RV Server Building - Unraid user looking at an AFA

[RV_server]

Hello,

I'm an unraid user who has dabbled with freenas a few times. I'm looking at making a plex server for my RV, but I want to do an AFA. SO I'm thinking the best thing to do is use FreeNAS for this particular use case.

Can I use the freenas server as my Media Player? Will plex be able to pick up a gpu and act as the media player as well as the server in this case?

Does anyone here do anything like this and if so, how did you accomplish a 100% offline experience.

I really don't want to teach my wife jellyfin or emby.

 

[sretalla]

Can I use the freenas server as my Media Player? Will plex be able to pick up a gpu and act as the media player as well as the server in this case?

The platform is really not designed to do what you're expecting.

You can certainly get a small client (like a Pi or something) that runs the plex client component and back-to-back them over an ethernet cable. Set the client to connect to plex on the IP you gave it and port like and it should go fine.

 

[RV_server]

The platform is really not designed to do what you're expecting.

You can certainly get a small client (like a Pi or something) that runs the plex client component and back-to-back them over an ethernet cable. Set the client to connect to plex on the IP you gave it and port like and it should go fine.

What would you do? Do that or just run a windows system?

 

[Samuel Tai]

The Plex web client won't work for you or your wife in this case? FreeNAS/TrueNAS is really only geared to provide the server side of Plex.

 

[RV_server]

I’m looking for a relativly cheap way to set this up and limit the number of devices I have to manage while I’m camping.

sounds like freenas isn’t for me

 

[Samuel Tai]

Why not add a USB wireless dongle to FreeNAS, and run it in AP mode? Then you could connect to it from an iPad Plex client.

 

[jgreco]

You could absolutely do this, but the result might not be what you wanted. There are several possible options that include running FreeNAS on the bare metal and a VM for display with GPU passthru, or ESXi on the bare metal and then VM's for both FreeNAS and a display VM.

The main problem is that you need to work out the plumbing for controlling the Plex client, and I find it hard to picture any situation that is easier than using a Roku TV and remote, a Roku streamer and remote, a tablet, or a laptop as the client, all of which have the control aspect worked out.

 

[pschatz100]

We use Roku's for all our media watching. For an RV, I would purchase a Roku TV (to keep the number of components and cables to a minimum). A small form factor PC with 8GB RAM and enough space to hold the movies you need would be easy to set up and manage. One network cable between them is all you would need.

If you wanted to get a little fancy with networking, you could set up a wireless media bridge and run the Roku TV wireless. You could then sit outside when the weather is nice

To the OP: Why do you want to use an all flash array? I presume you are not going to watch movies when the RV is moving and spinning disks are very shock resistant when powered down.