The convenience of netflix (whatever you want to watch, from any device in any location), populated with any media you decide; and easy to share with anyone you want.
I currently have 5114 movies and 39033 tv episodes from 483 shows; shared with friends and family. New episodes of any TV show that I’ve added get downloaded automatically as they air. Movies can be added before they release and will download as soon as they are available, with cam rips being ignored.
You provide one of these media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, or Plex) with folders of video files that are named after movies/shows and it identifies them, downloads all the necessary metadata, and presents it in a very similar format to comercial streaming services.
They can also perform tasks like converting media on the fly to support devices that can’t play a particular format, or are trying to stream over a poor/low speed remote connection. You can search, sort, and filter by things like genre, studio, cast/crew members, tags. Vist links to imdb, the tvdb, tmdb, rotten tomatoes, etc.
Then tools like sonarr/radarr/lidarr remove the need to manage files at all; making it so you simply search for a title, click ‘add’ and it’s hunted down and downloaded for you.
It’s just overall a much better experience than managing folders full of files.
I was initially talking about just one piece, but realized the comment you replied to was talking about the whole ecosystem and expanded.
I’ll break it down better:
The main piece of the puzzle is media server software. There are three big names here; Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex. (only one is needed, they just provide several options) These are provided with folders of media files and do all the heavy lifting to present and stream it to clients just like a comercial streaming platform such as Netflix.
Next is finding and collecting new media. For that there is Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr. (Movies, TV Shows, and Music) These manage searching through torrent/usenet indexers to find files that match the media you’ve told them to find. They then pass the desired torrent/nbz files to your chosen torrent/usenet client for downloading, and finally move+sort the downloads into your media folders for your chosen media server software to serve on demand.
Finally there are tools like Ombi, which can automatically manage requests for media from users, without them having to ask you to find/add things.
These can be setup to be LAN only, or with a bit more configuration be accessible from anywhere. This may require purchasing a domain name to enable proper SSL/HTTPS security; but that’s actually a really useful thing to have. I started with media streaming; but now run a VPN, immich, vaultwarden, and many other services all accessed/secured via my own domain name.
Plex is designed to make that part really easy, providing SSL/remote access for you; but at the expense of giving Plex corp access and control over your server, requiring users (including you) to login to plex.tv before being able to access your server, as well as selling your info to advertisers while pushing their content to you.
Jellyfin is fully open source and honestly a great option, but lacks some features like an XboxOne client.
Emby is in the middle. Closed source, and requires a subscription to enable some features; but there are lifetime license options and its been a very reliable product for me.
The convenience of netflix (whatever you want to watch, from any device in any location), populated with any media you decide; and easy to share with anyone you want.
I currently have 5114 movies and 39033 tv episodes from 483 shows; shared with friends and family. New episodes of any TV show that I’ve added get downloaded automatically as they air. Movies can be added before they release and will download as soon as they are available, with cam rips being ignored.
You provide one of these media servers (Emby, Jellyfin, or Plex) with folders of video files that are named after movies/shows and it identifies them, downloads all the necessary metadata, and presents it in a very similar format to comercial streaming services.
They can also perform tasks like converting media on the fly to support devices that can’t play a particular format, or are trying to stream over a poor/low speed remote connection. You can search, sort, and filter by things like genre, studio, cast/crew members, tags. Vist links to imdb, the tvdb, tmdb, rotten tomatoes, etc.
Then tools like sonarr/radarr/lidarr remove the need to manage files at all; making it so you simply search for a title, click ‘add’ and it’s hunted down and downloaded for you.
It’s just overall a much better experience than managing folders full of files.
Holly macaroni! That’s a lot of stuff!
thanks :)
I was initially talking about just one piece, but realized the comment you replied to was talking about the whole ecosystem and expanded.
I’ll break it down better:
The main piece of the puzzle is media server software. There are three big names here; Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex. (only one is needed, they just provide several options) These are provided with folders of media files and do all the heavy lifting to present and stream it to clients just like a comercial streaming platform such as Netflix.
Next is finding and collecting new media. For that there is Radarr, Sonarr, and Lidarr. (Movies, TV Shows, and Music) These manage searching through torrent/usenet indexers to find files that match the media you’ve told them to find. They then pass the desired torrent/nbz files to your chosen torrent/usenet client for downloading, and finally move+sort the downloads into your media folders for your chosen media server software to serve on demand.
Finally there are tools like Ombi, which can automatically manage requests for media from users, without them having to ask you to find/add things.
These can be setup to be LAN only, or with a bit more configuration be accessible from anywhere. This may require purchasing a domain name to enable proper SSL/HTTPS security; but that’s actually a really useful thing to have. I started with media streaming; but now run a VPN, immich, vaultwarden, and many other services all accessed/secured via my own domain name.
Plex is designed to make that part really easy, providing SSL/remote access for you; but at the expense of giving Plex corp access and control over your server, requiring users (including you) to login to plex.tv before being able to access your server, as well as selling your info to advertisers while pushing their content to you.
Jellyfin is fully open source and honestly a great option, but lacks some features like an XboxOne client.
Emby is in the middle. Closed source, and requires a subscription to enable some features; but there are lifetime license options and its been a very reliable product for me.
That’s an awesome break down! Now I see that my “double click the files in the directory” was… well… “cute”, compared to this.
Thanks again for the explanation, kind stranger. Salutations!