I've seen people create their own streaming site. Basically you set up a server at home with terabytes of all the shows/movies you want, and then just log in remotely. Now you can use that to watch all of your content ad free from anywhere.
If I was ever going to go some route, that would be it. I've done the whole stacks and stacks of CD's back in the day, never again.
I had the computer (an 10+ year-old HP Z210 workstation with a 4-core Xeon and 8GB ECC RAM) already. Ebay says they're on the order of $100-$150. It's a workstation-grade system, so it's all server components in a tower form factor which is nice.
It's running TrueNAS Scale, which is free. ZFS has some really nice features, which is why I went with it. Downside is ZFS shits the bed performance-wise if you go above 80% capacity. You start to get alerts if you go over 70% capacity.
Drives are 5x 14TB factory refurbs in a RAIDZ2 (ZFS equivalent to a RAID-6, so 2 drives can fail) configuration. Paid about $130/ea which varies depending on supply, so ~$700 including shipping. 14TB was about the sweet spot for price/size when I built the thing.
The drives run on the warm side, especially the one at the top of the tower. It probably would have been smart to put the drives in a caddy with a big fan.
Performance-wise it's limited by my gigabit ethernet household LAN. It probably could keep up with a 2.5 gig connection.
I've seen people create their own streaming site. Basically you set up a server at home with terabytes of all the shows/movies you want, and then just log in remotely. Now you can use that to watch all of your content ad free from anywhere.
If I was ever going to go some route, that would be it. I've done the whole stacks and stacks of CD's back in the day, never again.
I set up a plex server earlier this year (chose plex because easier to get setup on tablets) and I haven’t looked back. Cannot recommend more.
Jellyfin, Plex or Emby is the way to go.
plex seems like it turned into a streaming svc,
That's what I do. I have a 42 TB NAS that I put everything on with a bunch of Kodi instances connected to it and a central SQL database.
Works pretty much exactly like a streaming site would except the video quality is much higher since most of my movies are just raw disc rips.
How much does that cost? Including disks, server/array, redundancy, everything.
I had the computer (an 10+ year-old HP Z210 workstation with a 4-core Xeon and 8GB ECC RAM) already. Ebay says they're on the order of $100-$150. It's a workstation-grade system, so it's all server components in a tower form factor which is nice.
It's running TrueNAS Scale, which is free. ZFS has some really nice features, which is why I went with it. Downside is ZFS shits the bed performance-wise if you go above 80% capacity. You start to get alerts if you go over 70% capacity.
Drives are 5x 14TB factory refurbs in a RAIDZ2 (ZFS equivalent to a RAID-6, so 2 drives can fail) configuration. Paid about $130/ea which varies depending on supply, so ~$700 including shipping. 14TB was about the sweet spot for price/size when I built the thing.
The drives run on the warm side, especially the one at the top of the tower. It probably would have been smart to put the drives in a caddy with a big fan.
Performance-wise it's limited by my gigabit ethernet household LAN. It probably could keep up with a 2.5 gig connection.
/u/KeeperOfTheGate
Damn, I had no idea how cheap 12tb drives were. That's amazing.
What kind of NAS are you using? Mine is 12tb and I'm out of space. Thinking to upgrade.
basically everything is free somewhere. I don't own, but I don't pay either.
I'm doing the Plex thing too. I don't love Plex, but it's pretty good.