plans has a lot of buts. Either the speed is limited to close to unusable for streaming and/or you are limited to only use x amount of GB when using hotspot.
Also depending on the country, the coverage can be awful.
While I agree with others pointing out the oddity of a portable server in general: this sounds like a great use-case for a laptop.
Built-in battery, wifi you can broadcast out as a hotspot, and it even has a display/keyboard/mouse for troubleshooting!
An older laptop with the optical drive stripped out could have a 2.5” 5TB HDD in addition to the boot drive for some decent mobile storage.
Probably an rpi and a travel router. But seems like the best setup would be a media server you kept at home and a VPN to connect to it from anywhere.
Why would you need a travel router?
The rpi already can be set up to hotspot it’s own wifi network.
For connecting to hotel wifi, a simple usb dongle is good enough, as discussed here: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=287485
In regards to VPN-ing into the media server at home - depending on where you travel, you might not have any internet or you might use up your mobile data volume.
I am looking for a solution where you have the media with you, so you don’t need an internet connection to watch your media.
The media server at home is a great solution that I already use, but if you have 3 people watching in the car, using mobile data, you won’t have anything left when you get to your destination😅
