Better than Disney+: Jellyfin on my NAS

I've had enough with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and all the other streaming services, they are raising prices, running ads and even removing content that people already paid for. I have modified the deal, please do not modify it further. This agreement is being put. worse all the time I'm not sailing in the Seven Seas so in my last video I showed you how to copy movies to my computer in this video I will show you how I organize my media library using a program called

jellyfin

but first I need to clarify a few things, I want to talk about why, after all, you could pay for years of streaming for the price of a Nas.

Remember when Netflix was new back then, cable had the best content. Over-the-air television was destroyed and most sports and big-budget shows only aired on cable and made you pay. Cable and satellite were like $100 a month and filled the plans people really wanted with dumb channels. No one was even seeing the same things happening now with streaming services. I have become what they were destined to destroy, but at least back then we still had Blockbuster. I could take almost any movie, game, or TV series and watch it on my DVD player. Nowadays, there really is no alternative to physical media, and yes.

There are some sacrifices you have to make if you're not a subscriber - you may have to wait for a popular show to come to Blu-ray - but here's the thing: if it shows well enough to make it to Blu-ray, it's the right thing to do. good enough for me. wait for it, hell, patience, that used to be a virtue, worst case scenario, if I have to watch it now, I can subscribe for a month, watch the show and cancel, but not have easy access to a lot of streaming content has an unintended benefit. intentional about the things I watch, which is good, it's hard enough to keep my YouTube and social media habits under control and Netflix today has a deep but shallow library of content and that's the trend for all other streaming services also, since I have physical copies.

Of all my media companies like Amazon and Time Warner they can't take it away from me like they do on their own platforms unless they convince the FBI to raid my properties. I wouldn't pass them up, but there are some other things. People were also worried in the last video. I got a lot of comments about how paying $30 per movie is a huge waste of money compared to streaming services. Well, yes, I have over 300 movies if I paid $30 for each one. It would be nine thousand dollars just for the movies I have that would pay for 90 years of streaming services even if I subscribed to all of them, but I didn't pay $30 per movie, not even close.

I bought most of them on eBay and others. those from The Bargain Bin at Walmart Goodwill or even at garage sales, most movies, even fairly new Blu-rays, are under five dollars and DVDs, you can buy them for a dollar or two. TV seasons cost more, but you've got to be kidding if you think you'd ever pay over a hundred dollars for a box of anything You can buy individual seasons of almost any show on eBay for a few dollars each, but to do so you have to have Be patient if you really want to see something right at the time of its release.

You may have to pay more, which is why I pre-ordered Top Gun Maverick once every few years. A movie is good enough to pay full price for, but for everything else it takes time to be able to buy it at a discount, but that's okay because most shows today are hot garbage and the few that aren't good will be just as good six months after launch, not everyone agrees, but that's okay, it's good for engagement, so comment below on how I'm doing the wrong things and like it. And subscribe while you're talking about comments. I understood a lot about how breaking DRM is illegal.

Well, I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I will say first: the law is different in every country in the world and it is greedy. Hollywood executives try to make it impossible to legally watch movies how and where you want wherever you live, but here in the US we have the dmca and it has language that covers the process of ripping movies from physical discs and technically it still has a provision that prohibits breaking DRM or what you call them TPMS or technical protection measures in most cases is stupid but it is the law, but besides the fact that Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot by encouraging people to pirate content as if it were 1999, basically there are exceptions for remixes. videos like mine that provide commentary or use the footage for educational purposes, so if you just film yourself doing something illegal and post it on YouTube, it sort of makes it legal.

I guess if someone in Hollywood sees this and would like to sue. Hey, be my guest, maybe I could team up with the eff and finally fix this silly loophole once and for all. Amazon can come in and remove TV shows that people bought legally if that's legal, but backing up my own Blu-ray isn't, maybe it is. the law that needs to change some people also had complaints about my transcoding process yes I can do live transcoding. The ASA store even told me after that video that all the nases I've shown can do live transcoding without any problems, even in 4K.

I still don't do it. I don't, but for most people you can probably skip parking the handbrake as long as you have enough disk space. Speaking of handbrake, I got a lot of feedback about using 30fps, but that setting is a maximum, not an absolute. I can show you here. when I open the War Games movie that I transcoded, the actual frame rate is 23.98 frames per second, so stop worrying about that or find some other setting to be picky like I said. YouTube loves engagement. There were some other interesting things I learned from your comments like VLC Alternatives like iina MPV and pot player.

I've also heard of a lot of people using tools like setting up the automatic ripper machine to speed up the process, but enough of that, let's get back to the topic of this video, managing your media library. After copying a bunch of movies and TV shows, what do you do with them? In my last video I mentioned that you could start with an external hard drive, but eventually most people get a Nas or network attached storage. Provides redundancy but is not a backup. My backup video explains why, but most importantly, it's the easiest way to share your media with your entire home.

This NASA is called Drive Store 4 Pro, but companies like Asus Store Synology and qnap have many different options that cost from a couple hundred. for a couple thousand dollars, this video is not sponsored like the last one, but I will mention that this Nest also sent me a long time ago. This video is not an endorsement or review. I'm just using this Nas since I've had it on. Moreover, the first thing you need to do is set up your nest. I have four Seagate hard drives and they come packaged in these anti-static bags, take them out of the bags, put them in the drive trays and then slide the drivetrace into the case for most creels.

It's that easy for some, you have to do a little extra assembly work, but once you have everything plugged into power and network, you at least have to find the nas on your network, turn on the nest and wait for to start. Nest has a loud beep that sounds once everything is ready. Your user guide should guide you in finding your nests on the web. For this one you can download control center from Asus store but for me since I don't want to install additional software I just ran this command which finds all Asus devices on the network.

I took the IP address and went to it on the default port 8001 for this Nas. It has what's called a self-signed security certificate, so when you first visit it your browser will probably pop up a warning like this, just ignore it and visit the site anyway. This should open the setup wizard for me. I'm going to stick with the default balanced hard drive configuration which creates a Raid 5 array. It's a good option on this Nas, but look for other videos if you want a

better

explanation of the raid and how it all works. The Asus store wants me to register my Nest, but I'm only using it at home and don't need any of their additional services, so I'm just going to ignore that.

I'll also ignore this update for now, but it's a good idea to keep your Nas updated to make it more secure. I log in about once a month and make sure updates are installed if I go into storage manager. I can see that the hard drives are doing something called synchronization. This process is a one-time thing and takes a day or two depending on the size of the drives, but you can still use the Nest while it syncs, it'll just be a bit. a little slower, so while it's doing that, I'll jump into App Central and install Jellyfin and when I do, the Aces store tells me it will also install Docker, create a media folder, and set up a few other services that look good to me. so I'll let it install, you don't need an idiot to run Deli.

It will work fine on almost any computer, even a small Raspberry Pi like this one, but I'm just showing how I set it up on an S. because that's probably the easiest way once installed, if I go to file explorer, I can see that there are a new media directory on the Nas and that's where I need to put all my movies and TV shows for Jellyfin to watch and put my movies on the Nest I went into services and made sure SMB file sharing was enabled. I need it so I can mount the nas on my computer and copy my movies to it and you also need to set up a user account with permission to mount the media folder. go to access control and add a new user.

The most important thing is to ensure that this user has read and write access to the media folder. All other settings are fine, so I'll create the user. The media folder is empty right now, but I'm going to go to my Mac where I have the three movies I recorded. I could search for the server on the network, but since I already know its IP address, I'll use my Max Connect to Server option and type the address here. with SMB before, when I connect, I enter the username and password of the media I just set up, then I can mount the media folder and it's empty right now, but it will copy the three movies that you extracted before a few moments later, now that the movies are on the NAS.

I can see that they also appear in the NASA interface, so now I need to configure Jellyfin using its quick launch. I first set up the admin user account and then when I went to create a media library I realized I should probably do that. I put the movies in a movies folder, so I went back to file explorer and did that, then went back and set up a movie library inside Jellyfin using the movies folder I just added to the media volume. I left all the other options default, but I selected the option to save artwork to media folders because I like how easy it is to update things like the cover, if Jellyfin chooses the wrong one, I did the rest of the settings and it finally returned me to the page Login.

I logged in. and at first it doesn't say anything here because

jellyfin

actually has to scan your library the first time you run it and in the admin panel I can see the progress of the scan once it's done we should be able to see all the movies I copied ok ? I'm almost done and if I go back to the file explorer, I can see the downloaded artwork from Jellyfin, such as the cover, a logo and a background that it will use when showing the movies, and if I go back to Jellyfin and go to the house, I should see my movie library and if I click on it I can see all three movies on the nas if I click on one like war games I can see all the data that Jellyfin pulled out and if I want I can press play and it should start streaming the movie from the nest to my browser.

One thing I learned after creating a library with hundreds of movies is that it's good to put each movie in its own folder, otherwise you'll end up with a directory of thousands of files and it's harder to organize, especially if you do things like copy extra features , so for each movie I'm going to create a folder with the same name as the movie, like wargames with 1983 and parentheses, and when I do that, I do move the artwork inside the folder with the movie. I have to remove the prefix from each of the art files, but note that you also have to change the poster file to be called a folder, but it's even easier to just delete the art and let Jellyfin recreate it.discharge.

For you, I'll do that for Mulan 2 and then also for Mulan and then I'll organize those two folders the same way. If I go back to Jellyfin, I can manually rescan the libraries after a few minutes. Jellyfin completed the data for all movies. again and if I go back to the UI I can go back to where I left off and watch my movies, so the next thing I want to do is add a view-only account if I have my kids signed in to the TV upstairs. I don't want them to be able to delete movies or change metadata, so in Jellyfin I can go to the admin panel and add a new user in the users tab.

I will give this user access to all libraries and leave all default options set. There are more things you can change, like parental controls, but I'll leave that for now. You can see that the viewer now appears in the users tab so I will open a separate private browsing tab and visit Jellyfin and log in as the viewer works but if I go to the menu now I can browse the library but I can't access the dashboard management and outside of the web interface, Jellyfin is a great app for iPhone, iPad or Android, you can use the official app or just open it in your browser, but other apps also work with Jellyfin on my Apple TV.

I already had this app called Infuse or as my kids call it Nachos since it looks like the Doritos logo, all I had to do was give it the connection details. for jellyfin and it worked out of the box, there is also Swift fin for Apple TV but I haven't tried it yet, other media apps like Libra elect can even sync with jellyfin if you want, go watch my tv video on how I did that now, a As you grow your media library, you'll also find things like creating collections where there are multiple movies in a series like The Lord of the Rings, which is why I only have one movie, each in its own folder inside a Lord of the Rings folder like this, those movies also have two parts per movie and if you name them with part the first and the second part like that, then when you are in Jellyfin, it will show extra parts of the movie, you actually need to go back and extract all the extra features of those movies.

I forgot to do that for the TV series. I have this example of Doctor. Who and my favorite doctor was David Tennant, although I like the raw passion that Christopher Eccleston brought to that first season, but we're getting off track here. You can see that when I put the rips on my Nest, I added this TV Database ID to the folder name. Here, for a series like Doctor Who, where there were multiple runs with the same name, you can add some additional metadata that tells Jellyfin the specific series so that when it displays the information it's all correct.

Where did I learn to do all this? documentation, there are all sorts of weird edge cases you can run into and someone has probably already explained it there finally in case the FBI raids my house asking for evidence. I didn't unload a car. I save every drive I extract in these giant folders and they are stored, also useful in case one day I want something to reappear with a higher bit rate. This video barely scratches the surface. I just talked about some of the main features of Deli Fin and how she organized movies and TV. programs I didn't even talk about things like book and music libraries HD home run integration for recording TV like a TiVo or something, the possibilities are endless once you control your own media library in Hollywood hates it, have you noticed they started not post? content on physical media in recent years, yeah, if you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great if these streaming services want to survive and don't want to slowly die like Dish Network did. they play on our chord until then piracy no, I mean you are, but now I will own my own content.

Disney can't come into my house and take back the Blu-rays I bought and the more I rip, the more I get. to cosplay as a CIS administrator managing more and more hard drives I see this as an absolute win exactly Smart Hulk until next time I'm Jeff Gerling and I know you're going to ask so this is what it says read it with a British accent