Experiment: Multimedia streaming from a portable NAS at 70mph

Problem: A long car journey with two boys (6 and 3 yrs)

We’re going on a long car-trip, and at best it’ll be 8 hours of driving, not counting time for breaks, etc.

In the past, in addition to books, word-searches/puzzles and ‘I spy…’ games, we’ve used iPads loaded with films and downloaded TV shows (from BBC iPlayer, etc) to keep them occupied, but this journey is going to be way longer.

Plus, the 16GB iPads can only hold a small amount of downloaded content. Depending on the quality of the media film being used, the amount of space is soon eaten up. In my case, four 1GB films was all that was possible.  As my boys seem to have a boredom threshold of a gnat, these are rotated frequently.

Challenge: Provide entertainment

1. The aim is to somehow store enough content for the boys to not run out of things to watch, without having to watch the same thing over and over again.
   
2. Independent streaming is a must – the two boys are different ages and therefore find different things interesting and entertaining.
   
3. Must be easy to use.  This must pass the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF) test, as she is co-pilot/crowd-control whilst I drive. If she isn’t able to help them immediately find what they’re looking for, or struggling with, it’s all a wasted effort.

Solution: PLEX

Enter, Plex. A fork of the XBMC codebase, this media server/client works better than expected. The server runs in the background on a machine/device that has access to the storage capacity, where the content resides. The client can be any number of devices, from Roku boxes, Amazon Fire TV sticks, Xbox One, PS4, whatever.

In the home, Plex server would run on a PC in the back room somewhere, and the clients (in this case, the iPad) would stream content from it. 

But how to run Plex in the car?  Here’s how.

• Server: Lumia 1520 with 64 SD card, running Plex.
• Client: iPad 16GB, running Plex.
• Network: Huawei MiFi personal hotspot (no sim required)

To begin with, I had my Lumia 1520 phone connected to my NAS, where some media content resides, and used the ‘sync’ button to fully download the content to the phone. I also had to ensure that Plex and it’s downloaded content was to live on the Micro SD card in the phone, as I didn’t want to completely fill the phone space and leave the spare 64 GB stick laying empty.

From here, I could (offline) watch the downloaded media on the phone, without a connection back to the NAS. 

Aside: I understand that this is a feature of the PlexPass, which I bought a year’s pass a little while back just to get Plex working well on my Xbox One, but it has already proved to be worth the cost.

Then, I used a Huawei ‘MiFi’ personal hotspot device and didn’t bother using a SIM card, as I didn’t actually want an external internet connection. This essentially just bats-out a private WiFi hotspot.  In the confines of the car, this low-powered device should work well.

Then, I connected my Lumia 1520 phone to this same hotspot, and enabled the ‘act as mobile server’ setting.   The MiFi device wanted to troubleshoot the fact there wasn’t a SIM installed, and loaded up an intranet page in the browser on the Lumia. ‘Skipped’ that and continued (cancel closes the WiFi connection!).

Adding the iPads to the same WiFi connection, along with MiFi Troubleshooting displays, put the device in the same ball park. As I had previously disabled it, I had to re-enable the setting to ‘search local libraries’. The content that I had previously ‘synced’ to the phone started to play on one of the iPads.

Skipping on over to the second iPad, same procedure, and started to stream the same media file from the Lumia phone, but playing from a different starting position.

To push things further, I connected a third device, namely a Surface RT, again running Plex. Same procedure, and the file played well.

Result: Not two, but three devices streaming content from a phone, running on a private wireless network, travelling at 70 (ish) mph on a motorway.

I went back to my original NAS and started to pull more media files down onto the Lumia phone, meaning that the boys will have a much wider variety of things to watch and hopefully help the time pass a little easier.

I’ve had to adjust the settings inside of Plex to allow it to have access to more of the storage space available on the 64GB stick, but other than that, the content just streams happily along.

Conclusion: Plex really is great.  If you’re not using it at home, give it a whirl.

Having the kit, such as the Huawei MiFi, laying around certainly helped, and the wonders of Plex made everything possible.

Sure, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, but this solution has the least amount of friction for me to configure.

Lessons to learn for future: Pre-loading content from a NAS onto a phone via WiFi takes some time. The files I was trying to sync were about a 1GB in size. The UI in Plex does a decent job (not flawlessly, though) to keep you informed as to the progress but, occasionally, it needed a shut-down and re-open of Plex to kickstart the transferral process into gear. Whether it was happening in the background, I cannot be sure, but the UI showed no progress.