Podcast #648: Handheld Movie Server

Handheld Movie Server

We both took vacations recently and decided to leave the laptops behind. But that didn’t mean we didn’t want to take our content with us. If you have an iPad you are limited to 64GB at present and with Andriod many devices allow you to add storage through SD cards. While that gives you a potentially unlimited amount of storage its impractical for large libraries. What are you to do?

All (or most of your) Movies in the Palm of Your Hand

Seagate has got you covered. They sell the Seagate Wireless Plus. Its a hard drive with a built in web server that can stream your content to all your mobile devices. The 1 Terabyte version sells for $160 (Buy Now). They also have a 500 GB and 2TB version selling for $140 and $199 respectively.

Features:

• Wirelessly streams your favorite digital media to tablets, smartphones, computers and more

• Synchronizes with Dropbox and Google Drive to bring the cloud with you

• Streams up to three different HD movies to three devices at the same time

• Connects throughout your home to DLNA devices, Samsung Smart TVs, and AirPlay

• Integrates with the free Seagate Media app for iPad, iPhone, Kindle Fire, Windows 8/TR tablets and computers, and Android tablets and smartphones

• Delivers up to 10-hour battery life

Setup

The drive was connected to our home base computer and nearly 500GB of video and music were copied to it. The copy went pretty fast with the USB 3.0 interface. Since we were on a Mac we did have to reformat it so that both Macs and PCs could read and write to the drive when connected via USB. We copied the music to a music folder and the movies to a movie folder. When done the device indexes the content and presents the name and any album art that the file may have with it.

We then disconnected and turned on the wifi feature and saw the Seagate Wireless Network show up when we scanned wifi networks. We connected with no issues and immediately were able to stream content via the Seagate app on our mobile devices. You can mix and match OS as well as mobile device platforms. The first thing we did was select the settings widget and change the SSID and add a password. If you are using the device where wifi is available you can have the Media Server share the internet connection so you don’t lose Internet access while connected to it.

Performance

Navigation was simple, you can select content by Music, Movies, Photos, then by genres if you want. There is a nice search feature as well. Finally you can just browse the drives folders if you wish. Once the selection is made the media starts playing in a few seconds.

On the airplane we had three people connected and we streamed HD content that was recorded at about 8Mbps. We observed no issues with the data whatsoever. On our cruise ship we had four people connected and had no issues either. You mileage may vary as that environment was pretty quiet as far as noise goes.

The iOS app worked quite well but we seemed to like the web interface better. You simply put seagatewireless.com in the URL and you are presented with an interface that is similar to the app version.

The battery life was nowhere near the 10 hours that is on the packaging. It was more like four hours of continuous use.

Conclusion

The Seagate Wireless Plus drive is a great solution for those who want to carry very large media libraries with them and have access to them from any mobile device. Small and easy to carry, simple to use, and decent battery life make this an HT Guys favorite!