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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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[–] Dumbkid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 9 hours ago

650 shows, 1400 movies, 1450 anime. Take up like 130TB or something

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 3 points 10 hours ago

2.71Tb/515 series for TV, 6.28Tb/1176 titles in Movies.

Almost everything in MKV because that's what I prefer.

I use Plex so it's organized according to their requirements.

Everything is stored with a redundant backup on a Synology NAS with 6/9 HDD bays filled, totaling 48Tb in total storage space.

I run two servers (one on the Synology, one on a NUC-type Asus box) along with all my other systems.

Oh, and I have dual antenna tuners connected as well for live TV, DVR and playback.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 12 hours ago

12.8TB. Mostly uncompressed rips from Blu-rays, some DVDs, some from iTunes Store. Some from the high seas, but not in a long time because the market solved that problem with streaming.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 8 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Why start anew instead of forking or contributing to Jellyfin?

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

The short answer is because it's a fun project, and I wanted to see if I had it in me to make exactly the media server I want.

The longer answer is that I wanted something dramatically and fundamentally different from what either Jellyfin or Plex have to offer.

  • Can run without breaking a sweat on junk/old/cheap hardware like a Raspberry Pi or old laptop.
  • Can be safely Internet-facing -- no anonymous access, and no web-based admin features or API.
  • Hyper-lean and minimal. All-in, I wanted something on the order of 1MB for client app, server, all dependencies, everything.

I don't see either of those goals happening with a contribution or fork, because achieving them would require some dramatic feature deprecation.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 6 hours ago

All-in, I wanted something on the order of 1MB for client app, server, all dependencies, everything.

Okay that's gotta be radically different!

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

13200 movies 1200 shows

Over a 1/4 PB of data.

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

OK Netflix, you don't count 🤣

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 12 hours ago

Haha. Thanks. I really didn't want to pay Netflix or any other streaming service. But it might have been cheaper than hdds and electricity.

This is something I've been building for over 10 years at this point. I've gone through so many iterations of servers and storage architecture. I've lost my entire TV and movie library multiple times. (I don't back it up because a. It's expensive at this scale and b. this data is easy to rebuild over time.)

It's been a part of learning about hosting and data management that I've brought to/from my work.

[–] Lemmyrick@lemmy.zip 3 points 13 hours ago

4TB mostly TV, then movies, then a distant third is music. Novice at all, tried remuxing a few things that didn't work. Everything works on jellyfin android and PC. Android TV jellyfin is frustrating, some things don't play so well

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago

Nice try FBI Agent.

[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 4 points 14 hours ago

Sometimes I hear about other people's storage setups and I think, "that is overkill, no one really needs that." According to this thread, I am quite mistaken about that. 😳

I have 2,057 songs, taking up a measly 51 GB, on a Funkwhale server. No movies or TV shows.

That should get a little larger soon. I have about 100 vinyl records that I want to make digital rips of.

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago

Movies 1127 TV Shows 96

[–] HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 4 points 18 hours ago

cries in broke

I have 4x3TiB drives in a currently-degraded RAIDZ1 due to a hard drive failure. I have a replacement coming, and my fingers are crossed that I don't lose another drive beforehand.

[–] culpable@lemmy.world 9 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (3 children)

I use Tdarr to transcode everything in VP9 (can play in a browser and doesn't need transcoding from Jellyfin).

Audio is AAC 2 channel (I keep the original audio track and add the new AAC). Subs are in SRT.

Everything is made for play from a browser without issue. I use Infuse on my Apple TV and ether never the web player but when my family watch something form Jellyfin wathever the device no trancode needed.

TV Shows : 172 | Movies : 394 | 7.2 Tib

Actually, not all files are transcoded the process is very slow. All files are stored on my NAS (Synology DS918+) with SHR-1 (hybrid RAID with 1 drive fault).

I use Janitorr, he removes old files when I run low on space. This is why my library is not big.

Feel free to ask if you have questions.

Sorry for my English.

[–] HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

I tried tdarr, but have issues using more than one node. I may just wind up installing docker on my more powerful desktop specifically for tdarr, instead of on the proxmox server I have without a real gpu. (It's a Xeon Supermicro board with their onboard VGA)

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 1 points 16 hours ago

Playing files directly in the browser and avoiding the need for transcoding is exactly what the system I've built is designed around, so I get the appeal!

[–] alexcleac@szmer.info 4 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Wow, thanks for suggestion of Tdarr — that project indeed looks very nice. What is. your experience using it? Any quirks?

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 1 points 16 hours ago

I second this. Never heard of it but looks great.

[–] makeshiftreaper@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

Just started with YAMS using Plex 2 months ago:

Movies: 241 TV Shows: 30

About 3.5 TB on an 8 TB drive

[–] DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 3 points 20 hours ago

4 direct tv boxes worth

[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 day ago

Nice try Universal Studios!

[–] SirMaple__@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

My Jellyfin library:

1,152 - Movies

552 - Shows

37, 062 - Episodes

491 - Albums

6,558 - Songs

362 - Music Videos

14 - Concert Films

Files are a mix of 1080p and 4K. 264 and 265. Standard and REMUX.

Total space used is currently 149.90TiB

[–] marighost@piefed.social 4 points 1 day 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 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours 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 13 hours 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 5 points 10 hours 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 1 day ago

Thanks for the detailed write up!

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 5 points 1 day ago

Ahh, I like how you split Concert Films and Music Videos. I've been pigeon-holing my Short Films, Mini-Series, and TV Movies into just the two categories: Shows and Movies. Makes way more sense having separate categories.

[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

About the same here, minus the music videos (only a few dozen there for the kids), plus a fitness library, so I'd say it evens out to roughly equal.

Mostly HEVC but I still have some h.264 floating around that I have no interest in reencoding.

No AV1 at all until I get a new Intel GPU or newer Intel CPU to handle transcoding it nicely.

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

There's some relatively inexpensive NVIDIA cards now with AV1 hardware encoding. I'm on my third round of re-encoding my whole library (HEVC, then VP9, now AV1). For 1080p NTSC, I get about 13x speeds on NVENC AV1, whereas with VP9 I was CPU-bound at around 4x. Definitely worth the upgrade, in case you're on the fence.

[–] TheYang@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You do realize that you lose quality with wach encode, right?

It's not AS bad when bitrates are high, but it's still there.

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 3 points 1 day ago

True.

When I migrated off of Jellyfin, I re-encoded everything up to that point directly from the Blu-ray rips wherever possible. Because I'd already started culling those for space, I did end up just doing another pass on the first round of encoding for a portion of the library. There's some noticable degradation on those, and I'll want to re-rip those at some point.

Fortunately, I've got my process pretty dialed in for ripping and I actually enjoy it, so if I ever have a quality issue, it's not a huge ordeal to re-rip and encode.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So what card are you using?

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[–] remon@ani.social 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

1911 TV shows (65728 episodes)

2294 Movies

5051 Albums (66644 songs)

65.37 TB total.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago
[–] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Emby Server

382 Shows

30130 Episodes

1703 Movies

24740 Music Albums

Most are downloaded with *arr apps and are random quality. I shoot for 1080 for shows and movies but for the really good stuff that I personally like I will get the 4K version.

[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago

My ~~porn~~ media library is roughly ~500GB right now.

About a gig of books, and one movie called "Lensman: Secret of the Lens"

[–] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

~2000 movies ~200 tv shows

Many English only, many German and English, some German only. A few in different languages, if it’s the original language.

~50TB

Mostly 1080p h264. Lately, due to free space running out, I have started prioritizing and redownloading accordingly. Low bitrate h265 1080p for less important stuff, 4K h265 for important things and normal bitrate h264/265 (preferably the latter) 1080p for everything else.

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

50TB?

Dang, thought I was doing well at about 5TB,haha

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago

I know, right? I feel like the little guy in the memes next to the Giants in armor.

[–] metaStatic@kbin.earth 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thought 20TB of storage would last me forever

I've had low storage warnings for years now

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 1 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Lol. I feel your pain.

I setup a 2.5TB RAID box in 2011, thought it was going to last a while.

Now my server has a single 8TB data drive, my NAS is 7TB, and I have 2 4TB drives and everything is replicated between them.

Now I need to build another NAS as all this stuff is aging.

[–] neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

~3tb of a jumbled disgusting mess of miscellaneous files. Somehow it all works on jellyfin though.

I'd be down to try something new if you do end up releasing something. Jellyfin works just fine but I'm not in love with it.

[–] FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Movies: 7796

TV Series: 1443

Music (tracks): 37909

All up its pushing 45TB currently. All legal backups, obviously.

I’m trying to get all 1080p 10bit 5.1 x265 for tv and movies, but am not converting 264 -> 265 myself as it would take forever and is lossy. Sonarr and radarr will take care of it eventually anyway with the way I’ve set up my profiles.

Subtitles are usually SRTs grabbed by Bazarr, stored in a subtitles folder inside each movie folder.

Folder structure is just the standard folder per movie, and folder per tv series with sub folders per season.

Music is 320kbps mp3 where possible, and for the last year or 2 I’ve been trying to get FLAC and then convert to mp3 (automatically) and archive off the FLAC for safe keeping.

Whenever the 265 successor comes out I’ll look at upgrading to 4K if the space requirements are not crazy. With the price of storage and large bay NAS/DAS devices there’s just no way I could do 4K as it stands.

[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

1,028 movies

517 shows (20,702 episodes)

Shows are all 1080p or lower except a couple seasons of select shows in 4k. Movies are 4k HDR when it's available, otherwise best quality I can find.

I use Jellyfin because of the client apps and FOSS nature.

I tend to prefer HEVC/h.265 encodings for the strong trade off between player compatibility and smaller size for the quality level, but h264 and AV1 are also both in my library. I don't reencode anything except through the Jellyfin server transcoding.

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

80K+ hires music flac - no movies - no episodes, no shows, no podcasts, no youtube

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