Initial Thoughts
Hello friends!
This is something that’s been muddling around in my mind for a bit, in part because I now have a decent collection of DVDs, and I am starting get a digital collection of shows that are a bit hard to find. I’m also interested in the fact that there’s a TubeArchivist plugin for Jellyfin, as media archival interests me and YouTube is starting to suck with Google’s position on ad-blocking. It would be nice to be able to access this stuff anywhere as well, so creating a media/Jellyfin server seems like a good solution.
Thing is I’d rather have a physical server than pay a bunch of monthly fees for VPS hosting. Not knocking it of course, but on top of monthly fees I also have my skepticism about VPS hosts and if they’re sharing data with people regarding my use of their service.
Completely wishful thinking setup
I’m not so much of a hardware guy as I am a software guy, funnily enough, but to give you an idea of what I would like here’s my admittedly wishful thinking of what I’d like for a setup:
- DragonflyBSD as the server OS, utilizing it’s HAMMER2 filesystem and swapcache as I’ve heard great things about those.
- Jellyfin, obviously.
- NVMe SSD storage with some level of RAID.
- Intel GPU, as I’ve heard they’re very good at video decoding, but I’ve not looked into evidence of this.
- Whatever CPU and RAM I can get good performance out of without wasting money.
- Add it to the Wireguard network so I can watch stuff anywhere.
A few things with this:
- I don’t know how up-to-date DragonflyBSD’s dport of Jellyfin is, but maybe this is something worth contributing to.
- God only knows if the new Intel graphics card drivers work well on the BSDs. I know all of the BSDs basically just pull from the official Linux firmware for graphics (I think?).
- I’d have to figure out if any other hardware would not play well with DragonflyBSD, probably not too big of an issue but it’s still something to look out for.
- Cost of hardware.
Wrap up
Overall it probably be just me and my wife who would use the server, mostly me. Maybe some immediate family, a few friends, maybe down the line use it for kids when we have them.
What are your recommendations?
Slightly unrelated, but one of my recommendations would be to buy a VPN for a month and download all the movies instead of ripping DVDs. Unless you care about the extras of course.
I’ve recently digitized my DVD collection with MakeMKV(best tool for this) and boy is it hit and miss quality wise. Some are very watchable on a 1080p tv, while others look like a pixel mess. And I’m not that much of a purist when it comes to quality. But DVD is 480p (which is watchable) but when the movie is made from a VHS copy (which happened sometimes back then) it is… an unpleasant watching experience
Also, mpeg2(which dvds are encoded in) are huge filesize wise for what quality they offer. AND mpeg2 is not supported by stuff like a chromecast…so not great.
I, as a European, had double trouble: our PAL dvd movies actually run slightly faster than American dvd’s, so most subs found online simply won’t synchronize. So that meant ripping the subs, converting them to a sensible format, finding all the spelling mistakes from converting… A pain.
If I’d do it over again, I’d pay 5 bucks for a VPN and download some bluray rips. Even stuff that is deemed low quality by the pirate community (YIFY rips) are better AND 1/4th the size than your DVD rips will ever be.
You could go the ISO route, which preserves the menus. You can open ISO files with Kodi.
Or rip your dvds if you want to make sure it’s all legal. You do you 😜