this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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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?

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[–] marighost@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Kinda unrelated to OOP, but out of curiosity, what does your storage setup look like? Do you keep stuff reasonably backed up with that much data?

[–] SirMaple__@lemmy.ca 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Ah yes. My storage system is 2 x Supermicro CSE-846 cases. Only one has a CPU and motherboard, the other is acting as a plain Jane JBOD.

Hard drives I have 21 x 8TB 7200RPM mix of Seagate and Western Digital and 4 x 16TB 7200RPM from Seagate. I use mergerfs and snapraid. Mergerfs presents all the 21 8TB drives as one mount point. Snapraid uses the 4 16TB drives to provide 4 parity drives. Note that snapraid is not live and the parity is only updated after running a "snapraid sync" which I run nightly.

I only backup my songs and music videos. The rest is easy to get again. I have a script that generates a list of every single file I have each night. So if the day comes it wouldn't take too long to get back to where I was. The other reason I use mergerfs is if 1 drive dies, I only lose the files on that one drive and not the entire array. The truely important stuff such as tax documents, mortgage details, family pictures, will & estate documents are stored on a 2 x 8TB RAID1 and all backed up nice a safe using Proxmox PBS. The PBS datastore is synced to 2 remote locations as well as to external drives that I keep offline and rotate.

[–] Policeshootout@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nice write-up. I thought I had a large library (24TB) and my off site backup is starting to get full. I backup everything though but I have long debated on if there's a point of keeping movies and TV since they'll likely always be available. Anyway, I never thought of generating a list of files and eliminating the stuff that's not particularly important. Good idea.

[–] SirMaple__@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 day ago

I used to back everything up before I broke the 50TB mark. Just can't justify it now. I even looked at LTO drives for backing up the multimedia but they're still to expensive for the higher capacity drives. And then you need tapes..

All the truely good content will always be out there somewhere on the net.

The script I use to generate the file lists is very very basic. Nothing special no formatting the lists or anything since it's just for that oh balls, everything is gone scenario.

ls -alR /mnt/volume1/media > /mnt/volume2/backups/file_lists/media.txt

ls -alR /mnt/snapraid/data* > /mnt/volume2/backups/file_lists/snapraid.txt

Those text files are also part of the files backed up with PBS so I can always go back and restore previous versions of them. You may ask why I generate the list twice? The first is just everything inside the media folder on the volume1 mount point. The second let's me see what files are on each individual drive so if only 1 drive dies I can just grep the text file and output to another text file and show me what is on that 1 drive.

[–] marighost@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the detailed write up!