So I download a bunch of movies and then I put them on flash drive and then plug into the my Mi Box. I can probably setup a shared folder from my laptop, but I dont want my laptop always to be on. What is the alternative? I think I saw many years ago people get these small computers to just plug into an electrical socket and you just upload to that....but dont know if anything better is available since then.
Plex.tv
I have a NAS and my Shield is the player/plex server
I have a PC tower for Plex Media Server. Then I can use Plex apps on Samsung TV and Android TV for free.
Yes, Plex for android do cost you $5 either for one-time activation or Plex Pass subscription.
It's easy and works across many platform. Windows App, Android, iOS, chromecast, web browser, PS etc.
For me, I ended up spend $10 for Android and Windows app activation. I did buy an activation since it starts to support Chromecast 3-4 years ago. As my whole family used lot of Androids and Windows laptop, I ended up pay less than a $1 per device tho. And this is the easiest way for me to distribute and store the media across my 4 stories house.
For android, you also can get away with Amazon App Store. As Amazon App Store usually offer $5 free credits for new user. You can use that free credit to buy Plex as well.
A lot of people on here talk about Plex and Kodi. Keep in mind, Plex costs money, and Kodi, while being totally customizable, is also overly complicated for what you want, and in my opinion extremely ugly. Instead I recommend Achos Video Player which simply reads the contents of your NAS drive and automatically sorts the files, names them, and pulls cover art, descriptions, and trailers without any extra steps. You then stream the file from whichever video player you prefer.
RasperryPi3 running OpenELEC (Kodi) will share out any hdd, ssd or flash drive. Basically a poor mans NAS.
Running Kodi or VLC for Android and stream off the Pi. Done and done 100% free. There is absolutely no need to run Plex, buy a shield or even a NAS device.
Edit: Running a Pi, connected directly to the router is going to use far less power than a NAS or Plex server and cost a fraction than those options. Sure, at some point in the future, youll defiantly want something better, but for now, you might as well start out small.
Get a NAS and install Kodi on your Mi Box. Read up about setting up the NAS for network sharing and then finding network shares on Kodi.
There is no plug n play solution here. You are going to need to do some research and upfront "work."
NAS is the best solution, but you could probably get away with a decent sized thumb drive.
I use a NAS hard drive and a Raspberry Pi running Libreelec and Kodi. Runs everything (apart from 4K) and supports pretty much all audio formats. The advantage of this is, any movie you download from here on in just gets moved to the NAS once done and it's immediately available.
It also means that all movies are available on pretty much any other wifi-enabled device you have.
Get a router with a USB port that supports storage. Create a share from that storage. Mount the share on your laptop so you can copy and delete files to the USB stick. Mount the share in kodi on your mi box so you can play from storage on the router.
I personally hate having media on a wan facing device but I think for you it'll work out fine and a new router is $50-100 and you can probably sell your old one (or it already offers this feature) you can add another 0 to the cost if you want to go full NAS. Since it's downloaded movies, it isn't that important for that kind of investment and the power would exceed that of running your laptop
If you want small computers there's odroid and orangepi that offer gigabit Ethernet which a router already has. They are usb2 I think unless you go high end, but most routers do usb3 these days. Plus a router is 100x simpler.
Absolutely Plex. Once you discover the various tools for automatically downloading, um, acquiring movies and TV shows when they're released, you'll be hooked.
Get an NAS. Google it and read up about them