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?
~70TB, ~2500 movies, and ~250 series with , varying quality, I’m still trying to replace lower quality stuff with better versions
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.
Thanks for the detailed write up!
Nice try Universal Studios!
650 shows, 1400 movies, 1450 anime. Take up like 130TB or something
You got them all in uncompressed 8K or something!? How on earth does it take up that much space?
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.
Mine is sitting around 10TB, mostly podcasts and a few videos like graduations.
Nowhere near as big as yours. I haven’t bothered checking, but probably something like 100 movies and about the same number of TV shows (only a handful of series). It consists pretty much only of what I’ve ripped from physical media, plus a handful of things my SO uploaded. Total storage is about 2TB, and mostly DVDs w/ a handful of Blurays. Rips are full quality, and mostly ripped from MakeMKV, with a handful ripped w/ Handbrake.
We don’t watch a ton, but I do order new stuff periodically, so it slowly grows (most recent addition is Adventure Time).
Like 7
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.
My
pornmedia library is roughly ~500GB right now.4TB mostly TV, then movies, then a distant third is music. Novice at all, tried remuxing a few things that didn’t work. Everything works on jellyfin android and PC. Android TV jellyfin is frustrating, some things don’t play so well
Movies 1127 TV Shows 96
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.
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!
~3tb of a jumbled disgusting mess of miscellaneous files. Somehow it all works on jellyfin though.
I’d be down to try something new if you do end up releasing something. Jellyfin works just fine but I’m not in love with it.
~2000 movies ~200 tv shows
Many English only, many German and English, some German only. A few in different languages, if it’s the original language.
~50TB
Mostly 1080p h264. Lately, due to free space running out, I have started prioritizing and redownloading accordingly. Low bitrate h265 1080p for less important stuff, 4K h265 for important things and normal bitrate h264/265 (preferably the latter) 1080p for everything else.
Save yourself time on downloading and look into tdarr
50TB?
Dang, thought I was doing well at about 5TB,haha
I thought 20TB of storage would last me forever
I’ve had low storage warnings for years now
Lol. I feel your pain.
I setup a 2.5TB RAID box in 2011, thought it was going to last a while.
Now my server has a single 8TB data drive, my NAS is 7TB, and I have 2 4TB drives and everything is replicated between them.
Now I need to build another NAS as all this stuff is aging.
