I love digital media for two reasons: it doesn’t take any physical space and it’s much easier to access, with the right setup, than physical media.

However, digital media still has one of the major problems with physical media: once you have a lot of it, accessing and organizing it can be an issue. This is especially true with the small media access devices. You might own many more gigs of music and movies than your little iPad, netbook, or mobile phone can hold, and it can be a royal hassle to keep the content you want to access synced all the time. If you’re leaving for a trip, you have to make sure you preload the movies and music you want before you leave. If you forget to do that, you’re stuck with the same stuff you loaded last time. Plus, you have to plan what you want ahead of time – if you bring all horror movies and rap and then feel like a comedy and a country song, you’re outta luck, guy.

This can also be a hassle even within your household – you might have several computers and media access devices in different rooms, all networked together but all using different software, media formats, and access protocols. It’s a pain to manage all that individually and you can easily spend dozens of hours converting media to different formats just so it will play on a specific device.

Dealing with these problems sent me looking for a cheap, easy solution to managing all that media. I wanted to be able to access it from anywhere in the world on the fly, any media access device in my apartment, and I wanted it to be as cheap as possible. I also wanted it to be simple enough, once set up, that my non-tech savvy girlfriend (she’s come a long way, I’ll give her that) would be able to easily use the solution.

First, I looked at cloud storage solutions like Dropbox. Since everything is stored in their datacenter, content can be accessed from anywhere. However, there are three major downsides to these types of cloud storage solutions: cost, limited management, and upload time. These solutions are expensive. Dropbox costs 20 bucks a month for 100GB of storage. Plus, that’s only 100GB – for 80 bucks nowadays you can buy a 1TB hard drive – 10 times the storage space. You get limited management, can’t tweak the software, and on top of all that, you have to upload all your files to the service and keep them synced. The typical home internet connection doesn’t have much upload bandwidth, so it would take a damn long time to upload 100 GB.

So instead, I looked into building a media server at home, as well as solutions for streaming from that media server to my devices.

Cheap Media Server

A media server can be built very cheaply if you have a little knowledge of how to build a computer. All you need to build a media server is a motherboard, processor, memory, case, power supply, hard drive, and a DVD player. A video card is optional. If you plan to watch movies right from the media center you might want one, but most motherboards with have some type of video out that’s serviceable for just watching movies. Most motherboards also have onboard sound, so you don’t need a sound card. For another few bucks, you can even through in a TV tuner card and use your media server as a TiVo.

Assuming you have another desktop computer at home, you don’t need a keyboard, mouse, or monitor for your media server. Not buying these pieces can save you quite a bit. I like to use Newegg.com or Tigerdirect.com to buy my parts. Make sure you do your research – buy parts that work together. A few hours a research can save you tons of money. Get help from a friend or do some googling to learn what parts are good and what works with what.

In terms of software – the only thing you’ll probably need to buy is an operating system. The rest of the software you need is open source and free on the internet. If you’re really tech savvy, you can probably even go with Linux for your operating system and not have to buy that, either. But I don’t know Linux – I’m only familiar with Windows, so I bought that, too.

Once you get all your parts, assemble the machine and load your OS. When you’re building a machine, use the mouse, keyboard, and monitor from your other computer. You won’t need these things after you’re done, but you do need them to build it.

If building a computer scares you, invite a tech savvy friend over, pay with a few beers or a bottle of wine, and get him/her to do it. Make sure you help with this part, so you can learn how to it. You’ll probably be surprised by how easy it is. Building computers is really simple and fun. It’s a great skill to know and I’m always flabbergasted that people don’t want to learn how to do it. Don’t be one of them. Learn.

Once your machine is set up and your operating system is installed, hook the machine up to the internet and load on your other software. I usually put VLC on the machine because it’s a great media player and comes with most of the video codecs you’ll need. Plus, I use a projector for my media server, so I need a video player on there.

You’ll also want some type of streaming software that uses the uPnP steaming protocol. Don’t worry about how technical that sounds (some people run screaming once you start talking acronyms), it’s really easy to understand with a little googling. If you’re using a Media Center edition of Windows, you already have streaming software built into your operating system, so you don’t have to do this. For just home use (not accessible from the internet) Twonky Media Server is really good, but it isn’t free.

My favorite, however, is the Orb service. Orb is the best, most awesome thing I’ve ever used, and it’s completely free. All you have to do is go to their website, set up an account, and download their streaming software to your new machine. The streaming software runs all the time, in the background, serving media files to any device over the internet or local network. Orb Live even has iPad, iPhone, and Android applications. These cost a few bucks, but if you’re leery, there are free versions you can try out.

The best thing about Orb is that all the files are converted to the correct formats on your media server, and then streamed to your device. You iPad can only handle mp4 videos, right? But converting all that junk is a royal pain. No problem. Orb Live will do the converting on the fly and stream right to your device, even over the web. You can go to your friend’s house and stream from there. For you Apple users, Orb Live even streams over 3G – no wifi required. I really can’t say enough how much I love this service. It even streams to the PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 over the internet, so I can go to my buddy’s house and stream my media to his PS3. Oh, if you’ve got a TV Tuner card in your media server, Orb will stream your TV, too. You can even stream a webcam if you want. How awesome is that?

Once you’re got all that stuff set up, you can unplug the mouse, keyboard, and monitor from your computer. If you need to access the machine, you can use Remote Desktop. There are Remote Desktop clients for almost every platform, including Windows, Mac, and iDevices. If you’re using Windows on your other machine, remote desktop is built right into your operating system. If you’re on the same network, all you need is the name of the machine.

You can even access your media server from anywhere in the world by using remote desktop across the internet. All you need to know is the IP address of your media server. The problem, of course, is that most home internet connections have a constantly changing IP address, not a static IP address. Sure, you can call home and get someone to check for you every time you want to connect, but that’s a hassle. Instead, I use the Dynamic DNS service. It’s free and it works great.

To use it, you set up an account on their website. You’ll have to pick one of their free domain names during this process. Next, you download their software and run it in the background on your media server, just like you did with Orb. This software notifies Dynamic DNS every time your IP address changes, so it’s always up to date.

Now, when you’re using the remote desktop, you type in the domain name of your computer, instead of the IP address. The domain name goes to Dyn DNS, which provides your IP address, and BAM – you can connect to your media server from anywhere, even your phone.

There is only final thing that you have to consider when using dynamic DNS, and that’s port forwarding inside your network. Inside your network your media server will have a different IP address than your connection to the internet. So you need to configure your router or modem to forward any remote desktop connections to your media server by forwarding port 3389 to the internal IP address of your media server. This is a pretty simple process and done via the web interface that you probably used to set up your WiFi network.

Anyway, so that probably seems like a lot of work, but the end result is completely worth it. You can access your media anywhere in the world, on almost any device. You have access to all your media, not just the stuff you loaded on your device before you left your house, and it doesn’t cost you any monthly fees.

This was pretty much a general overview, but if you want more detail about any of these things, I’ll be happy to answer questions. It’s simpler than it sounds.

Also, the one thing I haven’t figured out how to stream yet is PDFs and comic books. I have a bunch of comic books from buying the Marvel DVD collections and I would prefer to not load them all on my iPad, since the thing is only 16 GB, which fills up quickly. I can stream my music and movies to the iPad using Orb Live, but not comics. If anyone has a good way to do that, I’m all ears. I want something that’s as easy to use as Orb. The guy who makes Comic Zeal for the iPad already told me he has no intention of adding this functionality and the streaming services for documents via Orb Live are very limited.