I've had ENOUGH with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and all the other streaming services.
They're raising prices, putting in ads, and even deleting content people already paid
for!
[Darth Vader] I have altered the deal.
Pray I don't alter it any further.
[Lando] This deal is getting worse all the time.
I'm not sailing the seven seas, so in my last video I showed how I rip movies to my computer.
In this video, I'll show you how I organize my media library using a program called Jellyfin.
But first, I need to clear up a few things.
I wanna talk about the why.
After all, you could pay for years of streaming for the price of a NAS.
Well, remember when Netflix was new?
Back then, cable had the best content.
Over-the-Air TV was gutted and most sports and high-budget shows were only on cable.
And they made you pay up.
Cable and satellite were like a hundred bucks a month, and they'd stuff the plans people
actually wanted with dumb channels nobody ever watched.
The same thing's happening now with streaming services.
They've become the very thing they were meant to destroy.
But at least, back then?
We still had Blockbuster.
I could go grab almost any movie, game, or TV series and watch it on my DVD player.
Today?
There's really no alternative.
Except for physical media.
And yeah, there are some sacrifices you have to make: if you're not subscribed, you might
have to wait for a popular show to make it to blu ray.
But here's the thing: if a show's good enough to make it to blu-ray, it's good enough for
me to wait for it.
Heck, patience used to even be a virtue!
Worst case?
If I gotta watch it now, I can subscribe for a month, binge the show, and cancel.
But not having easy access to a huge amount of streaming content has an unintended benefit.
I can be intentional about the things I do watch.
Which is good.
It's hard enough keeping my YouTube and social media habits in check.
Netflix today has a deep library of shallow content.
And that's the trend for all the other streaming services too.
Also, since I own physical copies of my media, companies like Amazon and Time Warner can't
take it away, like they do on their own platforms!
Well, unless they convince the FBI they can trespass on my property.
I wouldn't put it past them.
But there are some other things people were worried about last week.
I got a LOTTA comments about how paying thirty bucks per movie is a huge waste of money compared
to streaming services.
Well yeah.
I have over 300 movies.
If I paid $30 for each one, that'd be $9,000 just for the movies I own!
That'd pay for 90 years of streaming services, even if I subscribed to every single one!
But I didn't pay $30 a movie.
Not even close.
I bought most of 'em on eBay.
And other ones from the bargain bin at Walmart, Goodwill, or even at garage sales.
Most movies, even pretty new Blu-Rays, are less than five bucks.
And DVDs?
You can get 'em for one or two bucks.
TV seasons cost more, but you gotta be kidding if you think I'd ever pay over a hundred bucks
for a box set of anything.
You can buy individual seasons of almost any show on eBay for a few bucks each.
But to do this, you have to be patient.
If you really wanna watch something right at its release, you might have to pay more.
Which is why I preordered Top Gun Maverick.
Once every few years, a movie's good enough I will pay full price.
But for everything else?
It takes time before you can buy at a discount.
But that's okay because most shows today are hot garbage.
And the few that aren't?
We'll, they'll be just as good six months after release.
Not everyone agrees, but that's okay—it's good for engagement, so please comment about
how I'm wrong down below.
And like and subscribe, while you're at it!
Speaking of comments, I got a lot about how 'breaking DRM' is illegal.
Well...
I'm not a laywer.
But here's what I'll say.
First of all, the law is different in every country around the world.
And greedy Hollywood execs 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 some text covering the process of copying
movies off physical discs.
And technically, it still has a provision banning the breaking of DRM, or as it calls
them, 'TPMs', or 'Technical Protection Measures'—in most cases.
It's stupid, but it's the law.
But besides the fact that Hollywood is shooting themselves in the foot by incentivizing people
to pirate content like it's 1999, there are exceptions for 'remixes'.
Basically, 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 kinda-sorta
makes it legal, I guess.
I mean, if someone from Hollywood sees this and would like to sue, hey, be my guest!
Maybe I could team up with the EFF and finally get this dumb loophole fixed once and for
all!
Amazon can go in and delete TV shows people bought.
If that's legal, but backing up your own blu ray isn't?
Maybe it's the law that needs changing.
A few people also had gripes about my transcoding process.
Yes, I can do live transcoding.
ASUSTOR even told me all the NASes I've shown can do live transcoding without any problems,
even for 4K.
I still don't do it, but for most people, you can probably just skip the Handbrake part,
as long as you have enough hard drive space.
Speaking of Handbrake, I got a LOT of comments about using 30 fps.
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 please stop getting all worked up about it!
Or find some other setting to nitpick; like I said, YouTube loves the engagement ;)
There were a few other interesting things I learned from your comments, like VLC alternatives
like IINA, mpv, and potplayer.
I also heard from many people who use tools like ARM, the Automatic Ripping 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 you rip a bunch of movies and TV shows, what do you do with 'em?
In my last video I mentioned you could start with an external hard drive.
But eventually most people get a NAS, or Network Attached Storage.
It provides redundancy, but it's NOT a backup—see my video on backups for why.
But more importantly, it is the easiest way to share your media with your whole house.
This NAS is called the Drivestor 4 Pro, but companies like ASUSTOR, Synology, and QNAP
have a lotta different options, costing anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand
bucks!
This video isn't sponsored like the last one, but I will mention ASUSTOR sent this NAS to
me a long time ago.
This video isn't an endorsement or a review, I'm just using this NAS since I have it on
hand.
The first thing to do is set up your NAS.
I have four Seagate hard drives, and they came packed in these antistatic bags.
Pop 'em outta the bags, pop 'em in the drive trays, and slide the drive trays into the
box.
For most NASes, it's just that easy.
For some you have to do a little extra assembly work.
But once you have it all plugged in, with power and network at least, you have to find
the NAS on your network.
Turn on the NAS and wait for it to boot.
On this NAS, it has a loud beep that sounds once it's all ready.
Your user's guide should guide you through finding your NAS on the network.
For this one, you can download ASUSTOR's Control Center, but for me, since I don't wanna install
extra software, I just ran this command that finds all ASUS devices on the network.
I grabbed 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 visit it
the first time, your browser will probably pop up a warning like this.
Just ignore it and visit the site anyways.
This should bring up the setup wizard.
For me, I'm gonna stick with the default 'Balanced' hard drive setup, that builds a RAID 5 array.
It's a good option on this NAS, but look for other videos if you want a better explanation
of RAID and how all that works.
ASUSTOR wants me to register my NAS, but I'm just using it in my home and don't need any
of their extra services, so I'm gonna ignore that.
I'll also ignore this update for now, but it's a good idea to keep your NAS up to date
so it's more secure!
I log in about once a month and make sure any updates are installed.
If I go into the Storage Manager, I can see that the hard drives are doing something called
'Synchronizing'.
This process is a one-time thing, and it takes a day or two, depending on how big your drives
are.
But you can still use the NAS while it's synchronizing, it'll just be a bit slower.
So while it's doing that, I'm gonna hop over to App Central and install Jellyfin, and when
I do that, ASUSTOR is telling me it will also install Docker, create a Media folder, and
set up some other services.
That looks good, so I'll let it install.
You don't NEED a NAS to run Jellyfin.
It'll run just fine on most any computer, heck, even a little Raspberry Pi like this
one!
But I'm just showing how I set it up on a NAS because that's probably the easiest way.
Once it's installed, if I go over to File Explorer, I can see there's a Media directory
on the NAS, and that's where I should put all my movies and TV shows for Jellyfin to
see them.
To put my movies on the NAS, I went into Services and made sure SMB file sharing was enabled.
I need that so I can mount the NAS on my computer and copy my movies onto it.
And you should also set up a user account with permission to mount the Media folder.
I'll go into Access Control, and add a new user.
The most important thing is to make sure this user has 'Read Write' access to the Media
folder.
All the other settings are okay, so I'll create the user.
The Media folder is empty right now, but I'm gonna head over to my Mac, where I have the
three movies I ripped.
I could browse to the server on the network, but since I know it's IP address, I'll just
use my Mac's 'connect to server' option, and type in the address here, with smb before
it.
When I connect, I enter the media username and password I just set up, then I can mount
the Media folder.
And it's empty right now, but I'll copy over the three movies I ripped earlier.
Now that the movies are on the NAS, I can see they appear in the NAS's interface too.
So now I need to set up Jellyfin, using its quick start.
First I set up the admin user account, then when I went to create a media library, I realized
I should probably put the movies into a 'Movies' folder, so I jumped back over to the File
Explorer and did that.
Then I went back and set up a Movies library inside Jellyfin, using the Movies folder I
just added to the media volume.
I left all the other options default, but I did select the 'Save artwork into media
folders' option because I like how easy it is to update things like cover art if Jellyfin
picks the wrong thing.
Then I went through the rest of the setup, and eventually it kicked me back to the login
page.
I logged in, and at first it says 'Nothing here', because Jellyfin has to scan your library
the first time you run it.
And over in the Admin Dashboard, I can see the scanning progress.
After that's done, we should be able to see all the movies I copied over.
All right, it's just about finished, and if I go back over to the File Explorer, you can
see Jellyfin downloaded artwork, like cover art, a logo, and a backdrop, which it'll use
when it displays the movies.
And if I go back over to Jellyfin, and go to the home, I should see my Movie library.
And if I click on it, I can see the three movies on the NAS.
And if I click on one, like WarGames, I can see all the data that Jellyfin pulled down
for it.
And if I want, I can hit play, and it should just start streaming the movie from the NAS
down to my browser.
Now, one thing I've learned after building up a library with hundreds of movies is it's
nice to put each movie in its own folder, otherwise you get a directory with thousands
of files, and it's harder to organize, especially if you do things like rip extra features.
So for each movie, I'm gonna create a folder with the same name as the movie, like WarGames,
with 1983 in parenthesis.
And when I do that, if I move the artwork inside the folder with the movie, I have to
remove the prefix from each of the artwork files.
But note that you also have to change the 'poster' file to be named 'folder'.
But its even easier to just delete the artwork and let Jellyfin re-download it.
I'll do that Mulan II and then also for Mulan, and organize those two folders the same.
If I go back over to Jellyfin, I can manually re-scan the libraries.
After a few minutes, Jellyfin filled in the data for all the movies again, and if I go
back to the UI, I can hop back where I left off, and watch my movies.
So the next thing I wanna do is add a view-only account.
If I have my kids signed in on the TV upstairs, I don't want them to be able to delete movies
or change any metadata.
So in Jellyfin, I can go to the Admin Dashboard, and Add a new User under the Users tab.
I'll give this user access to all libraries, and leave all the default options set up.
There are more things you can change, like parental controls, but I'll just leave it
for now.
You can see the viewer is now listed in the Users tab, so I'll open a private browsing
tab, and visit Jellyfin, and log in as the viewer.
It works, but if I go to the menu now, I can browse the library but I can't get into the
admin dashboard.
And outside the web interface, Jellyfin makes a great app for the iPhone, iPad, or Android.
You can use the official app or just open it up in your browser.
But other apps work with Jellyfin too.
On my Apple TV, I already had this app called Infuse—or as my kids call it 'Nachos', since
it looks a bit like the Doritos logo.
All I had to do was give it the connection details for Jellyfin and it worked right away.
There's also Swiftfin for Apple TV, but I haven't tried it yet.
Other media apps like LibreELEC can even synchronize with Jellyfin, if you want.
Go check out my 'This is not a TV' video for how I did that.
Now, as you grow your media library, you'll also run into some things like building up
collections, where there are multiple movies in a series, like with Lord of the Rings.
For that I just have each movie in its own folder inside a 'Lord of the Rings' folder,
like this.
Those movies also have two parts per film, and if you name them with part1 and part2,
like this, then when you're in Jellyfin, it will show 'Additional Parts' for the movie.
I actually need to go back and rip all the extra features, I forgot to do that!
For TV series, I have this example of Doctor Who, and my favorite doctor was David Tennant,
though I liked the raw passion Christopher Eccleston brought to that first season.
But we're getting off track!
You can see when I put the rips on my NAS, I added this 'tvdbID' to the foler name here.
For a series like Doctor Who, when there were multiple runs with the same name, you can
add on a little extra metadata.
That tells Jellyfin the specific series, so when it pulls down the information, it's all
correct.
Where did I learn how to do all this?
The documentation!
There are all kinds of weird edge cases you might run into, and chances are it's already
spelled out in here.
Finally, in case the FBI does raid my home asking for proof I didn't download a car...
[90s music playing in background]
I keep every disc I rip in these giant binders, and those go into storage.
It's also helpful in case I do want to re-rip anything at a higher bitrate someday.
This video barely scratches the surface.
I only talked about a few of the main features of Jellyfin, and how I organize movies and
TV shows.
I didn't talk about things like a books and music libraries, HDHomeRun integration for
recording TV like a Tivo, or anything like that.
The possibilities are endless once you control your own media library.
And Hollywood hates it.
Have you noticed they've started not releasing content on physical media in the past few
years?
[Lumbergh] Yeah...
If you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that would be great.
If these streaming services wanna survive, and don't wanna die off slowly like Dish Network,
let's make 'em play in our court.
Until then...
[Red Shirt Jeff] PIRACY!
NO!
I mean, you do you, but I'm gonna own my content now.
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 sysadmin, managing more and more hard
drives!
[Smart Hulk] I see this as an absolute win!
Exactly, Smart Hulk!
Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.