LogFAQs > #976238341

Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

I've been looking at these for a while. I just need to get one to use now and cancel all streaming services.
Those plug right into a router and you can access them anywhere on your network, right?

They plug into the router (or more likely, into a switch that plugs into the router), and are accessible network wide. I have a Synology one, and Synology is kind of the Apple of NAS vendors, so I feel like their UI gets in my way a lot. Synology also has the weakest hardware. Asustor has the best hardware for their main units, stock 2.5 Gbps (this is why you'd want to plug into a 2.5 Gbps switch, then plug the switch into the router, as most routers won't have 2.5 Gbps).

You can also build your own and use UnRAID or TrueNAS Scale, but the latter requires a lot of drives for ZFS, and both require more technical know how, but you can build a more powerful machine for a few hundred bucks than a $700 NAS.

I just use Docker Compose to host everything, and I use linuxserver.io (LSIO) containers whenever I can. If you ever get a NAS and want to get started with Docker, PM me or @ me and I can share my docker compose file as a starting point.

But I host LSIO containers for jellyfin, emby, and plex to use as a comparison. I'm a lifetime Plex Pass subscriber, and I'll probably get Emby Premier when it goes on sale $20 off around Black Friday. But I mostly use Jellyfin. Plex is the market leader, but most people aren't happy with the direction it's been going. They just leave bugs hanging there, while most of their efforts have been on Plex TV, where they're basically trying to build out a streaming service within Plex. Emby is a premium competitor that used to be FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), and most of the people I've seen who used both say it's just a better service. Jellyfin was forked from Emby when it went closed source, and is FOSS. Emby has some features that Jellyfin doesn't, but as far as just watching your media, Jellyfin is fine.

Clients are an important factor though. Plex has "the Doom appeal," where any device, no matter what it is, is going to have an official Plex client for it. Emby has the next most clients. Jellyfin has the least. If you have a Roku, Fire TV, Nvidia Shield Pro (Android TV), Apple TV, etc., there are Jellyfin clients for all of them (for Apple TV, use Swiftfin or Infuse, as Jellyfin is a web app wrapper). But for just a smart TV, there might be a Jellyfin app and there might not.

Plex relies on "phoning home" to even work, so by default, if the internet is out, you can't watch your own media. You can disable authentication on your LAN to make it work in that scenario, but then anyone on your network has admin access to the server, so...

Both Emby and Jellyfin will work fine without internet access.

As far as UI during playback, I like Plex the least. It hides a bunch of playback options behind nested menus, so I find it tedious to use compared to Jellyfin. I have not used Emby for playback much, because I'm not subscribed to Emby premier.

Media wise, what you'll want to do is rip using MakeMKV to get a full quality MKV, then put it on your NAS. You will want to rename stuff like this:
Movie (Year)/Movie (Year).mkv
Show (Year)/Season 01/Show - S01E01.mkv

For the shows, after you've named them like that, you can use FileBot or similar tools to rename them in bulk to put the episode titles and such in there for you.

Now, if you don't want full quality rips because they take up a lot of space, you can encode them in Handbrake to get a 99% quality file at a way smaller size. AV1 is the best for anything with grain in it, which is most things, except maybe animation, where you may still want to use H265. But encoding is too much to list here.