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?
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Emby Server
382 Shows
30130 Episodes
1703 Movies
24740 Music Albums
Most are downloaded with *arr apps and are random quality. I shoot for 1080 for shows and movies but for the really good stuff that I personally like I will get the 4K version.
1,028 movies
517 shows (20,702 episodes)
Shows are all 1080p or lower except a couple seasons of select shows in 4k. Movies are 4k HDR when it’s available, otherwise best quality I can find.
I use Jellyfin because of the client apps and FOSS nature.
I tend to prefer HEVC/h.265 encodings for the strong trade off between player compatibility and smaller size for the quality level, but h264 and AV1 are also both in my library. I don’t reencode anything except through the Jellyfin server transcoding.
Nice try Universal Studios!
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
About the same here, minus the music videos (only a few dozen there for the kids), plus a fitness library, so I’d say it evens out to roughly equal.
Mostly HEVC but I still have some h.264 floating around that I have no interest in reencoding.
No AV1 at all until I get a new Intel GPU or newer Intel CPU to handle transcoding it nicely.
There’s some relatively inexpensive NVIDIA cards now with AV1 hardware encoding. I’m on my third round of re-encoding my whole library (HEVC, then VP9, now AV1). For 1080p NTSC, I get about 13x speeds on NVENC AV1, whereas with VP9 I was CPU-bound at around 4x. Definitely worth the upgrade, in case you’re on the fence.
So what card are you using?
Yeah I just dont have a need with no devices to handle it natively, while the rest of my library can be. Building a new htpc media player for the living room next, new server after that.
New because I’m using a lenovo tiny as the server, which means either I build a new box completely, or I find the right used workststion tiny/mini/micro that can handle av1. Complete build will do a lot more (well, the t/m/m does too, but not to the extent my big box builds are set up for).
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.
~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.
50TB?
Dang, thought I was doing well at about 5TB,haha
I know, right? I feel like the little guy in the memes next to the Giants in armor.
Movies: 7796
TV Series: 1443
Music (tracks): 37909
All up its pushing 45TB currently. All legal backups, obviously.
I’m trying to get all 1080p 10bit 5.1 x265 for tv and movies, but am not converting 264 -> 265 myself as it would take forever and is lossy. Sonarr and radarr will take care of it eventually anyway with the way I’ve set up my profiles.
Subtitles are usually SRTs grabbed by Bazarr, stored in a subtitles folder inside each movie folder.
Folder structure is just the standard folder per movie, and folder per tv series with sub folders per season.
Music is 320kbps mp3 where possible, and for the last year or 2 I’ve been trying to get FLAC and then convert to mp3 (automatically) and archive off the FLAC for safe keeping.
Whenever the 265 successor comes out I’ll look at upgrading to 4K if the space requirements are not crazy. With the price of storage and large bay NAS/DAS devices there’s just no way I could do 4K as it stands.
i just got my music server going recently, let me see that i had like 19 thousand songs!
What do you use for your music server if I might ask?
i settled on gonic via docker, for now, with jukebox mode controlled from dsub2000, as the device I’m using as the server is an old autonomic mms2a running debian. (not enough horsepower to run a full DE so it needs to be remotely controllable)
i just about drove myself crazy trying every single version of any subsonic related server and client, jellyfin (still running) ampache, mopidy with plugins, addons for kodi, various MPD iterations and control points, including trying to drive it from home assistant.
i am not sure if I’m completely happy with my setup, but with vpn, i can listen on the phone anywhere, make playlists that are immediately visible on the machine that can play to my speakers in the house (driven off of a matrixing amplifier)
i am giving my brain a rest before i try to look into snapcast
