How to share movies on NAS ?

[hw_user]

I have a collection of Movies on NAS. There are several teenagers on the same network as the NAS wanting to select and watch movies from NAS on their phones. The current setup just lets them use a file app (like ES file explorer) to access the list of movies on NAS and play it with whatever movie player app they have on the phone. I was wondering if there is any better way to do this. I keep coming across the term media server but not sure if it can do what I want better.
I think my current setup is just getting data over the home network and all the video processing is done on each one's phone.
Does use a media server means some of the video processing is done on the media server and results in less load on the network and the phone?

 

[punkncat]

Plex should do what you desire. The simple file sharing and letting the phones do the work isn't particularly bad for your end of the situation.

 

[Viking2121]

I use Jellyfin personally as its just easier for other non tech savy people to connect to it, Plex was always a pain walking people threw it, But either 1 would work pretty well. Plex if your NAS is not capable of hosting a Plex server, its not a vary good idea to network a drive to Plex with how often it has to access the crap on it, I tried it despite people telling me its a bad idea, yeah it wasn't great.

Jellyfin on the other hand, I had a 12TB HDD in a old WD DX4000 and Jellyfin on a different computer and setup a network share and it worked great, no problems at all, still run it like that, and I don't need to pay for it Jellyfin to use my GPU for Transcoding some media.

choice is yours, can't go wrong with either, Both work vary well on most devices, Plex is more of a paid ad though, it doesn't land you on your media even if you paid for it, they like to push their crap on ya all the time.

Good Luck!

 

[hotaru.hino]

The NAS units I've used have some sort of DLNA server option, which a lot of devices can use with the right software.

 

[Agent39]

upload your movie files to NAS and then share the FTP or SFTP access to others. This allows others to access the video files on the NAS via an FTP or SFTP client and play the video on their devices via the client.