Media Streaming

I have some media files that I want to share with 2 desktops, 1 laptop and possibly an android table (when I get to purchasing one)

What would be the best way of accomplishing this?

I've looked at NAS boxes but they are very expensive.
There's also the Live Drives from Seagate/WD.
There's also NAS USB adapter that you can plug into an existing usb hard drive to turn it in a NAS.
There's also "media steaming" boxes also.

Thanks.

 

With the desktop and laptops, it would be possible to simply set network sharing the way you want it to work and use one of the desktop to host the files. You could use a homegroup or set something like password protected sharing.

At home i set password protected sharing so that i could access all of my media through the network, media streaming settings set the right way should allow use of the android tablet now that i think of it.

 

Ok thanks it seems to be the easiest way is to use the homegroup sharing.

My problem is I don't want to have the host machine running (since it consumes quite a bit of power) if I go with homegroup method. I want something that consumes lower power that I more or less want to leave on constantly or quickly turn it on if I need to stream something to a machine.

 

There is also a program called tversity that would do what you want. I understand your concerns about power consumption, but leaving the machine on only for media streaming shouldn't be that different from having the computer staying on at idle rather than load. This is something i haven't tried, but if i recall correctly it is possible to set a computer to wake up from sleep from a network adapter so there might be a way to set it so that it goes to sleep fast and you can waked it up from the network.

Depending on which router you have, it's possible that it supports usb HDDs for that purpose. It won't be very fast, but it might get the job done.