Rich media library can make your Home Theater more attractive. So where can you store the large movie library? A PC or an external hard disc? Network Attached Storage (NAS) is actually the best choice. NAS is purpose-built for 21st Century work and leisure to store more photos, videos, and documents. Designed to support modern life, NAS is your smart, efficient, and up-to-date file storage, backup, entertainment, and secure sharing solution.
If you want to buy a NAS, Qnap and Synology are two veteran NAS vendors. But if you don't spend hundred of bucks on a NAS, it's also OK. You can build your own NAS Server for your Home Theater by using an old or new server/PC hardware. Here is a list of some best free and open source NAS Operating system available on the Internet.
Overview
we are going to
Part 1. 8 Best Free and Open source NAS software
Part 2. Best Movie Backup Tools for Free NAS
Part 1. 8 Best Free and Open source NAS software
#1. FreeNAS
Official Site: http://www.freenas.org/
FreeNAS is an Open Source Storage Platform and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It is an operating system that can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share data over a network. FreeNAS is the simplest way to create a centralized and easily accessible place for your data. Use FreeNAS with ZFS to protect, store, backup, all of your data. FreeNAS is used everywhere, for the home, small business, and the enterprise.
#2. Openfiler
Official Site: https://www.openfiler.com/
Openfiler is an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage and block-based storage area network. It was created by Xinit Systems, and is based on the rPath Linux distribution. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Its software stack interfaces with open source third-party software.
#3. Rockstor
Official Site: http://rockstor.com/
Rockstor Personal Cloud Server is a powerful local alternative to public cloud storage that mitigates the cost and risks of public cloud storage. A lot of important data is stored on laptops, desktops, mobile devices, external hard-drives and various cloud storage services and the data footprint continues to increase as users generate and access more data.
#4. NAS4Free
Official Site: https://www.nas4free.org/
NAS4Free is an Open Source Storage NAS (Network-Attached Storage) distribution based on FreeBSD. The NAS4Free operating system can be installed on virtually any hardware platform to share computer data storage over a computer network. 'NAS' as in “Network-Attached Storage” and '4Free' as in 'Free and open source', NAS4Free is the simplest and fastest way to create a centralized and easily-accessible server for all kinds of data easily accessed with all kinds of network protocols and from any network.
#5. Nexenta Community Edition
Official Site: https://nexenta.com/products/downloads/download-community-edition/
NexentaStor is an OpenSolaris or more recently Illumos distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system. NexentaStor supports iSCSI, unlimited incremental backups ('snapshots'), snapshot mirroring (replication), continuous data protection, integrated search within ZFS snapshots, and an API.
#6. Amahi
Official Site: https://www.amahi.org/
Amahi is software that runs on a dedicated PC as a central computer for your home. It handles your entertainment, storage, and computing needs. You can store, organize and deliver your recorded TV shows, videos and music to media devices in your network. Share them locally or safely around the world. And it's expandable with a multitude of one-click install apps.
#7. CryptoNAS
Official Site: http://cryptonas.senselab.org/
The CryptoNAS live-CD is made for people who want to encrypt their data without bothering about complicated technical issues. A computer running the CryptoNAS live-CD works as a fileserver (NAS) that encrypts your private data. The CryptoNAS-Server package adds a user friendly, web-based frontend for harddisk encryption to an existing fileserver.
#8. OpenMediaVault (OMV)
Official Site: https://www.openmediavault.org/
openmediavault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins.
Part 2. Best Movie Backup Tools for Free NAS
After you have a free NAS software for building our Home Theater, you also need a movie backup software to help you backup all your video files onto your free NAS software and organize all your video files in oneo format so that when you watch movies via NAS on your HD TV in Home Theater， you don't worry about the video format/codec incompatibility issues. Below are two popular video and audio backup software that also can convert video and audio formats.
1. Free Movie Backup Software
Free Video DVD Converter Ultimate is a tool that is especially designed to convert both DVD and video files to a wide range of video formats which are supported by PCs and mobile devices. With it, you can manage and organize your various video files and DVD collections to free NAS in AVI, WMV, MOV, FLV, MKV, 3GP, MPEG, MP3, M4A, AC3, WMA, AAC and more format. In case you need to, Pavtube Free Video DVD Converter Ultimate enables you to perform a few basic adjustments to the movies you want to export. With the help of some practical sliders, menus and check-boxes, the application allows you to trim a clip, crop the image, add watermarks and subtitles.
10 Minutes Guide to Backup DVD and Videos to NAS
1. Click "File" > "Load Video/Audio" or "Load from Disc" to load DVD and video files.
2. Choose output format by clicking "Format" button. You should choose the format according to your NAS supported file format and your usage in your home theater.
3. Hit on "Convert" to start to organize the DVD and video files to one format for NAS store and use in Home Theater.
2. Paid Movie Backup Tool for Free NAS Users
Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate is a top-ranked video converter + Blu-ray Ripper + DVD Ripper to cahnge the format of a video/Blu-ray/DVD file in order to make it playable onto a specific device or across a whole range of hardware or software products through your free NAS software. It supports to input various video formats and remove Blu-ray/DVD copy protection then to shift the video to H.265/HEVC, H.264, MP4, MKV, MPEG-TS, AVI, MP3, AAC and more so that you can play videos, DVDs and Blu-rays on TV via NAS.
You can configure your video and audio encoder codec, bitrate, sample rate, bitrate, channel and do some simple editing jobs to make the output videos. Loading files from a disc or from a local folder is as simple as it can get and users can work with a plethora of formats for both video and audio streams. There is also a preview tab for examining the selected video while capturing screenshots is a one click job, thanks to the button placed right beneath this area.
10 Minutes Guide to Backup Blu-ray, DVD and Videos to Free NAS
1. For video and audio files, just drag and drop the files into the software. When you need to load Blu-ray and DVD discs, you should first insert the disc to Blu-ray drive. You are allowed to rip Blu-ray/DVD with forced subtitles to NAS.
2. Click "Format" bar, from its drop-down option, select the format you want. You also can directly 1:1 backup Blu-ray and DVD to video folder without quality loss.
3. Click “Settings” on the main interface and you can adjust A/V parameters. After finishing all the settings, go back to the main interface, press the right-bottom “Convert” button to start organizing video/Blu-ray/DVD to NAS.
Compare Free and Paid Movie Backup Tool for NAS Users
| Free Movie to NAS Backup Tool | Paid Movie to NAS Backup Tool | |
| Backup Video/Audio |  |
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| Backup Blu-ray |  |
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| Backup DVD | |
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| 1:1 Entire Disc Copy Blu-ray and DVD | |
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Directly Main Title Copy Blu-ray/DVD |
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| Convert to MKV, AVI, MOV, FLV, etc | |
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| Convert to MP4 | |
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| Convert 2D to 3D | |
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| Compress 4K to 1080p | |
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| Edit Video | |
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| Adjust A/V parameters | |
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