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?
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.