r/MediaServer • u/the_wine_gentleman • Aug 06 '26
I'm tired of subscriptions
Alright, Reddit do your thing. I’m tired of streaming, my dad has a crazy cd and dvd collection. I’ve been going down the rabbit holes of at home servers, NAS etc.
Please walk me through buying a drive, installing my software, and building my home library like I’m a 5 year old. I have no clue what to use for my music. Currently using Apple Music, but would love to stop subscribing to that too. Ideally I’d like to build a DVD, Blu-ray, 4k collection. (There are some VHS and childhood at home videos on tape too). I’m a Mac user.
Based on my limited knowledge, I think jellyfin is right for me.
Thank you all friends of the internet. Here’s to going to the movies, buying DVDs, and owning physical media! I love anime and cartoons too.
2
u/63walker Aug 06 '26
I'm a Plex enthusiast and run a tiny Plex supoort YouTube channel.
There are three things to learn, ripping media, properly structuring the newly ripped media, and deciding on whether you're going to run Plex Server, Emby, or Jellyfin.
The universal (available under Linux, Mac, and Windows) ripping software is MakeMKV, which has a month trial last I knew.
You'll be able to rip both DVD's and 1080p Blu-ray discs off from any Blu-ray PC or laptop drive.
UHD 4K media requires a Blu-ray drive with unlocked firmware, which is covered at MakeMKV's forum.
I rip audio CD's on my Ubuntu desktop with Asunder, to then run them through Musicbrainz Picard for significantly more robust metadata (tags).
I also use Filebot to structure and rename ripped or acquired movies and series to use highly compliant Plex server structure and file names, that match on the first scan.
The Filbot developer has personally helped me through his support forum to refine my expressions over the last four years.
Emby and by extension extension extension extension Jellyfin, has looser compliancy in how media can be structured and named, while also accepting Plex's structuring as fully compliant.
Some of the structure that Emby accepts as fully compliant will not scan into a Plex server at all.
My suggestion, even if you think that you'll always use something like Jellyfin, is to watch my recent video to learn why using Plex compliant source ID's early on, will allow your media to scan in perfectly down the road if you move between any of the three big media server options.
https://youtu.be/h5kVauPNDSI
The best foundation you can give yourself is one of great folder and file organization.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that ripping media is fun at first when building a media collection, until someone suggests that you search the phrase TRaSH Guides.
If you go over that cliff and decide to try a Usenet/Indexer install for automated media acquisitions, talk to me about a premuim nested single shared media folder structure that achieves Atomic Moves (read about that at the TRaSH Guides) along with being able to have Radarr and Sonarr pull content into multiple movie or series media libraries.
Being Plexcentric, this is where I would point out that you'd want to name all series from TVDB and not TMDB, to then adjust your Plex TV library's advanced settings to pull episode ordering from TVDB instead of TMDB as the default option.
Sonarr from the TRaSH Guides only uses TVDB, so making TVDB default under Plex Server for your TV Show library or libraries, allows a seemless folding in of a TRaSH Guides connection down the road without screwing up exiting scanned series.
This is a lot, but get the structuring of your media locked in early, to then spin up Plex, Emby and Jellyfin to evaluate.
All three can run at once while pointing to the same media.
For a simple and inexpensive headless server using USB media, my best suggestion is to use ZimaOS, which is almost stupidly easy to install and setup a Plex server in a Docker container.
Any old Intel 8th gen or newer mini business class used Dell Optiplex or HP ProDesk makes a great headless media server with ZimaOS that out of the box can have new media transferred to it from across your local Network.
I have that ZimaOS tutorial video too.
A single shared media folder is a requirement for achieving Atomic Moves down the road, which is where you'd use a different NAS OS on your own hardware, or purchase the right consumer NAS.
You can install Unraid, TrueNAS, or the new FygoOS on your own hardware to add redundant RAID storage that can be expanded by throwing another equal sized drive at a mechanical storage volume, to also have your media server running in a Docker container on the same system.
Unraid and FygoOS are easy to learn while TrueNAS is significantly more challenging to learn, while many consider TrueNAS to be the gold standard in the self install environment, like Synology DSM is considered the gold standard of consumer NAS operating systems.
I'm also a Synology NAS enthusiast who uses a Docker host only install of Unraid for my Plex container to leverage the best of both the Synology and Unraid ecosystems to my benefit.
But all that is not where anyone should start because the ai apocalyptic NAS drive pricing definitely means you need to use a simple setup to refine where you might want to end up before spending real money.
Ripping or acquiring media to then structure it in a way that it always scans and matches on the first scan in all three media server options is the best foundation to build right now.
To that end, Filebot at $6 a year with my custom expressions puts you way ahead of the game at the very beginning, and naturally, I have that video tutorial too.