Should You Build a DIY Media Server In 2024?

Hello everyone, thanks for coming back to the channel. I really appreciate it, thanks for watching the home theater tour and the Journey video. It was great, I had a lot of fun doing that and I just want to keep things moving and in rhythm, esp. So, it's kind of like that for me, so today I thought I'd do a quick little video about my latest Endeavor home theater system. In this case, I'm going to

build

a dedicated

media

server

that will be filled with shows and movies for virtually instant access and one-to-one disc-quality parodies, so I guess I can start with the source of this interest and, you know, After

build

ing my home theater system, I did a lot of research and watched a ton of Collision Escapes.

In the wild, it basically looked like everyone, after a certain level, had escaped Collide and I really thought the UI looked cool. I thought about the concept of just being able to access your

media

library that way on the go and be sure that "The quality is even better than the quality was really cool to me and I wondered, not very surprisingly, thinking, you know ? Is there a way to do this myself by copying my own movies at that time? And sure enough, it's actually a lot more common than you think and it even seems to be the first step people try to take before graduating to Collide Escape, so?

That prompted me to start looking into my Nas and learn a little bit about what tools I was going to need to do this, long story short, after that, I remember having an internet outage that lasted, I don't know, four to five hours, nothing super horrible, but it was like it was a Friday night and you I know it was both my girlfriend and I were off work and we were excited to hang out watching a movie, we do something and I realized that great part of my content had been internet, you know, just streaming, I was doing that. a lot of streaming, I was streaming all my movies, all my TV shows, I didn't even have some of my favorite shows on any kind of media that's tangible and real, so I thought, you know, this is a really, really good excuse to Load a hard drive with a lot of my media, in case this happens again we can put whatever we want on it and we don't even necessarily feel like the internet is cut off, we just have something on the TV to play. for background noise while we scroll on our phones or talk or hang out that kind of thing.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is the devices you can use to stream media from a local

server

. In my case, obviously, I moved on. and I'm just using my Apple TV for now, but there are tons of other options, you can make an Nvidia Shield Pro, you can make a zidu um zpd is out of the question, looks like that rvolution player just got released too. people are paying so there are options to stream your backups, your shows, for the sake of my setup I'm just using the Apple TV, it's the main device that's almost always on if the theater is in use so which makes a lot of sense. for me to go ahead and use that.

I chose Apple TV solely because of my investment in the Apple ecosystem. I'm kind of a fan of Apple features. I think your UI design is key. I use it quite a bit. everything on the channel has been used with an iPhone and a Mac and Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, so it made sense and I started even renting a little bit and if I start building my own digital library, it will probably be through iTunes, so to me it makes sense. That said, I can't talk about the praise of the Apple TV without talking about some of the limitations, especially when it comes to streaming your own physical media, a first.

That's not extremely important to a lot of people is that there is no Dolby Vision profile 7 and profile 7 is what they use for Blu-ray and Apple discs. I think it is in the hardware or software limitation. I'm sure essentially I'm sure the hardware could do it right, but there's essentially nothing anyone can do about it. Apple just doesn't allow it, they only allow profile five and I think eight, so you won't be getting your Dolby Vision off the drive for a while. For many people, that's not necessarily the worst thing. For many people, this is important and there is no lossless audio on the Apple TV.

If you're going to play an Atmos soundtrack over something like Infuse, for example, you're just going to Get Track 7.1 Che HD and it'll remove the Atmos metadata again. The people at Infuse have said that this is an Apple TV limitation that they have implemented. It would be really interesting if the Apple TVs they launched this year allowed it. but I'm not feeling too optimistic on that front, so for a lot of people that may be a deterrent if you have 7.2.4 and want to stream your remixes or Blu-ray copies, you're probably better off doing so. with some kind of dedicated player that will allow Atmos, currently my system is 5.2 and in the near future I definitely see myself going to 7.1 so this won't really continue to be an issue until I go crazy and then really Dolby Vision 7 profile can be important, which means it may make me consider where I want to go with this, but yeah, that's really another thing I wanted to touch on is why I chose Infuse.

This wasn't exactly the hardest decision I made. I just went through Jelly Fin and Plex and this Ur really stuck with me. I like the daily packages. I like that it shows me what I've copied recently in the order of my movies. like the metadata information when I go to open something when I have something open here you can see it gives me information about the actor um it gives me some other movies um it even looks like it's trying to ask for similar things um oops I didn't want to play I just wanted to upload it so yeah , the decision was a pretty easy one, and I just liked the way the film's presentation on Wall worked for me and Infuse doesn't really require any likes. client-side installation.

I just have an SMB with all my movies and I just point Infuse at whatever Apple device I'm signed in on and it goes ahead and finds it right away, so I really like it and it's exclusive to Apple. So I'm not really sure what other options there would be on the Nvidia Shield side, but I know there are tons of people using them and resources are plentiful for that, the next thing that's really important if you're going to try it. these are your storage concerns, storage concerns are like the number one thing, I mean, your average 4K movie is going to range from 6 gab, you know, up to 80 and 90, even if you remove some menus and some other information.

So you really need to be a little cautious and you know, determine what your end goal is for me. We'll see if this becomes an unrealistic expectation as my movie collection grows. Right now, let's see what we're up to. I don't think we have much content here for about 73 movies and 885 TV episodes, so those are some of the concerns for me, like I said. I want to copy every movie that I want to be able to point to in my movie. shelf and say hello, every Blu-ray disc and case you see, I own it digitally, we don't even need to put the disc in the player, like I said, that's just my goal for now, we'll see how it ends up. underway and have chosen to start with 14 tablets of space to achieve what I need.

That actually seems like a pretty good sweet spot when I think about it. I probably still have five to six terabytes left for De con until it's time to put another tab 14 in the nas um and then from there we can have discussions about whether I need redundancy in my system. You know, it took me a while to copy all these movies and it would really suck. Doing it again, at the end of the day, another 14 terabytes of space that I can use to store more movies and more content seems like a pretty promising idea, but ultimately it will depend on how I feel at the time I do the upgrade, yeah , the next thing I will discuss is what format you want to go ahead and copy.

There are two types of formats. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen on mine, let's see. Here, if I go to my public folder, I have three folders. Here you'll see, and then if I expand my 4K movies folder, here you can see there are two different types of formats. You can see I have some movies. they are in folders and some movies that are in mkvs for me and ultimately this is another thing you will have to discuss. um techn noad. I think you have a really cool chart that you made that shows what different formats support things like Dolby Vision. or Dolby Atmos.

I'll mention it here with credit to him as well to help me figure it out, so I talked earlier about how my Apple TV currently won't allow Dolby Vision pass-through and anyway. From that I still want to be at a point where if I go to another Medi device I can get the Dolby Vision metadata, so I chose to rip discs that are Dolby Vision discs in bdmv format and the bdmv format is a full Ono one. copy everything that's on the disk, you can think of it as an ISO, but it's not exactly an ISO, and when you do it that way I'll get Dolby Vision later in the future, but I lose the ability to delete the information from the disk. menu.

I'm losing the ability to delete additional languages ​​and subtitle tracks and again, this is something you have to talk about when it comes to storage issues, if you just want to conserve the maximum amount of space, I know. A lot of people just copy everything to MKV and say to hell with Dolby Vision, to me it's more worth it to be able to extract every last bit of information from these discs and keep only what's relevant to maximize the amount of storage, and that's . That's totally fine, you know, there are discussions about how much Vision really matters compared to an HDR color grade, anyway, for me, I mean, I'm watching pretty much all my content in HDR10 and for now, I'm going to Dolby Vision If I really care. about Dolby Vision at this point I'll put the disc on and I've done that a couple of times but if you watched the last video you'll know I'm not on a flagship TV by any means so I don't really necessarily care for now but I do.

Preparing for the future matters and that's why I do it this way and that's pretty much what I have here. The final topic I wanted to talk a little bit about. are television shows because television shows have been, I mean, you saw, I have 800 uh 85 episodes of television and there are not a ton of shows here as you can see, so when it comes to pulling television shows, organizing them and place them. on your centralized media server, I actually think there's a strong argument for maybe not even bothering with TV shows, and I'll explain why in a moment, but ultimately it just comes down to your time commitment and how much are you willing to put something like this on for me and in my house we're watching a lot of TV shows and that's one of the things you know in case the internet goes out I have tons of options here just put something on and have it go feel a little bit like your internet isn't out, um, so that necessarily when something comes out we're not okay, we have to watch a movie, uh, and that's important to me. personally, honestly, I guess we can talk about my TV experience and we can start with what works and so far some of the easiest copies for me have been a lot of these HBO 4K UHD shows, there's not much ausc and Shit that it can happen when you have practically three episodes per disc and by that point I mean the episodes take a while to copy and then you know it takes two seconds to open one of the three, you know they copy.

In episodes one through three you only have three files to sort through, as in an example on a TW on a 1080p Blu-ray you might get five or six episodes per disc and those five or six episodes might not even They're not even in the right order, you don't necessarily have to deal with that when it comes to 4K UHD shows because only you know that you're not going to fit seven 4K UHD episodes on a single disc, so they're pretty easy, um, another example, Cowboy. bbot is one of the animes that I enjoy the most and that's why it was also very very convenient.

I think this one had, you know, five or six seven eight episodes, but they were all in order, um, and I know this because I still reviewed it anyway because I'm paranoid and occasionally you'll get some stuff like that that won't give you too much trouble when it's about extracting um and you know that case is the best case scenario, at that point you just find the files um, they're pretty titled before you rename them to whatever naming convention that instills is uh, it's pretty straightforward, though , there are some programs that really don't do much to copy and don't necessarily make it too easy for you, so I'm going to transition to my screen again if you see here.

I have MKV open and I have these three from Season 1 of Pokémon, so I'm going to click on this Blu-ray layer so it shows me the information of what's on the disc and we're going to let the L go up for a second, you might still be able to hear my drive working fine and here we are and if weRealize, we have a nightmare scenario when it comes to this particular anime and the six discs of the collection are like this, we have an MKV file that is 3 hours and 25 minutes long and those are all of our episodes on the disc, they are in one file giant big and you have to do it. the extra work to analyze them if you want somethingIt's similar to the Netflix experience where you have breakdowns of each episode and this is where I say this is really where the time commitment comes and you have to judge what type of media you have on your server and what want.

I will say straight up that Neon Genesis Evangelion was exactly the same way that I had to analyze all the episodes of the show and I'm not going to lie, it took me a lot of time, but I also managed to save a lot of time. and that's because of a little program I like to call lossless cutting and lossless cutting has been a saving grace for my local media server and essentially everything it does is on my Nas here on my SSD. I still have one of these big long mkvs. which is 3 hours long if you see it's 35 gigabytes so I'm going to take these 5 and drag them into a lossless cut and this part is really important you want to import your chapters because even though they are there's still a big MKV record, there are chapter markers and these are going to be all for this so you'll notice that it loads into my MKV and it may take a little while because we're on the web, but if you look now down here we have all these little chapter markers we can say that this little one Short chapter, if we let it play for a bit, it's actually pretty obvious that this is the introduction to the program, so from here it's basically just skimming patterns, this looks like the first one.

Half of our episode, this is the back half, this is our little kind of ending screen and then if we go through chapter 5, this is our credits for our first episode and then chapter six, we go back to the intro again and then , what can you do? With this information, if I look, I basically see that all of these patterns are the same, so each episode has five chapters, and in my experience with the two animes I had to do this with, Pokémon and Evangelion, it's pretty. a lot of things work the same way there's a set number of chapters per episode so let's say I want to export chapter um episode one.

I know it's the first five chapters and I can just click on chapter six and subtract everything up to the last chapter and now. I only have one episode of MKV. I can export it, merge it and go back to my Nas, to my public folder. Oh wow, I didn't mean to post that. Put it on my TV shows, in my Pokémon Indigo League folder and here we go. That helps a lot and lossless cutting does all that without re-encoding the video, so it doesn't really take much time, but it can be time consuming, and so far with Pokémon I've done that, I think there are 52 episodes of this series I've managed to get up to 42 so I still have a little bit more to do and it takes a long time and again, this is one of the things where you have to weigh the options of how There's a lot that matters, they're both some of my shows favorites, so I'm willing to make the effort to have a Netflix solution for that, the final reason why maybe you

should

n't do it, over and over again if you want. a I'm just showing you the obstacles that I experienced um if you see them and you're like me and you still want to try it um I'll tell you straight this is It's really rewarding for me I really like it um it's It's great that my girlfriend is starting to infuse now and just wants to put something on very, very quickly, it's great, you know, obviously I spent money and time to make the system work and I like to see how it is used, but there is another important thing.

What you really need to take into account is your metadata. I'm pretty sure Infuse uses TMD, the movie database, to extract metadata from all your TV shows and what you want to do is inspect it before copying a show. Look at it. in the episodes that are on your media that you're going to copy and make sure everything seems to be okay in my uh one of the problems I had was with Pokémon, there are some episodes that are banned in the US they weren't released in the physical edition I have, but they were still broadcast on TV at the time, so TM DV has an entry for that episode that I don't have on my drive and will upset my naming conventions in the future.

A good example is this episode of Beach Beauty was banned and not released on any physical media version but tmdb still takes it so once I had it all here and inspected it once I got to episode 18 , all my episodes in the future were one of because I was basically missing an episode and I went and found the episode. I think trying to remember where I got it. I think it was one of those archive sites and I completed it just for myself. There's another example here where we get a skip an episode because there was another one here, let's go 35 and I just opt ​​to skip it and rename everything correctly in the future so that at least my episode names match the metadata and I know that in that moment tmdb has multiple categories of metadata. like TV and DVD order, but currently there is no way to activate the fuse whether you

should

use it or not for each program, so it's up to you to decide again and you know, just inspect your metadata and make sure because I know there are some programs which are much worse than others and you have to be careful, you have to be careful that things turn out right, you don't want to copy a whole show and not check the episodes, you know, another example is Justice League. here i ran into these weird issues where i had mislabeled versions and the issue actually ended up being that on tmtv the first episode of secret origins is split into one so i used lossless cut because lossless cut can also merge mkvs so I just merged the first three episodes into this file and then from there I just went and renamed everything correctly and for a lot of them I had to click and watch the first few seconds of each episode because the order on disk didn't it's necessarily always simple, sometimes it's the other way around and then an episode randomly skips and you know, I have to suspect that they're making a mess of it with the people who are doing this, you know, obviously publishing it in a dubious and non-legal way, so that's a long time ago.

It makes sense to me and you just have to be careful, it really takes a lot of time, but it's satisfying for me personally. I mean, I'm really proud of this movie wall that I built. I'm excited to see him grow. I think I have a pretty foolproof plan that you know, as soon as I buy a Blu-Ray, I have room to copy it immediately and if it doesn't pass, they'll send it back until I can get one that passes and I know that. that all my records in my collection are good and that I have individual backups that I don't necessarily have to really worry about, um, that gets me into my final final discussion about do you know how much this is worth? you to build, you know, as we're looking at Best Buy, uh, really, you know we're going to

2024

now, almost in February, and we're really seeing that they are, they take this seriously, they're not changing their word, they're they are undoing. their shares there will be no more sales of physical media.

I'm of the opinion that if we keep buying, they should keep letting you know. Heimer did really amazing physically and you know Nolan was a great defender. Definitely, obviously, we're going to see physical media decline and the future become digital. I'm not very happy about it, but I live with digital only if we can get a quality increase in what we get from streaming. I think that satiates a lot of people um, I personally like, you know, having a movie. I like that part, but honestly, deep down, I like physical media because it's where I can get the best quality without Collide Escape prices and So if streaming services really start upping their game on that front, it could be something that I'm inclined to continue with this, but at this point you know if they continue to release 4ks and bit streaming seems to just be. better in dis.

I'll keep doing this until the latest 4K Blu-ray is produced and I'll have it on my Nas, so there's a lot to argue about where the future is with that, but if so. something you're thinking about doing, um, I hope this video doesn't deter you and I hope it encourages you in some way because you can learn about the obstacles that other people are facing, you know, I had the same discussion. Is the future of physical media worth doing all this work for me? Now you know I say I'm here with a pretty solid movie library.

I'm happy about that, I'm very happy about that. I'm going to continue to do this right, so this was all just, you know, the trials and tribulations that I went through when it came to setting up your media server. I hope you learn something. I hope there is something. things you weren't considering before that you have, if you have your own media server, let me know in the comments what you do differently, how it copies your movies, do you agree with My Philosophy, don't you agree, let me. You know, let's talk about it in the comments.

I really appreciate everyone visiting the channel. I hope everyone has a safe rest of the week. Thanks for visiting the channel, guys, bye.