Jellyfin
My family has a lot of DVDs…
and I mean a lot.
But as time goes on, the DVD more and more becomes defunct media. As they sit in various basements, they run the risk of damage. Unless you take the time to organize, it quickly becomes a jumbled mess. And even if I want to watch one, I have to have a DVD player on hand. It’s a lot of work, and certainly not fun…
So I took a page out of my grandfather’s book: digital conversion! My grandfather(-in-law, but who’s counting) has been converting his vast collection to digital for a long time. He has multiple 5TB hard drives filled with media, which he hooks to his living room TV. I wanted to do the same with my media, but my recent adventures with my Minecraft server sent me down another path…
Introduce Jellyfin!
Jellyfin is an all-in-one media server with a fantastic web UI and immense plugin support for customizability. What’s better is that it has a fully containerized release available! It took next to nothing to get started, just run the container with the necessary ports open and a ‘media’ folder mounted. That, and opening up the firewall; but the firewall is an extra precaution that not necessarily everyone will take.
I made a few user accounts, added a few movies I had digitized using Handbrake to the media folder, and we were live! Jellyfin even grabs online database information about stuff just by gleaning the name. Actors, movie/episode descriptions, online ratings, thumbnails: you name it, Jellyfin probably grabs it. After getting the basics together and making sure things were accessible from my desktop, I took a look at the settings. I wanted mandated HTTPS, which I enabled, but I didn’t have proper certificates. This meant that I would get a rather ominous “Your data isn’t safe!” when I try to open the webpage. While this was mostly mildly annoying, and I ignored it for now, I would eventually decide to solve it for good.
Once I got the settings where I wanted them, I looked into mobile & TV apps. Turns out, Jellyfin goes the full distance and releases apps for just about every device you’d want to watch your stuff on. It even had a very handy discovery feature which allows you to find Jellyfin instances on your LAN easily, which I had to go back and open a port for, but was still very helpful. Setting up the apps had a sneaky bit where I had to allow IPv6 through my firewall (as that’s what my TV uses), but from there on it was smooth sailing! I now have an easily accessible place for my DVDs (and CDs if I so wanted) that I could access on any screen in my house. It came with wonderful thumbnails, descriptions, and an unprecedented ease of use.
It was another meaningful step in my homelabbing; hosting a service with lasting and tangible benefit. But this was just that: another step in what would be a much longer journey…