Ask HN: How do you manage and consume movies etc.? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you manage and consume movies etc.?

6 pointsarraypad10 comments

In recent years the coverage and convenience of streaming services has improved hugely, but I still have terabytes of DVDs backed up which I'd love to explore and consume just as easily.

What are you using to store and enjoy your own movie collection?

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I tend to use a lot of randomization for this.

The LAN has a cron job that rebuilds two m3u playlists every 45 minutes. One is for low-bandwidth video streaming and one is for higher-bandwidth (so you can pick whatever's more appropriate depending on location on the property / distance from wifi).

Locally where other collections are available, I usually have keystrokes bound to create a given playlist on the spot and open the playlist in a media player.

As an example I use this idiom a lot for creating things like m3u playlists:

find . -name "*.format" | shuf | head -n 150

This usually gets me a nice shuffled list of things to watch. I open up 3-9 windows at work and lower the volume of all but whatever one I'm watching. And whatever I'm watching usually needs to be something I've watched before, so I can focus on my work and also take advantage of the energy effect from the video that's playing.

I also do this shuffling thing with books, comics, long-form MP3 tracks like relaxation, lectures, etc. They each have a button in the xfce panel. Aaand I really wish I could do something similar with streaming services and my various cloud book collections...

Great idea, I definitely see the value in having a way to surface content you're not actively looking for.

nas (synology) + jellyfin running on that nas

radarr auto downloads and organizes the movies (if you're into that kind of thing)

If you've used Synology Video Station - how does Jellyfin compare?

I'm happy with Synology Video. Streams well over LAN and internet, and hooks into IMDB for info.

I have not -- I like Jellyfin because it's docker based and it has inter-op with Infuse (apple tv) and VLC. All my other home services are running in a small k8s cluster. So if I ever want to move where jellyfin lives it'll be seamless.

A Mac Mini 2011 I use as a file server (SMB) + Infuse on everything (iPad, Mac, Apple TV). Infuse scans the file and pull its metadata from IMDB or something. I don't watch much, but having the same experience everywhere is a nice touch – I use Plex for music and it's not as smooth.

An external HD + airplay has done the trick for me.

plex.tv, kodi.tv

They appear to cover similar ground, although Plex seems to incorporate other sources of content - not really a point of interest for me.

Would you recommend one over the other if I'm only interested in my own content collection?

I’ve only tried Plex TV and I only use it for my own content collection (to me, the new additions are no-op). I like it and recommend it. It’s free if you don’t want to do hardware transcoding and a few other things. I bought it for $75 lifetime at some point.

So, I can recommend Plex over null. For me, having it automatically lookup meta data and cover art is useful, but it’s by no means unique there.

There are good apps for FireTV and a basic web player. I have an iOS app as well, but I can’t recall ever using it except to browse the library.

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