How to setup a Raspberry Pi to make media files of hard drive available everywhere?

Question

What I want

I would like to use a Raspberry Pi 3 attached to my home router to make available a hard drive with a bunch of media files (pictures and videos) to all my devices. (kind of a homemade Dropbox)

Considerations:

• Everywhere: it should work whether I'm in my home network or not.
• Phone client: I would prefer to have a client that can download the content so I can after play it rather than directly stream it.

Research I have done

I've been doing some research for the last few days but I didn't come across a satisfactory way of doing it. The two options I found are:

• Plex: it will stream the files and I'm concern about the performance. I probably wouldn't see a HD video without problems.

• NAS: only available in the home network.

What is the best way to achieve this? If there is one..

Update:

I found ownCloud and nextCloud and look really close to what I want.

Answer 1

There is NextCloud (https://nextcloud.com ), a fork of OwnCloud which you can install on your pi, or just flash a prepared disk image for the pi: https://ownyourbits.com/2017/02/13/nextcloud-ready-raspberry-pi-image/

Seems promising, but i haven't tried it yet.

Answer 2

I think you've got 3 separate problems: 1) How to use a Pi on your home router to store data: I just recently set up OpenMediaVault & it worked well. I could stream HD over wifi to my TV. 2) How to make it visible outside your house: this comes down to two things - a static IP address and opening the right ports for external access. There is a discussion on the OpenMediaVault forum with someone who wants to do this and ends up with OpenVPN. 3) A downloading client on your phone - not sure about this bit. Sounds like a dropbox sync to me.