Raspberry Pi media server

The quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 is powerful enough to run a decent media server – albeit with some restrictions, chiefly that it’s not powerful enough to transcode between formats, so it will work best if your media is in a format compatible with the devices you plan to run it on. In most cases, using MP4 video with H.264/ MP3 codecs plus MP3 music files will fit the bill.

The Pi 2 can perform limited transcoding when prepping a file for streaming, meaning that you should be able to access your media even outside your local network, but expect significant delays – over a minute – while the transcoding takes place.

You’ll also notice some lags when accessing the server, but it’s not too bad; we’ve happily run a Pi 2 Plex media server for six months with few issues. If you’d like to go down this route, then see TechRadar’s guide at http://bit.ly/

pimediaserver, which explains all you need to set up the server using a customised Minibian image by HTPC Guides ( www.htpcguides.com).

This is probably the simplest way to get a feature-rich media server using the Pi 2, and Plex is a better supported solution than Emby, but if you’re taken with Emby then it is possible, albeit a lot more complicated. There’s a how-to guide to using it alongside the OSMC distro at

http://bit.ly/lxf-emby-install, which has the bonus of providing you with a media centre as well as server, but the author concedes that many of its features – such as streaming and integration into Kodi – are untested, so there may be issues. Several people have reported success with Emby using Arch Linux – one guide is here: http://bit.ly/lxf-emby-arch.