Better than Netflix: Jellyfin on my NAS

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 that people already paid for I have altered the deal pray I don't alter it any further this deal is getting worse all the time I'm not sailing the Seven Seas so in my last video I showed you 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 want to 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 100 bucks a month and they'd stuff the plans people actually wanted with dumb channels nobody even watched the same things 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 it shows good enough to make it to Blu-ray it's good enough for me to wait for it heck patience that used to 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 and Netflix today has a deep library but of shallow content and that's the trend for all the other streaming services too also since I own physical copies of all 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 to do a raid on my properties I wouldn't put it past them but there are some other things people were also worried about in the last video I got a lot of comments about how paying 30 bucks per movie is a huge waste of money compared to streaming services well yeah I have over 300 movies if I paid 30 bucks for each one that'd be nine thousand dollars just for the movies I own that'd pay for 90 years of streaming services even if I subscribe to every single one but I didn't pay 30 bucks a movie not even close I bought most of them 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 come for one or two bucks TV Seasons cost more but you got to 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 want to watch something right at its release you might have to pay more which is why I pre-ordered top gun Maverick once every few years a movie is good enough that 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 well 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 doing the wrong things 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 lawyer 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 disks 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 kind of sort of 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 legally bought if that's legal but backing up my 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 ASA store even told me after that video that all the nasas I've shown can do live transcoding without any issues even at 4K I still don't do it but for most people you can probably just skip the handbrake Park as long as you have enough drive space speaking of handbrake I got a lot of comments about using 30fps 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 pot player 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 them 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's the easiest way to share your media with your whole house this NASA is called the drive store 4 Pro but companies like Asus store Synology and qnap have a lot of 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 asosore sent this Nest to me a long time ago this video isn't an endorsement or review I'm just using this Nas since I have it on hand the first thing to do is set up your nest I have four Seagate hard drives and they come packed in these anti-static bags pop them out of the bags pop them in the drive trays and then slide the drivetrace into the box for most nasas 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 nest and wait for it to boot on this Nest it has a loud beep that sounds once it's all ready your user's guide should guide you through finding your nests on the network for this one you can download Asus store's control center but for me since I don't want to 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 going to 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 Asus store wants me to register my Nest but I'm just using it in my home and I don't need any of their extra services so I'm just going to 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 storage manager I can see 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 nest while it's synchronizing it'll just be a little bit slower so while it's doing that I'm going to hop over to App Central and install jellyfin and when I do that Aces store is telling me it will also install Docker create a media folder and set up some other services that looks good to me so I'll let it install you don't need an ass to run Deli fin it'll run fine on almost any computer heck even a little Raspberry Pi like this one but I'm just showing how I set it up on an S because that's probably the easiest way once it's installed if I go over to file explorer I can see there's a new 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 nest 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 to 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 going to 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 its IP address already I'll just use my Max 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 that I ripped earlier a few moments later now that the movies are on the Nas I can see that they appear in the NASA'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 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 one 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 actually 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 alright it's just about finished and if I go back over to 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 if I click on one like war games 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 nest 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'll get a directory of thousands of files and it's harder to organize especially if you do things like rip extra features so for each movie I'm going to create a folder with the same name as the movie like war games with 1983 and parentheses 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 it's even easier just to delete the artwork and let jellyfin re-download it for you I'll do that for Mulan 2 and then also for Mulan and then organize those two folders the same way if I go back over to jellyfin I can manually rescan the libraries after a few minutes jellyfin filled in the data for all the movies again and if I go back into the UI I can hop back to where I left off and watch my movies so the next thing I want to 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 that for now you can see the viewer is now listed in the users tab so I'm going to open a separate 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 that 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 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 Swift fin for Apple TV but I haven't tried that yet other media apps like Libra elect can 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 things like building up collections where there are multiple movies in a series like with Lord of the Rings for that I just have a movie each in its own folder inside of a Lord of the Rings folder like this those movies also have two parts per film and if you name them with part one and part two like this then when you're in jellyfin it will show additional parts for the movie you actually need to go back and rip all the extra features for those movies I forgot to do that for TV series I have this example of Doctor Who and my favorite doctor was David Tennant though I like the raw passion Christopher Eccleston brought to that first season but we're getting off track here you can see when I put the rips on my Nest I added this TV DB ID to the folder name here for a series like Doctor Who where 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 someone's already spelled it out in there finally in case the FBI does raid my home asking for proof I didn't download a car 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 reappear anything at a higher bit rate someday this video barely scratches the surface I only talked about a few of the main features of Deli Fin and how I organize movies and TV shows I didn't even talk about things like Books and Music libraries HD home run integration for recording TV like a TiVo or anything like that the possibilities are endless once you control your own media library in Hollywood hates it have you noticed they started not releasing content on physical media in the past few years yeah if you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on that would be great if these streaming services want to survive and don't want to die off slowly like Dish Network let's make them play in our chord until then piracy no I mean you do you but I'm gonna own my own 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 CIS admin managing more and more hard drives I see this as an absolute win exactly smart Hulk until next time I'm Jeff Gerling and I know you're gonna ask so here's what it says read it in a British accent

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 662,895

Keywords: nas, jellyfin, blu ray, rip, dmca, eff, legal, drm, encryption, makemkv, ripping, dvd, movies, tv shows, hollywood, law, copyright, breaking, handbrake, doctor who, lord of the rings, pioneer, drive, mac, windows, pc, computer, asustor, qnap, synology, plex, media, library, lawyer, disc, digital, linux, transcode, storage, hard drive, hdd, network, emby, libreelec, piracy, torrent, sonarr, radarr, red shirt jeff, congress, usa, legality

Id: 4VkY1vTpCJY

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/H_Q_]

The single most directly used service in my homelab.

Before I found the concept of selfhosting, I wrote a rudimentary "media library" that would pull data from TMDB and display my Movies, Series, Collections and Actors. And it lived on my external HDD as a portable program.

Once I found Jellyfin though... chef's kiss.

Personally, I would recommend the Arr stack even without torrent integration for pirating content. They are very good for organization.

[u/HippoKingOfOld]

Never going back to Plex. Jellyfin all the way.

[u/genericky]

This is a good contrast to the video LTT did on Plex (all the comments on that video were about trying Jellyfin). I switched at that time, and haven't looked back. It is working well for me.

[u/geerlingguy]

I've been using Jellyfin for about a year now, and I'm happy to say IMO it's the best media server for home use. I used Plex a few years ago, and before that XBMC. While the more commercial products seem to stray off into a lot of features that I don't care about (and some are even paywalled!), Jellyfin is just sitting there doing it's thing—and doing it well!

[u/electrona]

I've used the same services over the years and I wholeheartedly agree with you, because I've found my happy place with Jellyfin.

[u/keko1105]

So glad u gave attention to this could u cover all the cool plugins and skins? And how to access it remotely

[u/Pegasus82]

I love the idea of Jellyfin. I used to use Plex and switched as soon as I found out about Jellyfin.

However, two things are pushing me back to Plex.

1. I can't cast from my Jellyfin iOS app to my Chromecast? I used to be able to do this with Jellyfin at my old house, but when I moved, it now says "Google Cast unsupported"??
2. There is no Jellyfin app for my quite new Samsung TV. I understand this might change soon.

[u/mxpower]

Love your channel, hope your health is getting better!

Cheers

[u/DangerousDrop]

Thanks Jeff, big fan of your videos.