NAS with USB connectivity


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Does anyone know of a NAS with USB connectivity that can connect to a media player?

I want to be able to remotely transfer files to my NAS and then locally (through USB) play them through my media player.

Thanks

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My Synology NAS supports esata and usb connections for external hard drive transfers. to your question, though, i dont know if you can stream data to your media player directly from the external source (usb) you might check either website for more details.

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Yeah, I'm 9999% sure you'll not be able to do what you're asking. That said, other solutions exist. WD Live is a good one, as is installing XBMC on a Raspberry Pi.

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Does anyone know of a NAS with USB connectivity that can connect to a media player?

I want to be able to remotely transfer files to my NAS and then locally (through USB) play them through my media player.

I feel like that defeats the purpose of a NAS (and would have weird lock issues). But... let's say you had a NAS without USB connectivity. You could "stream" and or otherwise listen/view your media through UPnP and SAMBA couldn't you?
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Thanks Jdawg683. I kind of had a feeling it wasn't possible. But I am going to keep researching, just in case.

Raspberry Pi is definitely thought. Thanks for bringing that option to the forefront again CPressland. Does raspberry Pi have enough power to play 1080p?

@cybertimber2008 - I see your point at defeating the purpose. However, I have never been a true fan of media streaming. I hate knowing that there is a possibility of media buffering or a connection being dropped.

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What media player do you have? Can you not just access file shares directly from the media player? Does it not support network connectivity?

I think you going to be hard pressed to find a NAS that allows read write to a disk via network, and then also present that same disk to some external device as a USB connected disk.

What your talking about is shared storage. Can be done in the cheap with iscsi, many nas support this. Or can go the fibre channel method - non in home budget normally.

But I don't know of any media players that allow access to shared storage via iscsi?

What is the make and model of you media player and can take a look at what you might be able to do with it. You might want to change out your media player to one that supports accessing shares, be it smb/cifs or nfs. For example I just access files of my file server via smb. So I can move files to it from my PC, and then the popcorn can play them directly off the file server.

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The media player is the WD HD Media Player. See here It does not have network support and that's really why I wanted the USB local connection. Lol- I don't even think Western Digital maintains this device on their website anymore.

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Yeah does not look like any network connectivity on that thing - time to get a newer generation product ;)

As to DLNA, yup that would be an option. But that is a streaming method, vs direct access to the media file. You can run into issues with the DLNA server not understanding the media type, etc.

I personally prefer direct access to the file by the media player vs transcoding and streaming to the device. SMB/CIFS over tcp/ip is a much more reliable method of accessing the file, so your less likely to see tiny blips in your connection causing you any grief in playback.

But sure it is a valid method of providing access to your media over you home network, and it should work great. You are seeing more and more devices supporting it.. And yes many nas do support it to be sure.

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As a follow up then -

If I were to set up Raspberry Pi with XBMC, would I be able to remotely connect to the Raspberry Pi "box" and copy media to it remotely?

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The raspberry PI is a tiny little thing with no real storage.. But sure if you attached some storage to it then yeah, in general it would have small onboard storage and then pull your media off your NAS via smb/cif/nfs/etc

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