“No new Mac has a built in DVD drive so, while you still have an old one or a USB Superdrive lying around, now is the time to digitize your film collection and set up a Mac as a media center,” Harry Guinness writes for Envato Tuts+. “Storage is cheap — a few dozen films won’t put a dent in a one terabyte external hard drive.”
“Digitizing the media collection, however, is just the first step. There’s no point going to the effort of ripping your entire film collection to a hard drive and then just leaving the files sit there,” Guinness writes. “Sure, you can connect the hard drive to a Mac, dig through the file system and maybe find what you’re looking for, but it’s not a nice experience.”
“What you should do is set up a proper media centre with an app like Plex,” Guinness writes. “Plex is the best media centre software available for macOS. It uses a client-server model. On the media centre Mac you install the server app and then on every iOS device, Apple TV, Mac, games console, smart TV and other device you want to use, you install the client app. When you want to watch a film, you use the client app to browse your media collection and choose something. It then streams the film from the server, whether it’s in the next room or a different country. The server does all the heavy lifting. This split keeps Plex lightweight and available on a wide number of platforms.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Setting up a Plex media server is a perfect way to utilize an old Mac you might have around gathering dust.