Hi there,
I’m thinking about what kind of opportunities there is for a portable media center you can have with you in the car, train or whatever.
I imagine that the media center would create its own WiFi, so that devices would be able to connect to it and access the media.
I know you could do something with a Raspberry Pi, but how could this work in practice? What would be an easy way to access the media from an iPad fx? What software could be used?
As a bonus, it would be pretty cool if the media center could connect to a hotel WiFi and then create a hotspot from that.
Edit: This would be used when on the move. So you would have the media with you on the media center.
You could fairly easily power it from a USB power bank. At least up until the Raspberry Pi 4. The Pi 5 with its weird 5 V / 5 A power requirement is a different beast. They should have gone with something standard like 9 V / 3 A PD. It might still work ok if you don’t power lots of peripherals with it.
Peripherals are one thing, handling concurrent streams, transcoding… is another one.
So in theory, a Pi can be kept alive with a power bank, but OP is expecting (as I understood) multiple hours of streaming (with “local” only access) , which includes the above tasks for multiple concurrent streams. How big of a power bank we’re talking about and how long will it last?
When you use a typical 74 Wh (“20000 mAh”) power bank, you can expect more than 12 hours of runtime, if your average power draw stays at or below 5 W. Of course you aren’t going to do much transcoding with a Pi in any case, but multiple concurrent streams shouldn’t be much of an issue.