Category: Media Center
A folder full of favorite movies still leaves you with a decision: what do you want to watch? Sometimes choosing is part of the fun. Other times, you just want to turn on the television and settle in to whatever’s already playing. A familiar episode halfway through can be more inviting than half an evening spent browsing posters. Moirai provides…
Last updated: July 2026. Organizing a media library seems simple until your media manager identifies the wrong movie, separates episodes incorrectly, or ignores artwork and subtitles that are sitting right beside the video. Most of these problems aren't caused by bugs but ambiguity. Media managers can only identify content based on the information they're given, and filenames and folder structures…
Intel Celeron-based Synology NAS devices are popular for home media servers for one key reason: they have an integrated GPU that supports Intel QSV hardware acceleration. This enables them to serve a much higher number of video streams than CPU-based transcoding would allow. That transcoding support is available to any software running on the NAS, though how it is run…
I’ve written about the topic of a home media server multiple times in the past, from building an RV media center to running a Synology NAS on 12V DC power, integrating internet radio into the sources, and running an Apple TV on 12V DC power. This time I wanted to cover a recent improvement: adding live TV-like custom IPTV channels.…
The Apple TV is powered by 120VAC, which is fine for a house, but I didn’t want to need to have the inverter powered up just for that. It was the one remaining piece of my RV media center that wasn’t yet 12V. Fortunately, there’s a guy out there who sells 12V retrofitted Apple TV hardware. Step 1 was to…
Outside of populated areas, the radio/TV antenna on our trailer doesn’t catch much. Between dense forest and mountains a thousand feet taller than any of the broadcasting towers, the signal is effectively gone by the time it reaches one of our typical campsites. Video is a solved problem between a huge local media library and the option to stream if…
One of the biggest barriers in finding a solution to a problem is knowing the right terms to search for, especially when it’s a subject of only passing familiarity. That’s me with the world of audio, and it’s what has prevented me from finding the right subwoofer for the trailer. Until now. The ceiling-mounted speakers that shipped with the trailer…
I have a Synology NAS that I use in an RV media center — the model (DS116) was chosen deliberately due to its low power needs. It houses all of the content that we have available to watch while off the grid and connects into the trailer’s network. Synology does not manufacture a DC-DC power supply, only offering the AC-DC…
At home I normally stream most of what I watch — there’s very little on Netflix that interests me that I haven’t seen at least some portion of. This doesn’t cope well with the significantly bandwidth-constrained internet access I have in the travel trailer. I’d likely use up all or most of the high speed portion of my “unlimited” bandwidth…