This video is absolute garbage. Halo the TV series was entirely faithful to canon and I loved the time when we finally met Master Cheeks!

The worst part of the streaming age is that a lot of shows and even some movies have started not coming on physical media at all.

I was in the military and we amassed about 5,000 DVDs and Blu-Rays over my 28 years of service. I was deployed 7 times and always managed to take some movies with me along with a portable player so we could watch something on down time. Anyway, we cut cable TV about 6 years ago. My son and I digitized my entire collection using 4 old laptops and now we have a 72 TB server with all the movies and TV shows you could imagine. It is insane how much we have to watch whenever we want to watch. I, especially, like older TV shows and movies. We use Plex but came to see what this Jellyfin thing is. My wife now goes to yard sales and picks up old movies and TV shows on the cheap and we add those to our collection too. So far, we have managed to fill up right at 45 TB of storage. Luckily, I am handy and we can build a second server if needed as we continue to add content. I think our biggest problem is that I tend to keep entire runs of shows on the server in case I want to watch them again. I have watched Justified, Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, and Stargate Atlantis over and over and over again. Start to finish. Great video. We do have an antenna and Tablo so we can catch some shows now too. I have figured out how to record them on the Tablo then remove commercials and then rip them to the Plex. That lets us continue to add current seasons that we like.

The people who say this is too expensive forget that the media you buy is yours forever. As long as you keep proper backups; the media you bought will never go away. There's no dealing with the streaming site removing content or going down. You have all of your things whenever wherever.

Thanks, i always wanted a good front end for all my "legally and totally ethically obtained movies" and this seems really cool so I'll give it a try

I moved from a 3-bedroom house into a studio apartment. Saving space was a must. I took my five XL Uhaul boxes of DVDs and blue-ray and started the encoding process. I used an old Pentium 4 Dell with three optical drives to rip, encode, label, and organize the whole thing for about 6 months. Now everything resides on a 6-bay Synology. It was one of the best investments I ever made.

Great video as always Jeff! Glad Jellyfin is working out so well for you and thank you for the project donation! -Jellyfin Project Leader

I truly enjoy watching your videos Jeff, there is an underlaying set of values you adhere by, that make your videos not only entertaining, but also productive and educational. This video is specially designed to get rid of of those services plagued with meaningless content. Much appreciated !

This is excellent. As a physical media collector, this is absolutely game changing. You rock!

"It's Stupid, but It's The Law" sums up copyright/IP law in its entirety

It would be great to see DIY alternatives. Like compare costs of building a NAS vs buying off-the-shelf, comparing open-source NAS OSes ,etc.

Hats off to you, sir, for the time and dedication to get all those hardware and the setup all those from zero.

Jeff thank you so much for covering this! I'd love to see you go back and review some ripping/pre-transcoding options, it sounded like there were some other good options out there, especially the all-in-one one. Also wanted to share my favorite low-brow inventory and purchasing method - I just put stuff in an amazon wishlist (especially new releases) and check it often, and snipe the good deals when they happen, like 4K for under $20. That way I'm also alerted in case I've already purchased something. It's not nearly as cheap as what you do, but it's low effort and does save $ - patience as you said.

Just wanted to say thank you for these last two videos. I had been wanting to do something like this for years. I had started doing it for music but never knew you could do it with film and TV. This weekend I got a NAS and have started filling it up with my film and TV library. This video was the missing link I had been waiting for to teach me all I needed to know in order to make this dream reality!

I moved from using Kodi and SMB shares to Jellyfin about 4 months ago and I'll never look back. After a few hiccups configuring the hardware transcoding, things are fairly smooth and I couldn't be happier. Great video. I hope more people use this approach. By the way, it can be incredibly affordable to make a NAS using an ordinary Windows machine -- I keep shuffling my old workstation hardware into service as a mediaserver as I upgrade, and it makes for a much beefier machine. This makes transcoding, ripping, management, and running all the necessary servers possible on one machine. I just run Windows 10, and I use Storage Spaces to set up redundant drives. It was way easier than I expected.

The last few seconds of this video was absolutely appreciated at the 14:40 timestamp. I spent most of the time watching for your camera to pan down, but you made it unnecessary. Thanks! Oh, and the video was great too. I did this back in 2014 before going on the road full time in an RV, and a small NAS with easily accessible ripped video library was a must for small kids. Serving the movies via tablet while on long drives was great.

Thank you for showing us the shirt. Seeing the setup for so much of the video left me wondering what the punch line could be.

I am in love with this notion of building my own streaming library at home. I’m already in the market for a NAS for business data and I’m thinking of getting two NASes so one can be for the media streamer.

I paid for plex for years, but recently after I had internet issues, I found the plex won't work unless it phones home. So I tried Jellyfin and it's AWESOME. It even does 5.1 in firefox, and hardware encoding for free.

There are a few things I'm missing from Jellyfin interface/logic: 1) collections set in UI do not allow for sequence definition, all items are placed in a "collection pool" and sorted by name/title as defined/found in JF, 2) in order to define a sequence of titles in a collection one needs to use playlists, 3) but playlists cannot be shared between users - Emby and many other media server options allow it, but JF currently not, even though in metadata/media directories the files for UI created playlists share structure similar to Emby's with creation/visibility fields the latter is just not used by the JF logic, 4) playlists created as M3U files might be shared/visible as imported playlists for all, but they're non-editable so no easy updates through the UI (though one can easily edit the external playlist files elsewhere and just upload'em anew), 5) series episodes that often are split into 2 episodes (or more) on airing but are then combined into single longer (double-length) ones on disc releases still are not correctly recognised as dual episode entries - only the first episode "part" gets populated by title/actors and other metadata, it's not an issue on JF itself, it's more the situation of metadata availability in metadata providers that usually follow scheme used in airing, 6) series that can be aired as nearly continuous all episodes in a single airing season that on disc releases are actually split into segments parallel to actual seasons logic may have issues with obtaining proper metadata for files in "other" seasons than the first one that's been defined as one containing all the episodes due to how networks aired them officially - quite often this is what happens to anime releases, 7) if you add mini-series and define the respective production segments as "parts" (by that I mean files differentiated by keyword 'part'), they will be treated like parts of a movie, thus not being shown in the UI as episodes, but hidden as extra parts to the first file, which also means no metadata is obtained for those miniseries episodes unless you change the keyword from part to eg. episode or other episode monikers, so you need to make sure you have the file naming scheme correct and following documentation.

Man your kids can be so thankful for having such an amazing dad!!

Thanks for the info. I used to rip my DVD's years ago but got out of it. Now I look at my DVD collection on the shelf and want to get it all online without having to buy the digital copies of stuff I already own.

The alternative to streaming is the library! But i definitely see the value in this setup.

Been ripping all my movies and tv shows on to my new server dedicated to media. Have Jellyfin running on Windows 10 and streaming to my Apple Tv in the front room. WORKS AMAZINGLY WELL!

I'm new to JellyFin, but have a decent library set up by now. And I had no idea about the Collection thing for movies! (Probably should read the documentation page more thoroughly...) So very much thanks for that. It'll help a lot in keeping it looking tidy. Since currently Harry Potter takes up so many slots

Yes, I've shopped the three price tier bins at Walmart, and I've ripped DVD's. I was about to sign up and install a plex server when, like jellyfin, I found that the KODI player used imdb to thumbnail all my movies, let me sort them in several ways like genre, newly loaded, name, etc. With KODI I could share the content in several ways such as SMB, NFS, iSCSI ... KODI installs on my firesticks and finds the database by IP address. Like you, it doesn't hurt to try newer players but I like the fact that with KODI I don't need an account, don't need to pay subscriptions, etc. And, I like your videos

I picked up an 8 bay HP tower server from a surplus store at the start of the year. It was much cheaper than any standalone NAS, but its power consumption is higher and it is much more difficult to initialize a software RAID array with LVM

Stumbled across this page. I love this! Keep it up.

Seriously, thank you for showing us the Dad shirt at the end. Great video!

A thought about the waiting problem. When a movie is supposed to be really good and you don’t want to wait until the disc comes out, just go to the movie theater. The film will probably be even better there :)

I knew you wouldn't let us hang without the dad-joke-shirt-reveal!

A nice video, it will help since I'm currently going back to physical media myself and plan to set up a NAS for it.

Great video, thanks for the information Finally getting around to ripping my boxes of DVDs and bluerays

100% agree. I buy all my films on DVD and BluRay and rip them to my NAS. Each TV runs a mini PC with Kodi. Sky in the UK has a cool feature called "buy and keep" where you can watch the film now by streaming it and they send you a DVD/BR in the post to keep. So I can watch it straight away but also get a physical copy. Kodi does pretty much what JellyFin does. It also has a great override feature where you store an XML file in the same dir as the DVD and you can override any metadata you dont like. For example the title so they alphabeticall sort as you would like them, etc.. I'm glad I'm not the only person still buying and hoarding DVDs ! 🤣 Great video.

The fps setting in handbrake is not a maximum. If you want it to remain unchanged, set it o "Same as source". You should be using constant framerate. It can be used as a maximum when set to the setting "peak framerate" but with movie content there is no reason for you to change anything there. This would only come in handy if you want to conform something like a variable framerate video from am mobile phone for something like Premiere Pro which doesn't like variable framerate videos at all (they might have corrected this by now, I'm not going to check though).

TY for the T-shirt reveal at the end. I was wondering about it so much it distracted me from the video. After the reveal, I was able to watch the actual video content. Not kidding either.

Thanks for this Jeff, I've been using Emby after trying Plex and keep meaning to try Jellyfin again. Only thing is my servers are TrueNAS Core and last time I checked, it doesn't do Jellyfin without complicated installs! I hope you're feeling as well as you look me hearty! 👍

I just installed Jellyfin on my home server and am enjoying it so far. It requires a lot of fiddly file renaming of my library but for an organization aficionado like myself that's almost a benefit. 😛

I became a cord cutter in 2018. I already had a library of 500+ movies at the time. When I cut the cord, I bought an antenna, an HD HomeRun and a Plex Passport. Even though I live in a small TV market, I get 46 channels with my antenna in the attic. It’s connected to the cabling in the house that was used by the cable company. Plex will record OTA programming and skip the ads. I use Open Media Vault on an RPi NAS as one of my backups. I have the Plex app installed on my Roku TV. My only paid subscription is BritBox and I don’t plan to renew. We’ve watched most of their programming of interest to us. Well I do have an Amazon account, but I use that account for additional services. I have Google Fiber for an ISP.

Enjoyed this video. Watched it purely out of curiosity. Right at the end of 2019 before COVID, I discovered PLEX. At first I just played around with it on my computer. Then I realized I wanted a NAS (for security mostly). Bought a 2-bay Terramaster (yeah, I know… but I wasn't even sure what I was doing and they are CHEAP). Anyway, it turned into an obsession. I ripped all my DVDs and BluRays (about 200?) and the hand full of TV box sets I had. THEN I discovered the LIVE TV-DVR integration. I'm ideally located so that all my networks are E-SE of me… and I'm on a hill in an otherwise flat area. I get about 60 channels in HD from my antenna using a HomerunHD 4-tuner. The whole TV integration with antenna on the roof cost me my time and about $150. Since then I've DVR'd at LEAST a dozen nostalgia TV series' and movies to add to my library and PLEX marks the commercials for skip or outright deletes them for me. One difference is I use RAID 1. Aside from traditional backup, I hotswap in a third drive once a month and let it re-RAID. That way if I'm ever infected with something like .deadbolt (AGAIN…), I'm only back a month with a fully ready to go drive with my media and the NAS OS installed and configured exactly how I want it. Wipe the two infected drives, re-RAID, back up in about 9hrs (sync time) with no hassle. Do you have any experience with PLEX? I was wondering what the differences are with Jellyfin. Based on your video there seem to be few to none.

This video is top-tier! Well-done, Mr. Geerling.

Jellyfin is awesome. I switched a couple years ago when I wanted a Plex alternative.

Swiftfin is great, i've been using it on my Apple TV. Recently got a UI update and its so clean, nice to look at and easy to use

Love this video. I actually use a Synology NAS to run my Plex server via docker containers and ssh into my NAS to keep radar, sonarr, lidarr & plex docker containers up to date. I need to upgrade my hard drives as 32tb with half being used as redundancy isn't enough. Down to 20GB and constantly deleting stuff to make space lol smh.

i had no idea what a NAS is. Now I do, and I subbed because you seem cool

I miss those mail home dvd businesses. Blockbuster and Netflix used to mail you any movie and many games all for like 9-12 dollars a month. A far better selection than any streaming service today and there was games too. With blockbuster you could even bring back a dvd to the store to trade for a free one at any time.

RIP Blockbuster. :(

Awesome content as always Jeff, I did want to mention using the Pioneer drive link, I ordered but received a no name generic device instead unfortunately. Has anyone else had this issue that you know of?

Thank you Jeff. I love messing with networks and network storage, vpns etc. I never knew NAS media was so involved now a days. I'm still using a long HDMI to my TV for media. Guess I have to start spending more money, and make my network rack even weirder.

I am still using an early version of Plex to do this (having previously used Kodi), running on a Chromebox re-purposed to Linux with media stored on USB3-connected drives. I will have to look out for a comparative review of Plex vs. Jellyfin.

This is awesome! I just moved from Plex to Jellyfin (didn't want to pay for certain features). My only difference is that I prefer to use Plex's media naming suggestions. It just feels a bit neater/fancier.

Great video :D I got an idea.. maybe two?? From this video and your presentation!! Especially on how to organize your videos, where I had some problems (turns out to be my way of ordering things ;) )

Thanks for pointing out the documentation. I have a Jellyfin server and I used Sonarr to try to manage my library, however, I guess I was not using Sonarr correctly. It would always fight with me, and I even got banned from their Discord server basically after asking for help and being mocked. I had bulk sets of TV Shows and Movies that I needed to manage so Jellyfin could grab the metadata correctly. I was so fed up that I started to write my own software solution to manage media that would've ultimately solved a lot of the problems I had, since ideally this software would be endlessly configurable. But I eventually gave up since the maintenance was getting way more than worth it. Though given this new insight and different perspective, I may take a hack at it again in the future. After all, I did have fun using Cloudflare tunnel to server files via nginx, and even stream movies to friends in other countries.

It just occurred to me that you could go to one of those Redbox machines and rent a movie to rip. My dad actually did that with Netflix when they were a DVD rental service.

I went down a similar path and now have a NAS that contains rips of all the DVDs we've accumulated over the years. Realize that the initial learning curve in doing this, even if you are fairly tech savvy, is a bit steep. But it gave me something to do during the pandemic lock down. The advantages also include access to this "virtual Netflix" even when the internet is down, and having your media far more accessible than when it was crammed into DVD cases on a shelf. I can watch anything on any device now, and even access my media remotely. The main downsides are the up front cost, the amount of time it takes to process all your media initially, and the fact that you'll eventually end up with this multi-terabyte media library that is absolutely cost-prohibitive to backup to the cloud. So think carefully about how you are going to back everything up and bake that into your budget. You can buy extra hard drives, set up a second, mirrored NAS off-site, etc. but that all costs money too. And trust me, once you've ripped everything, gotten all the metadata cleaned up and the like, you will never, ever want to redo that exercise. So just saving your original media is not much of a backup plan.

Thanks for a great video Jeff! I'm having some trouble logging inn on my phone. Could you make a video on how to set up jellyfin on a phone? Or do you have an easy explanation on the subject :)

Jeff, I watched your last video and just finished watching this one. Good content, thanks for sharing and keep it up. I clicked the Subscribe button. I came across your last video because I just got my fist 4K TV and I was thinking about how I could watch some of the highest quality content on it. 4K Streaming is an option but I know it's not the highest quality I can experience. I knew 4K USB discs existed but never purchased any because until recently I only had a 1080p TV. I'm a tech geek and I've always dreamed of having a huge NAS with hundreds of titles that I could watch from anywhere in my home but Ive never taken the plunge. The closest I got was an external drive attached to an Intel NUC running Plex. I ripped a couple dozen BluRay discs and had them on there. It was neat but I don't even have the system turned on any more. There are very few movies and even fewer TV shows that I want to watch more than once. The work to rip discs just doesn't seem worth it. It seems like you have kids so I guess having a NAS makes it easier for your family to access content anywhere in the house. Other than that and perhaps just because this is a hobby for you, why wouldn't you just watch your BluRay and your UHD discs using a BluRay player attached to your TV?

You know, there's another alternative you haven't said anything about: Your local public library. Libraries often loan discs for cheap or even free!

"Ive had enough with netflix, hulu, disney ".... Instant like and subscribe.

I built and unRaid server over a decade ago for network storage and more and I’ve never regretted getting the Pro license.

Great video dude!!! I have a question related to the app. Do I have to purchase the app for use in home, mobile devices for use inside or outside home?

As usual a great video. You could, and I would, use some kind of VPN to be able to view your content away from your home. There are quite a few options with perhaps the most popular being something like an OpenVPN server connected to your home network, and with a decent internet connection (some public WiFi hotspots and cellular networks might be a bit to slow, and on cellular networks there a places with poor to no connection) at the viewing end you can use it.

Oh heck yeah. I love my Plex server. I've been wondering about alternatives

Excellent video Jeff. Thank you. I just discovered your channel. Awesome. Thank you.

Besides media storage, your NAS can be used for a bunch of other services like home services (security, IoT devices, etc) and networking. Question: I was an old XBMC (now KODI) user so how does JellyFin compare?

Thanks Jeff for looking at Jellyfin on an ASUSTOR NAS! Hey everyone! Marco here. We recently put in anti-RSJ defences into our NAS devices, but it seems that in the last video, RSJ defeated the security to install a 10G card! Honestly, we were surprised he wasn't destructive this time! But we have to keep ourselves on guard! Next time we will have anti Red Shirt *Pirate* Jeff defences built in! As always! If you have questions, comments, constructive criticism, praise or suggestions about how we can keep Red Shirt Jeff and other threats to your data out of your NAS, feel free to reply to me here and I will happily answer your questions. I get notifications if replied to. Thanks again!

I haven't stopped buying DVDs since I made the switch from VHS and I'm glad I did. Not just because of all the reasons that Jeff mentions but also because all the content in streaming services are not the original, by this I mean scenes have been removed or replaced and quite often great music has been replaced with a really bad quickly made replacement.

Sir, you are a man after mine own heart. I'm doing something very similar with my own movie collection, though I'm only doing a local theater PC, no NAS setup. Right now I'm using Kodi, though I don't like it very much because its info scraper is finicky, and it has no ability to group movies or TV shows into categories (Drama, Sci-Fi, etc.) I'd never heard of Jellyfin before this; I'll give it a try.

I'm glad you covered the point that you're making a digital backup of movies you legally (and currently) own. I've heard of people describing the process and then suggesting doing a Redbox rental or selling your discs once the backup is made. That's not kosher with either moral principles or the law. Anything in your digital collection should have a paired physical disc or documentation of your purchase of the media in a digital format.

Another problem is that some streaming exclusives are not available on physical media at all

Hey Jeff! Can you do a segment on over the air tv and tv tuners? I just cut cable and I’d like to find a way to use a usb tv tuner and antenna and potentially hook into jellyfin or plex.

Spot on Jeff ! To add to your case people can share physical media lowing cost of overhead 👍 not to mention control and tink-ablity 👍

Glad someone is testing out Jellyfin. I saw linus' sponsored review of Plex and they casually glossed over the caveats and imo wasn't really a fair review

Also: If a show is good enough to make it to blu-ray, that means it's good enough that Netflix didn't cancel it after 1 or 2 seasons, and you might get to see a complete series. Every time people start talking about the latest show that just released, my answer is always the same: "No, I haven't watched it yet. I'm not going to watch it yet. I'm going to wait and see if it gets cancelled or not. I don't want to get invested and left wondering what would have happened next."

That Asusstor NAS is so awesome! Wish I had one!

Love the shirt. And don't forget about loaning something out to a friend or neighbor that's something you can't do with a streaming service especially now that Netflix is locking down on account sharing..... And the best part no scratched DVDs or non-rewound VHS tapes on return if you give them a link to the digital version!

I have about 60 tb of content. Still waiting for the FBI to show up.

I have been running jellyfin for years now. I picked jellyfin because contrary to plex, jellyfin doesn't call home. Zero dependencies. Running and managing the movie server has become a fun hobby. I encode all content to HD h264 with AAC stereo audio which makes it run without transcoding on all known devices. Because of that, my entire family can enjoy the content locally or remotely and scrap their streaming services. Huge benefit is that content STAYS. Over the years I have built a large library of old catalog content that is far superior to the drivel produced in the last decade. It's fantastic.

Idk if Jeff put it there or not, but the “this is a dot” is awesome

There is a lot of website that reupload movies once it released on Netflix or other streaming service. Especially in India, there is no many restrictions on accessing those content.

And the absolute best part about this is if you teach your kids properly they can keep expanding the collection after you die. Keep it going long enough and after a few generations it will contain everything. Or at least it will have enough you'll never be able to watch it all.

I'll stick to sailing the high seas

Speaking of NAS(well this video got recommended from a Rossmann video), any chance you plan to discuss/go over disk shelves and their connections back to a controller for your new studio shop? :)

Dude this is amazing!!!

3:26 First he tells me to unsubscribe, now he tells me to subscribe. Instructions unclear. Bought Jeff Geerling: The Complete Series on HD DVD instead.

I think one thing you lose out on is enjoying it as a society. Take the Mandalorian for example. Disney still doesn't have a bluray and alot of it would have been spoiled just by hearing about it from other people. It's part of the experience to enjoy it when everyone else is enjoying it.

I just finished setting up my first media server on an old Intel nuc running Ubuntu. I used Plex for this and am happy with the overall end result but may I know how is Jellyfin compared to plex?

I have a Synology NAS and it's really user friendly and easy to use. It's getting a bit long in the tooth (nearly 10 years old) but it works. Does DLNA which most set top boxes / TVs have support for.

If there's one thing we can agree on, it's that the Halo TV series was absolutely terrible.

I love all the media software out there, and HDTV has everything I want in terms of news. I could use a NAS because I use a TV card to save my shows. Between ripping all my media and using my computer as a Tivo, space is tight.

hello Jeff! i installed jellyfin on my windows pc (server) and android box (client) but the one thing i wish i could fix is an external player that has custom zoom easy to operate via remote? any suggestions?

Greate video! Is there somehow to automatically organized all the movies and TV shows?

Oh Jeff you’ve brought a tear to my eye this day. The moment you said Tennant was your favourite Doctor, his last scene specifically where he said “…I don’t want to go” resonated to my core. He loved it. We felt that. Thank you Jeff

Great Video! Unfortunately the Pioneer BDR-XD07UHD is not available anymore (well, not in my region). Can you recommend another good one ?

One of the best things about waiting is knowing that the series will be completed and not just dropped (or ruined). Some shows are great, but they never get a chance to finish the story.

I love having my own streaming service from my NAS. All the subscriptions add up and yeah I’m sick of shows getting removed. So now I’m buying physical copies of all my favorites and ripping them on my NAS.

As an anime fan, this is the perfect use case. I know that no anime is spared from licensing hell so I always buy the physical copy for shows I enjoy. Plus the studios sustain themselves off of Blu ray sales so it's a win win imo

"a deep library, but of shallow content" Very succinct. Nice :D

Excellent video, Jeff.

Thkx for sharing Jeff. I have digital copies (ISO) of all my DVD's. Have you considered putting ISO's on your Jellyfin server in stead of ripped files?