Holiday Season Family Gaming

So we are a few days away from Thanks Giving one of my favorite holidays here in the USA. Yep another day where we can eat until we cant feel our legs. Now my wife loves this day because she loves to cook so our house always ends up with a mass amount of people. Just what do we do to keep all those people happy because we don't have cable TV so there is no football in this house, which is fine by me I'm not much of a sports watcher anymore; hockey was always my sport to watch.

Now last week I spoke about using old hardware as a media machine using Plex. So there is always something for people to watch and we have Netflix and Hulu on the Amazon Fire TV. So the parents will have something to watch but what the kids? Well they can join the parents in watching a movie or they can head down to the basement were we have a TV with the Wii/WiiU and the old X-Box setup. Here is where the problem come in, the age difference of the kids. The oldest one will want to play the more graphic games then what the little ones should see. Yes, I know we all did it ourselves when we were younger and we made it. But back then we did not have the powerful gaming machines we do today, the graphics are some time too close to the real thing. So I think its a good idea before this holiday season to stop for a minute and have a quick chat with the kids about what should be played with company around. Tell them to try to stick to the more family friendly multi player games you know, racing, sports, goofy ones; and when the family is done eating the littlest family members are watching a movie then they can break out the heavier games the old kids like to play.

Its also a fun idea to get some of the family that don't think gaming is good for kids to see the more family fun said of games, and get them to play a round with the kids. It's a nice way to break down the ideas that the media paints on games and the people that play them. The holidays are a wondrous time to year, getting the family to sit down and game together is an event I love to see happen around my house, hope it also happens around yours too.

Extra Hardware - Plex Media Server

If you're a PC-Gamer/computer person then you are a lot like me and have a tons of extra hardware laying around. So with all this you try to find uses for the older hardware and trust me there are many uses for it. Just because its no longer the top of the line super fast machine to play the latest greatest games you can still do a lot with it. I am going to be writing some articles about what to use this old hardware for and some of the software I use around my house. 

Lets be truthful, kids can be very hard on today's media formats for video entertainment. DVDs are the most common, and don't hold us well to scratches. So with this I decided to create a media center machine out of some of my old hardware laying around, and when we buy the kids a new movie I encode it into a stream able video format that my Amazon Fire TV can view. Cutting down on the destruction of the DVDs yeah they maybe a cheap format but lets face it, your sick of buying another copy of Frozen for the sixth time at ten bucks a pop which is getting pricey ($10 x 6 = $60) and that just one DVD the kids are breaking, you will go broke by the time the kid hits second grade if you haven't gotten them to put the movie back correctly and lets face it my 11 and 9 year old still have issues with getting that right. 

So a new media setup is needed just what do I use well... Plex (view features)

Plex is a multi media server system, with very little technical knowledge needed. Plex allows you to share you media anywhere you want across the Internet to your own devices you allow using an account you create. So you can share you media be it movies, music, and photos to your phone, TV, tablet, and even your game console. 

So lets get the technical break down out of the way. Plex minimum requirement have two settings, with trans-coding or w/o trans-coding. Since you want to be able to watch your videos on any item I recommend with trans-coding. These specs are at least a Duel core 2.4 processor, if you are going to have a lot of devices on at once I recommend a quad core, at least 2 GB of ram, Windows Vista or newer, OS:X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 or newer, or you can have to following versions of Linux running(Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS or SuSE Linux) You can read more about it here. 


My server specs are the following:(white case)

• AMD Athlon II X2 2.9 GHz
• 4 GB Ram
• Windows 7 Pro x86
• Network is a Wired 10/100 Ethernet
• Seagate 80 gig 7200 rpm (boot drive)
• Western Digital 500 Gig 7200 rpm (videos, photo, music; ex Plex drive)

The fist thing I would so with my server is make sure my OS is fully setup and any virus scanner is loaded and ready and everything is up to date. If using an older machine, I would do a full reload of the software, if restoring from a big box supplier (HP, Dell, or so forth) I would go threw and remove any software not needed for basic PC usage as the machine will just sit some where and not be used by a user. Next set would be to setup where my media is stored. I would recommend creating a folder named Plex, then do a break down from there. One folder for each item Photos, Videos, Music. This give the software a clear place to find the files and also helps for saving the items to a simple location. Once this is all done you can download the Server Software. Follow all the steps from the installer. It will ask you to create an account this is key as you will use this log in to connect any device you are using with Plex. 
Once this is all done, you can go to your device you want to connect. We use the Amazon Fire TV in our living room so I use Plex to stream all my media to that. Each device has its own setup the software will cost you five bucks but once you have bought it on one account you can load it to all your devices you have that account on. So our two Fire boxes both have it. Now that you have it loaded on the device just log in with your account and boom if you followed all the steps in the setup you should see all your files from your server. 

This wasn't a major break down of how to setup a new Plex server, but I hope it gave you some ideas of what to do and how to think about sharing your media with kids around. 

Have you built a media center for your home?  What software did you use? or even the hardware you used?