Without wishing to turn into a couch potato, Michael Reed examines five media servers that mean he could become one if he decided to.
HOW WE TESTED…
We used a fresh installation of standard Ubuntu (24.04) as our test platform for all the servers. One concession to this role we made was to choose the Basic install in Ubuntu’s installer as we didn’t have a need for extra apps. We also added and configured an SSH server so that we could handle some of the configuration details remotely.
We added Flatpak to Ubuntu’s existing Snap support to broaden our options when going after the latest stable versions of server applications. Wherever we could, we favoured this simplified method of installation rather than doing full manual installation of each candidate. No point in making things difficult if they don’t have to be.
Where we were able, we did the setup through a combination of remote access to the web interface of the candidate with some SSH access when needed, rather than hands-on with the server itself.