this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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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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[–] ISolox@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago

My Linux ISO collection take up around 12TB, 268 of smaller ISOs, and 751 big boi ISOs.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 6 points 6 days ago

~70TB, ~2500 movies, and ~250 series with , varying quality, I'm still trying to replace lower quality stuff with better versions

[–] keyez@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago

My library is almost cracking 18TB. Backing up all documents, pictures, videos and profile/settings dumps for apps and laptops. Also have plenty of moving Linux ISOs, 1359 longer isos and 269 smaller iso series.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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).

[–] fountainpenink@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Mine is sitting around 10TB, mostly podcasts and a few videos like graduations.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago
[–] SirMaple__@lemmy.ca 39 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

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

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 5 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] curbstickle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 4 points 1 week ago (5 children)

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.

[–] TheYang@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You do realize that you lose quality with wach encode, right?

It's not AS bad when bitrates are high, but it's still there.

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[–] Greg@lemmy.ca 31 points 1 week ago

Nice try Universal Studios!

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why start anew instead of forking or contributing to Jellyfin?

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The short answer is because it's a fun project, and I wanted to see if I had it in me to make exactly the media server I want.

The longer answer is that I wanted something dramatically and fundamentally different from what either Jellyfin or Plex have to offer.

  • Can run without breaking a sweat on junk/old/cheap hardware like a Raspberry Pi or old laptop.
  • Can be safely Internet-facing -- no anonymous access, and no web-based admin features or API.
  • Hyper-lean and minimal. All-in, I wanted something on the order of 1MB for client app, server, all dependencies, everything.

I don't see either of those goals happening with a contribution or fork, because achieving them would require some dramatic feature deprecation.

[–] dutchkimble@lemy.lol 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Does it not need to transcode then if it runs on cheap hardware?

[–] SpookyMulder@lemmy.4d2.org 1 points 5 days ago

Yep, transcoding is the main reason I had to buy any new hardware when getting my library going with Jellyfin.

For me, the main draw of Jellyfin wasn't the transcoding. It was being able to browse and stream my library from anywhere. My partner and I would alternate weekends hanging out at each other's places, and we just wanted access to the library from wherever we were and whatever device we were using.

I was willing to put up with weeks of encoding to get everything into a web-compatible format. But that's just me and I know it's not for everyone. I'm curious where the palatibility for that is on the spectrum more broadly.

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[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

13200 movies 1200 shows

Over a 1/4 PB of data.

[–] jjlinux@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

OK Netflix, you don't count 🤣

[–] brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Haha. Thanks. I really didn't want to pay Netflix or any other streaming service. But it might have been cheaper than hdds and electricity.

This is something I've been building for over 10 years at this point. I've gone through so many iterations of servers and storage architecture. I've lost my entire TV and movie library multiple times. (I don't back it up because a. It's expensive at this scale and b. this data is easy to rebuild over time.)

It's been a part of learning about hosting and data management that I've brought to/from my work.

[–] FreedomAdvocate 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

and b. this data is easy to rebuild over time.

You say that, but some shows and movies are getting very hard to find these days. I lost one show to an external HDD that died, and I have never been able to find it again :(. That's part of the reason I recently went to a DAS in my setup instead of a NAS - backblaze backs the entire 40TB DAS up for ~$90 a year!

What did you lose?

And there are plenty of shows that I've had to manually recover at times. And plenty more that I can't find a copy of at all. I don't get too attached to much, and those I'll usually be seeding on multiple machines myself at that point.

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[–] culpable@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] dethmetaljeff@lemmy.world 1 points 6 days ago

Could you share your plugin setup/flow? I'd like to have tdarr do exactly what you have it doing.

[–] alexcleac@szmer.info 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wow, thanks for suggestion of Tdarr — that project indeed looks very nice. What is. your experience using it? Any quirks?

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[–] thatradomguy@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago

My ~~porn~~ media library is roughly ~500GB right now.

[–] ThePantser@sh.itjust.works 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rezifon@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I have single movies that are larger than your entire song library.

[–] tuckerm@feddit.online 4 points 6 days ago

I'm kind of surprised that it's only 51 GB. They're all FLAC files ripped from CDs -- I was expecting like 300 GB at least.

So apparently this 1TB SSD is going to last me a while. :P

[–] borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The Lawrence of Arabia 4K remux is so fucking crispy.

[–] Dumbkid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

650 shows, 1400 movies, 1450 anime. Take up like 130TB or something

[–] FreedomAdvocate 1 points 5 days ago

You got them all in uncompressed 8K or something!? How on earth does it take up that much space?

[–] remon@ani.social 3 points 6 days ago

1450 anime

Since you listed them separately from shows does the count also include anime movies?

Still, if I add up both my shows and movie I'm at 1447. Damn you!

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago

Nice try FBI Agent.

[–] LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 8 points 1 week ago

2.71Tb/515 series for TV, 6.28Tb/1176 titles in Movies.

Almost everything in MKV because that's what I prefer.

I use Plex so it's organized according to their requirements.

Everything is stored with a redundant backup on a Synology NAS with 6/9 HDD bays filled, totaling 48Tb in total storage space.

I run two servers (one on the Synology, one on a NUC-type Asus box) along with all my other systems.

Oh, and I have dual antenna tuners connected as well for live TV, DVR and playback.

[–] remon@ani.social 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

1911 TV shows (65728 episodes)

2294 Movies

5051 Albums (66644 songs)

65.37 TB total.

[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

cries in broke

I have 4x3TiB drives in a currently-degraded RAIDZ1 due to a hard drive failure. I have a replacement coming, and my fingers are crossed that I don't lose another drive beforehand.

[–] lemmylommy@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

~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.

[–] zerodawn@leaf.dance 1 points 6 days ago

Save yourself time on downloading and look into tdarr

[–] Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

50TB?

Dang, thought I was doing well at about 5TB,haha

[–] Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 week ago

I know, right? I feel like the little guy in the memes next to the Giants in armor.

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[–] Lemmyrick@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago

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

[–] neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 week ago

~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.

[–] FreedomAdvocate 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Movies: 7796

TV Series: 1443 (4128 seasons, 49344 episodes)

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.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago
[–] entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

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