Recommended NAS for Multiple Streaming

[c2.larios]

Hi everyone! thanks for taking the time to read this - I'm new to NAS and it's applications so please bear with e here.
The school I work here for currently checks out DVDs for students that comes here. I'd like to remove that and just load all available titles onto a NAS and allow students to stream from there rooms using the existing bluray players.
We have this building with 15 rooms furnished with a small older LCD TV(I think 28 inch?), and a Sony BDPS380 blu-ray player. Each room also has 2 network ports.


What I'd like to do is to get a NAS / or build a media server capable of streaming media to these rooms simultaneously. At our fullest, we house about 13 students at a time.
My concern is if at least half of that number goes and watch something using the bluray player, how slow the connection would be and what hardware would be best for this application.

Thank you for reading!

 

[sfx2000]

If you don't intend on doing any transcoding, then the real impact is bit-rates on the source files and bandwidth of the connection - any x86 based NAS should be able to handle this.

If you're looking to do some real-time media transcoding, check out the other thread...

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/recommend-me-a-fast-1080p-transcoding-nas.24471/

sfx

 

[KenZ71]

A max of 13 separate streams is not that much really.

Although using a blue ray player might be a challenge. Would tablets, laptops or PCs be an option?

 

[azazel1024]

I have a slightly older version of that BR player. I don't see an exhaustive list of what the slightly newer one supports, but I am pretty sure it will not support streaming from local network for any of the "apps" that it supports. You'll need to get a media streamer that supports local network playback to be able to use a NAS for anything.

With a typical transcode stored on the NAS, you are probably only looking at 10Mbps or so per stream. I'd imagine most decent NAS with a couple of drives in RAID0 wouldn't have much of a problem with even 13 streams at that rate so long as it was a gigabit connection from the NAS to the core switch.

 

[sfx2000]

13 simultaneous streams, depending on the content bit-rates, might prove to be a challenge across the wired network.

I don't think we have enough information - are the TV's playing the streams or are the BlueRay players doing this? Does the Sony BDP S380 support streaming from a DLNA server? I know the earlier S370 did, but doing a quick check, it's not clear if the 380 can...

In any event, you might run into Digital Rights Management concerns with multi-casting content, and getting around DRM is something that is well beyond the charter/scope of the forums here.

 

[htismaqe]

All of my Sony BR players support streaming from a DLNA server...

• BDP-S580/BM U2
• BDP-S1100/BM U2
  
• BDP-S5100/BM U2
  
• BDP-S3200/BM U2

 

[azazel1024]

Uh, I'll have to look up which version mine is, but I could have sworn it was the S370 and it does not support DLNA streaming (maybe it is an even earlier version?)