Better than Disney+: Jellyfin on my NAS

Jellyfin's an awesome open source home media server. I'll show you how I use it to organize my movies and TV shows.

Mentioned in this video (some links are affiliate links):

Contents:

00:00 - This deal's getting worse all the time!
02:07 - Aren't Blu-Rays expensive?
03:26 - I am not a lawyer (breaking DRM)
04:41 - Live transcoding and 30 fps
05:32 - Managing your media library
06:17 - NAS setup
07:53 - Jellyfin setup
10:28 - Organizing your media
12:24 - Advanced organization
13:24 - FBI raids?
14:37 - Dad Jokes

[TomNook.]

This video is absolute garbage. Halo the TV series was entirely faithful to canon and I loved the time when we finally met Master Cheeks!

[joruffin]

The worst part of the streaming age is that a lot of shows and even some movies have started not coming on physical media at all.

[Ashinle]

The people who say this is too expensive forget that the media you buy is yours forever. As long as you keep proper backups; the media you bought will never go away. There's no dealing with the streaming site removing content or going down. You have all of your things whenever wherever.

[kevinintheusa]

I was in the military and we amassed about 5, 000 DVDs and Blu-Rays over my 28 years of service. I was deployed 7 times and always managed to take some movies with me along with a portable player so we could watch something on down time. Anyway, we cut cable TV about 6 years ago. My son and I digitized my entire collection using 4 old laptops and now we have a 72 TB server with all the movies and TV shows you could imagine. It is insane how much we have to watch whenever we want to watch. I, especially, like older TV shows and movies. We use Plex but came to see what this Jellyfin thing is. My wife now goes to yard sales and picks up old movies and TV shows on the cheap and we add those to our collection too. So far, we have managed to fill up right at 45 TB of storage. Luckily, I am handy and we can build a second server if needed as we continue to add content. I think our biggest problem is that I tend to keep entire runs of shows on the server in case I want to watch them again. I have watched Justified, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate Atlantis over and over and over again. Start to finish. Great video. We do have an antenna and Tablo so we can catch some shows now too. I have figured out how to record them on the Tablo then remove commercials and then rip them to the Plex. That lets us continue to add current seasons that we like.

[lte_]

Thanks, i always wanted a good front end for all my "legally and totally ethically obtained movies" and this seems really cool so I'll give it a try

[aromaticsnail]

It would be great to see DIY alternatives. Like compare costs of building a NAS vs buying off-the-shelf, comparing open-source NAS OSes, etc.

[chuckreff]

I moved from a 3-bedroom house into a studio apartment. Saving space was a must. I took my five XL Uhaul boxes of DVDs and blue-ray and started the encoding process. I used an old Pentium 4 Dell with three optical drives to rip, encode, label, and organize the whole thing for about 6 months. Now everything resides on a 6-bay Synology. It was one of the best investments I ever made.

[sayubu]

I truly enjoy watching your videos Jeff, there is an underlaying set of values you adhere by, that make your videos not only entertaining, but also productive and educational. This video is specially designed to get rid of of those services plagued with meaningless content. Much appreciated !

[wakaneut]

Hats off to you, sir, for the time and dedication to get all those hardware and the setup all those from zero.

[kenzieduckmoo]

"It's Stupid, but It's The Law" sums up copyright/IP law in its entirety

[joshuaboniface]

Great video as always Jeff! Glad Jellyfin is working out so well for you and thank you for the project donation! -Jellyfin Project Leader

[waynetherockjohnson]

This is excellent. As a physical media collector, this is absolutely game changing. You rock!

[chrisa.]

The last few seconds of this video was absolutely appreciated at the 14:40 timestamp. I spent most of the time watching for your camera to pan down, but you made it unnecessary. Thanks!

Oh, and the video was great too. I did this back in 2014 before going on the road full time in an RV, and a small NAS with easily accessible ripped video library was a must for small kids. Serving the movies via tablet while on long drives was great.

[kingofmaglos]

Just wanted to say thank you for these last two videos. I had been wanting to do something like this for years. I had started doing it for music but never knew you could do it with film and TV. This weekend I got a NAS and have started filling it up with my film and TV library. This video was the missing link I had been waiting for to teach me all I needed to know in order to make this dream reality!

[markconger]

I am in love with this notion of building my own streaming library at home. I’m already in the market for a NAS for business data and I’m thinking of getting two NASes so one can be for the media streamer.

[nyxedbones]

Thank you for this video (these videos? the one prior was also incredibly helpful lol), I have been interested in a NAS for a while but Im pretty new to this stuff so a lot of written guides are a bit overwhelming, and your video helped really break down the process and made everything click a lot easier in my brain! I'm excited to tackle this project now when Im able :)

[colinpye]

Thank you for showing us the shirt. Seeing the setup for so much of the video left me wondering what the punch line could be.

[danielsmullen]

I moved from using Kodi and SMB shares to Jellyfin about 4 months ago and I'll never look back. After a few hiccups configuring the hardware transcoding, things are fairly smooth and I couldn't be happier. Great video. I hope more people use this approach. By the way, it can be incredibly affordable to make a NAS using an ordinary Windows machine -- I keep shuffling my old workstation hardware into service as a mediaserver as I upgrade, and it makes for a much beefier machine. This makes transcoding, ripping, management, and running all the necessary servers possible on one machine. I just run Windows 10, and I use Storage Spaces to set up redundant drives. It was way easier than I expected.

[robertwalker]

Thanks for the info. I used to rip my DVD's years ago but got out of it. Now I look at my DVD collection on the shelf and want to get it all online without having to buy the digital copies of stuff I already own.

[Neonsilver]

A nice video, it will help since I'm currently going back to physical media myself and plan to set up a NAS for it.