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?
Feels like a convoluted way of using an external hard drive.
Search for portable Jellyfin media server projects. It looks like there’s a few out there.
If you’re going to use this in a car, it needs to be as simple as plugging in a single device and powering it on. An over-engineered solution is going to quickly turn into a headache.
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?
I did this a few years ago with a stack of pi 4s connected to a four port PoE switch. One was an openWRT router, one was a plex server connected to some spinning discs via usb, and I had another you could plug an hdmi cable into and use to view the media. I eventually found out I could host the whole thing on a single pi, but it was still a fun project. Could probably do it all on a pi 5 with an nvme hat no problem. Might look into that when I get the spare tinkering money.
I carry a mini PC, Bluetooth remote, and HDMI cable. Then media and automatic VPN to home as every hotel and Airbnb blocks Plex.
It’s a good setup, but I don’t think this would work in a car and using iPads.
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.
Glinet makes travel routers with OpenWrt on them and internal microSD slots as well as external USB ports. Pretty easy to turn those into a media server as well.
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 used a raspberry pi 3 with RaspAP in this use case in my room at home for some time. Performance was not the best, but enough for my needs back then.
Yeah you can use the rpi as the router too
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😅
Pi5 may be a good solution then. Might also try a radxa x4. It has wifi 6 so more bandwidth for multiple wifi clients. Plus an m.2 slot. Only thing that sucks is there’s like no cases for it.
As others already wrote, I would go with the Plex server at home and using the “Download” feature to have some content available offline for the times you don’t have internet. You can actually set a limit for the size of the download library and individually set video and audio quality for the files.
Seen raspberry pi mentioned some times, I don’t have one, so maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there would be an easy way to power it up on a train for example.
Travel router and VPN.
What if I have no internet? 😅
