I am a strong believer in offline availability of media even today where it seems everybody is using streaming services like Spotify and Netflix, I like my media to reside on my own server. An internet outage is a rear thing in the Netherlands, but there is always a chance. That is one reason to keep my media offline. Another is that the media I buy in hard copy (CD, DVD, Blu-ray) is really in my possession. Especially for video there are so many services, almost every production company has his own streaming service.
With a wide range of television and movie interest, this results in needing multiple different monthly rates. Sure you can rotate the services one month Netflix, next month Disney+ then Amazon Prime maybe some HBO then (if you have the Dutch ISP Ziggo) which I don’t have for multiple reasons.
Serve my media
All the media I own lives on a server running Debian at the moment. The different folders are available via Samba and NFS the same server is also running Docker and multiple containers for my [Smart Home][smarthome] and other useful containers. One of which is an MariaDB database with the location of the media, among others.
Play my media
To play the media I have a couple of choices:
- Kodi
- Jellyfin
- Airsonic
The last 2 choices are another Docker container where Airsonic is an music player only and Jellyfin can play either audio and video. In my living room there is a media player which consist of a Raspberry Pi 3b running [OSMC][osmc] a free and open source media player based on Linux. Based on Kodi. The database is used to synchronize the media library databases, to ensure that different devices can access the same information at the same time.
[smarthome]: /smarthome/
[osmc]: http://osmc.tv