Help: 7 HDTVs to 1 HDD?

[CyberBeaR]

Hey there!

I'm not much of a TV enthusiast but with this new Smart TV thing I thought of an arrangement and would like to know if it's possible:

I work in a Hospital and we have 7 rooms where I'd like to put 7 Smart TVs and have them all connected to our network which will have 1 HDD filed with movies so that they can access them. However, as I've previously said, I have never had any contact with these TVs so I don't know if this is possible, hence, I'd like to ask you what you think of this.

Furthermore, even though there are 7 rooms, let's say that only 2 or 3 would be accessing at the same time. How do these TVs read the movies, do they do it on the fly or will they store them on some sort of internal RAM so that they won't need to read the HDD? You see, I'm worried if this arrangement would function if there were too many accesses to the HDD.

Oh, by the way, If the HDD is connected via network would it still be needed to be formatted as FAT or I'd be fine with NTFS?

Please give me your thoughts!

 

[CyberBeaR]

Does anyone have an input over here? It would be very helpful as I'm lost in this matter..

 

[pm4]

1st to setup
You will need that HDD in some kind of network device (NAS or dedicated PC).
Those TV will also need connection to same network, best is wired connection as it's faster and more stable with lower latency.
Also TVs will have to either be able to directly read file from NAS (NAS will have to support direct file sharing which I think all modern/current do) or NAS will have to have Media server (UPnP, DLNA, ...) also all modern should support some standard like that (most of them will support all of them).

2nd to speed.
2-3 streams should be ok, ofc depending on TVs or NAS. 7 would be probably too much, it would all depend also on size of movies. Smaller movies (with lower bitrate) would be easier to stream than bigger (higher bitrate).

EDIT to 2nd point:
You asked about internal ram. Well during streaming there is some caching, but it won't load whole movie into memory. It do not have such large memories anyway. So you will need to read it from HDD everytime.

3rd to HDD formatting. If you will use NAS it will be determined by that NAS what fileformat it need. But it should not be your concern really. That TV will communicate with disk through NAS. I had one NAS which had ext3 (linux partion format) one I use currently have NTFS. Both worked with my windows, my TV and also WD live TV.

EDIT to 3rd point :
Ofc if you will need to store larger files than 4GB FAT would not be wise, but I think NAS currently either use NTFS or linux formating which both allow bigger files, but you should check it before buy.

So now summary:
You will need to choose compatible TV and NAS ensure that both support same standard which you will use. Also be sure your HDD is compatible with your NAS. I run into previous issues with unsupported HDD so if manufacturer have list of supported HDDs try to follow it it may not be joke .

And now something to think about:
If you already have some older TVs which you want to replace with smart TVs you may try to consider something like WD TV Live. That is small box which connects to TV through HDMI and acts like smart tv hub for any tv which do not have it's own. I have 2 of those and they work very well. And those are cheaper than buying whole smart TV, advantage is also that it allows you broader range when picking TV as you do not need to concern about compatibility of TV, or TV having some "smart functions" just it have to have HDMI. Ofc NAS have to be compatible with this device, but it should not be problem.
There are many devices like this and by my opinion they have superior functionality in terms of "smart tv", reason for that would be probably because their purpose is only that, while TV have to focus on lot of other stuff and those "smart tv" functions are often neglected, they look great on paper, but when you buy it you see that it's actually really slow and do not support half of things.
Cons for this way is that you need extra device, 2nd remote controller and one more wall socket for this device to plug in.
Pros is that it work with any TV with HDMI, it's probably faster and have better support for codecs and video containers. (not always ofc).
So just something to consider as alternative if you already have older TVs.