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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the detailed write up!
Nice try Universal Studios!
Why start anew instead of forking or contributing to Jellyfin?
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.
All-in, I wanted something on the order of 1MB for client app, server, all dependencies, everything.
Okay that’s gotta be radically different!
Does it not need to transcode then if it runs on cheap hardware?
Yep, transcoding is the main reason I had to buy any new hardware when getting my library going with Jellyfin.
For me, the main draw of Jellyfin wasn’t the transcoding. It was being able to browse and stream my library from anywhere. My partner and I would alternate weekends hanging out at each other’s places, and we just wanted access to the library from wherever we were and whatever device we were using.
I was willing to put up with weeks of encoding to get everything into a web-compatible format. But that’s just me and I know it’s not for everyone. I’m curious where the palatibility for that is on the spectrum more broadly.
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.
Wow, thanks for suggestion of Tdarr — that project indeed looks very nice. What is. your experience using it? Any quirks?
I second this. Never heard of it but looks great.
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)
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!
Could you share your plugin setup/flow? I’d like to have tdarr do exactly what you have it doing.
Nice try FBI Agent.
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.
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.
I have single movies that are larger than your entire song library.
I’m kind of surprised that it’s only 51 GB. They’re all FLAC files ripped from CDs – I was expecting like 300 GB at least.
So apparently this 1TB SSD is going to last me a while. :P
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.
My Linux ISO collection take up around 12TB, 268 of smaller ISOs, and 751 big boi ISOs.
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.
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.
~70TB, ~2500 movies, and ~250 series with , varying quality, I’m still trying to replace lower quality stuff with better versions
My
pornmedia library is roughly ~500GB right now.1911 TV shows (65728 episodes)
2294 Movies
5051 Albums (66644 songs)
65.37 TB total.
Movies: 7796
TV Series: 1443 (4128 seasons, 49344 episodes)
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.
