Media Server's an observation

It seems everyone has a media server at present, with everyone wanting you to use there specific flavour

We have Serviio,
Plexx ,
WMP ,

All reccomended by oem's, then we get the others

Twonky,
Xbmc,
squeezebox

etc,

Question is how many media servers can you have running at once? , how many should you have running at once?

And on which machine should the server run?

The machine your watching the media on?

The main machine in your network?

The NAS or similar you have your media stored on?

More importantly? what is the purpose of the server, just what does it do exactly? (daft question prehaps, butive never really got a definitive answer)

Mart

Since I installed Serviio on my Synology NAS, I seem to have some network issues; it sometimes crashes, my renderer is unable to connect to server. I still have the Synology Media Server running and I was wondering if this is creating some IP address conflict, as both media servers show up with the same IP address. Is this an issue ? Should I have only one Media Server running at anytime ?
Thanks.

[atc98092]

I've run two media servers on the same PC before, but unless you are doing it for testing purposes, I wouldn't recommend it. Places a lot of work on the PC.

In my limited testing the media servers used different port numbers, so having the same IP address wasn't an issue, but if two different products tried using the same port, it wouldn't work.

"And on which machine should the server run?"

The server should be running on the PC storing the majority of your video/audio files. This reduces the network traffic and keeps the video processing/transcoding (if necessary) fully contained inside the PC and off the network.

"what is the purpose of the server, just what does it do exactly?"

The server provides a single interface to stream media from a wide variety of sources. With Serviio, I can stream videos from my Windows Server, my other Windows computers on my home network, or online sources through plug-ins. The other main purpose of the server is to ensure the media you are attempting to stream is in a format your viewing device will support. If your TV (as an example) doesn't support a particular type of video, your media server transcodes it into something the TV will support. No need to convert one type of media to another. The media server handles it all.