Background: I’ve been writing a new media server like Jellyfin or Plex, and I’m thinking about releasing it as an OSS project. It’s working really well for me already, so I’ve started polishing up the install process, writing getting started docs, stuff like that.
I’m interested in how other folks have set up their media libraries. Especially the technical details around how files are encoded and organized.
My media library currently has about 1,100 movies and just shy of 200 TV shows. I’ve encoded everything as high quality AV1 video with Opus audio, in a WebM container. Subtitles and chapters are in a separate WebVTT file alongside the video. The whole thing is currently about 9TB. With few exceptions, I sourced everything directly from Blu-ray or DVD using MakeMKV. It’s organized pretty close to how Jellyfin wants it.
What about you?
You say that, but some shows and movies are getting very hard to find these days. I lost one show to an external HDD that died, and I have never been able to find it again :(. That’s part of the reason I recently went to a DAS in my setup instead of a NAS - backblaze backs the entire 40TB DAS up for ~$90 a year!
What did you lose?
And there are plenty of shows that I’ve had to manually recover at times. And plenty more that I can’t find a copy of at all. I don’t get too attached to much, and those I’ll usually be seeding on multiple machines myself at that point.