mediacowboy 438 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) I want to know what made everyone want to centralize their media and build a media server. I don't mean server in the rack mount sense but a machine to store all your media on. I remember what did it for me. I had gotten a old computer from a family member in 2012. It had a TV tuner in it and at that time I hadn't had much experience in that area. So I set the system up and began to play with Windows Media Center. I saw the potential of never having to worry about were I recorded what show. After a few months I went to watch a DVD on it only to discovered someone had left it out of the case. So I began looking into options to remedy this by making them digital. Well the wife looked at me nuts and said why are you doing this we have blu-ray players and cable boxes. So I showed her what Mediaportal, the software I decide to go with at the time, could do and she loved it. No annoying trailers and that she could switch from a movie to live TV fairly quickly. Also no more replacing scratched Dvds. So after about a year I started to look at other options out there. I wanted everything Mediaportal could do but other ways to watch my content besides having to have a computer in every room and discovered plex. It did everything I loved but I wasn't happy with it so I keep looking and researching and discovered Media Browser/emby. Mediabrowser/emby fit the build. Now I have a Roku in every room and no more scratched Dvds or only being able to watch a recorded show in the room we set it up to record in. I started out with a 2 tb western digital hard drive and have sense expanded to 5 - 4tb Segate drives and 2 - 8tb Seagate archive drives. During this growth I wanted to be able to add drives but keep windows seeing one. I discovered drive bender. That was when I bought my second 2 tb hard drive. As they say the rest is history. I love emby and everything they have done since switching. I look forward to everyone else's story and the growth of this wonderful software. Edited January 6, 2017 by mediacowboy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Koleckai Silvestri 1150 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) The search for a system like Emby is for organization. I got tired searching for DVDs and Bluray discs. Either they were put back in the bookcases in the wrong order, put into the wrong case, or the discs were left out next to computers and televisions. Edited January 6, 2017 by Koleckai Silvestri Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jasonmcroy 315 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Great story. I started in a similar manner, with recording TV Shows about 5 years ago. However, I never liked using WMC and didn't need the DRM ability as I was using an antenna to get my TV Shows. I played around with MBC as well back then. I found MediaPortal as well but I never liked how it seemed to be in like 3 or 4 pieces weaved together (I had to go to one interface to setup recordings and another for everything else, tons of plugins to do things I wanted to, etc.) I then found NextPVR and I really liked it's recording features but not how it handled my other Media. Then I found Kodi (XBMC at the time) and found out I could add NextPVR into it along with my other media. It was a steep learning curve but I figured it out. I started playing around more with ripping my DVDs and eventually had them all on my computer. I also found Plex and used that a little bit too. But when MBC branched out and became what it is now I followed along. I still kept my NextPVR setup and Kodi but always relied on Emby more and more as it become more developed. Then when I started getting into the streaming devices (Roku, Nexus Player) the game changed even more. I looked again at Plex but always kept coming back to Emby, especially when they integrated Live TV more and more. Now I own 2 Rokus, 2 Nexus Players, 1 Fire TV and 2 Nvidia Shields (the Pro model and 16GB model). I have since retired the Rokus, Nexus players and the Fire TV and I only use the Shield devices for streaming both in the Living Room and upstairs in the bedroom. I occasionally use the Server PC (hidden behind my large old school entertainment center) to watch content as well. It has all come a long way since I first started. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I'm just a "data hoarder" in general. It actually started with music and pictures for me, Long ago in a galaxy far away I was a DJ and thanks to my life long love of computers I jumped on the digital bandwagon fairly early (though I still prefered vinyl and eventually Pioneer got me to ditch vinyl completely but that's another story lol) I also enjoy photography and of course around the same time digital photography really started to take off. Sadly though I lost a HDD of data, mind you it was less than 250GB total back then but it was a HUGE loss for me I had copies of irreplaceable vinyl that I'd stupidly parted with the physical media and even worse family memories that vanished in a sad sudden heart beat. I am not kidding when I say I literally cried when it happened. It was that point that I decided I would never lose a bit of data again in my life and built my first server. This grew into movies as I eventually ripped my entire DVD collection after discovering Media Browser and immediately falling in love with it. Over the years it evolved and now is our amazing Emby software, and through those years my media collection has expanded. I'm now sitting on 30TB of data with nearly 100TGB of disk space throughout my home and no desire to slow down. Though as things evolve and 4k becomes more popular I may have to reconsider things. 50-60GB for a feature length file compressed with h.265 is hard to swallow. Storage as always gets exponentially cheap but I can't imagine heading down the road to getting close to a petabyte of data or more. But then again 10 years ago I'd have told you you were crazy if you told me I'd have 100TB of storage in my home. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest asrequested Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) When I bought my first CD single that had a very badly compressed mpeg music video on it (a long time ago), I was hooked. Digital video!?! I had finally found what would become my first true love. I hunted for more. I craved the sight of those glittering dancing pixels. I would buy discs that had video, rip them from the shiny beer coasters (yes, I was drinking at a young age), and archive them in one folder on my 20 MB hard drive (I had like 3 videos, awesome!). I wanted a laser disc player, but alas, I was denied that digital delight. I've been chasing the dragon ever since. Edited January 6, 2017 by Doofus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 When I bought my first CD single that had a very badly compressed mpeg music video on it (a long time ago), I was hooked. Digital video!?! I had finally found what would become my first true love. I hunted for more. I craved the sight of those glittering dancing pixels. I would buy discs that had video, rip them from the shiny beer coasters (yes, I was drinking at a young age), and archive them in one folder on my 20 MB hard drive (I had like 3 videos, awesome!). I wanted a laser disc player, but alas, I was denied that digital delight. I've been chasing the dragon ever since. Ironically LaserDisc was in fact completely analog (except for the audio later on) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest asrequested Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Ironically LaserDisc was in fact completely analog (except for the audio later on) Just as well I didn't get one, then. Major buyer's remorse, lol 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeremyFr79 228 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Just as well I didn't get one, then. Major buyer's remorse, lol Buyers remorse was when you first discovered "laser rot" many an amazing collections succumbed to that rabid beast Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest asrequested Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Buyers remorse was when you first discovered "laser rot" many an amazing collections succumbed to that rabid beast I'm waiting for someone to digitally remaster Babylon 5. The DVDs are quite poor quality. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6802 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I want to know what made everyone want to centralize their media and build a media server. I don't mean server in the rack mount sense but a machine to store all your media on. I think I saw a post on another forums (TheGreenButton ??) by @@demonseed, that inspired me to look into the world of digital media. I believe that was around 7 years ago, and now I use Emby 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aspdend 174 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I'm waiting for someone to digitally remaster Babylon 5. The DVDs are quite poor quality. I was just thinking this the other day! I ripped all my Babylon 5 DVD's a while ago to my server and can't believe how poor they look on my new 4k TV! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Latchmor 584 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 (edited) I bought a Dell Dimension 8100 tower (I think) in 2000 and it had one of these bad boys in it, https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1720/all-in-wonder-radeon-7200, I remember being amazed I could record telly on my PC I then added Windows Media Center Edition to it in 2002 and bought an even more impressive https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/864/all-in-wonder-radeon-8500dv to use 2 monitors. Once I started adding music, pictures, videos to it and properly recording telly I thought this is great I'd better start adding my DVDs to it! I've had every version of Media Center since and still love it as the TV part just works so well. Built several htpcs and used various TV Tuners (Hauppage, Blackgold, TBS) and now very happy with 2 x HDHRs (4 tuners). All media is now on a Synology NAS and backed up to my 'normal PC' and have Emby Server on a fanless Win 7 htpc. All pretty simple but works for me. Cheers Edit: I was late to Media Browser but used it for quite a while and I've been here since Oct 2013 when I heard about MB3 coming! Edited January 6, 2017 by Latchmor Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MSattler 387 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Damn kids kept breaking/scratching disks so I started ripping. Started with a 2TB disk and now have 2 unraid servers with 56TB of storage. That's all =) 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mediacowboy 438 Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 Damn kids kept breaking/scratching disks so I started ripping. Started with a 2TB disk and now have 2 unraid servers with 56TB of storage. That's all =) I understand that one. The wife is/was just as guilty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mediacowboy 438 Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 Thanks everyone for sharing. I didn't think this would get much attention but here it is. Hope to hear more stories and discussions about what made you become a media junkie. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathsquirrel 741 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 For me this is about storage, organization, and ease of use. When I had a few dozen DVDs they fit on a single shelf in my entertainment center. When I had a hundred I had to buy special storage shelves for them. When I had 500 I had to get more storage except, of course, no one made the same one I'd bought the first time so now I had not only two storage units, I had two kinds of storage units and in two different places. Suddenly picking a movie was kind of a hassle so it stopped happening as often. The difficulty of physically browsing 500+ DVD cases made the whole collection less useful. The shelving was bulky, unattractive, and expensive. It took up wall and floor space I had other uses for. Emby solved that. That's why I started. What I found though was that making everything run off the server meant it got used a lot more often. Eventually live TV wasn't getting used much, just netflix and Emby. Emby turned out to be key in cancelling cable and saving me a bundle monthly. Then I figured I hadn't opened my DVD cases in a few years and I took all the packaging to the recycler and just kept discs in binders like I'd been doing for years with music. Saved me a ton of space in my garage. At this point a 1500 movie collection, 600 CDs, and goodness only knows how many discs of movies all fits on half a closet shelf in my office. A collection that I couldn't use due to its bulk takes up about two square feet of floor space for the tower I use as my server. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mediacowboy 438 Posted January 6, 2017 Author Share Posted January 6, 2017 @@Luke and @@ebr, I know Yall are busy building this amazing software but I would love to hear from you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CBers 6802 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 @@Luke and @@ebr, I know Yall are busy building this amazing software but I would love to hear from you. They dont have time to watch anything other then BIG BUCK BUNNY 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14960 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 I got into it by getting into building a custom, acoustically designed, dedicated home theater space. I got this bug from AVSForum and built two full rooms in two different houses from the sheetrock out and now have third "area" in my current house (no room for a dedicated room). My first room had a 300 disc DVD changer but being a computer guy in the first place, I quickly moved on to an electronic system based on Cinemar (a flash-based system that may or may not still exist). After that moved to MyMovies but, while setting that up I discovered Media Browser and thought it was much better but just lacking parental controls (I had young children at the time). So, I got in touch with Sam and Soultaker and put together my first contribution to the project as the initial parental control implementation. From there, I just got deeper and deeper into it. 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moviefan 184 Posted January 6, 2017 Share Posted January 6, 2017 Like @@JeremyFr79, I am kind of a data hoarder. I had a similar data loss earlier in my life as well which made me a bit maniacal about backups and stuff. I started out early on mostly hoarding music collections. Trying to get every last release by every artist I liked. Eventually started using MB around 2008 timeframe mostly for the WAF as I was cutting our cable cord to save money. It was way easier for her to use and I liked the fun ways it could be customized. Also, I HATE commercials so being able to watch TV without having to mute the TV or FF the commercials made watching shows a lot more acceptable to me. Fast forward to 2017 and now I have about 60TB redundant usable capacity with 40+TB of that replicating to CrashPlan Cloud, three TVs in my house which can be leveraged for watching my media, not to mention the mobile devices, and about a dozen friends who regularly access it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack Burton 94 Posted January 10, 2017 Share Posted January 10, 2017 For me, I think being born in the 80's allowed me to follow some pretty amazing tech changes that has always kept me hooked. I'm a big nerd and when I was a kid, Marvel was my jam. I collected everything Marvel related, from comics, to toys, to silly putty that came in wolverine's head. I would record the '92 X-Men and '94 Spider-Man cartoons on vhs, pausing and restarting the recording to omit commercials. I kept all my vhs recordings organized and tidy, fitting as many episodes per tape as I could and labeling accordingly. I remember once finding a new X-Men line of toys called projectors (Here's one on ebay) that was basically a viewfinder. The chest would pop open and you would put in a tiny disc that would project scenes from the cartoon, and I'd break it out at night and play through the eps in my head with the projector. I could "watch" my favorite episodes in my room, away from the tv room in my own place. Anyway, I thought it was the coolest thing, before that I'd never thought of the possibilities of seeing media traditionally played on the tv being played not only outside the tv, but in my own room. Flash forward a few years to the time of Napster. Back then music was the primary type of media floating around, since the file sizes were small. The show Family Guy have just come out and I found a 10 sec clip online (the Kool-Aid man breaking through the courtroom wall). I figured what the hell and gave it a try. I'd conservatively guess maybe 4 or 5 hours later, I had a clip. A form of media I'd never seen play on a computer, playing right in front of me. Whenever I wanted I could play it. No waiting. No searching, It was mine. This was one of the coolest feelings I'd ever experienced (though the single clip got real old real quick, but that wasn't the point ). I connected my pc to an old tube tv and bam, new way to watch! From then on I realized I could convert my already expansive media collection to digital, partly for a back up but mostly just because I could. I eventually started moving my physical collection to storage and just keeping the digital ones handy. I'd buy a dvd or bluray, convert it and put it away. Now I generally just buy the digital copies or give the physical copies to friends. I'd have people over and show them my setup, and they'd be blown away. All my files were meticulously organized by genre and type, and I changed the folder icons on movies I hadn't seen yet after things started getting to "hoarder" levels, keeping some level of organization. That's when I stumbled on media organizers, Kodi first, then Emby. Holy. Crap. This blew me away. A central program that organizes and pulls artwork and synopsis, which my setup never had. It looked so pretty! Kodi didn't last long. It wasn't as intuitive and crashed a lot, essentially making it wife-unapproved. I looked for an alternative and came across Emby, and the server aspect again gave me that feeling. I'm living in the future. The kid in me was throwing up he was so excited. I've been a collector of all sorts of things in my life, media being a primary piece. Emby helps me do it to an amazing extent, basically creating my own centralized Netflix. My new hoarding itch began after reading Ready Player One. I want to build my own Oasis. My own server and network with as many tv shows and movies, books and music as I can get my hands on. Emby has provided a new level of collecting, allowing me to break away from the restraints of physical space. I could now buy as much media as I could, without cluttering up my home. The community is amazing, the devs are amazing, and Emby may have caused me to empty my wallet, but it's filled my heart. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rumbaar 13 Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 I started in the early 00's, where I would buy/copy DVD's from stores and rentals. Found DVDShrink and in no time, had 1200+ DVD titles, that's where my media hoarding started. Not sure how it came to be, but my first system was a Shuttle PC (SD32G2B) around 2006, these were custom small/quiet PC that pack all the needed hardware in a tiny box that would sit nicely on my TV cabinet. For a pure machine that ran WinXP, and Window Media Center it was quite expensive. I think $1500+ at the time. Where it was hard to find a TV Tuner that worked with WMC, and I had a dual card. I manually downloaded and catalogued my collection and used the basic VIDEO/MOVIE function of WMC. It worked, but no bios, no previews, and no play counts etc. Media was being acquired, but the file sizes were big. Talking about large AVI files 3-5GB in size and lower quality than 720 and only stereo etc. I still remember the first movie I got that was a MKV h264 codec 720 and it was small, around 400MB and was better quality that huge AVI's I had at the time. It was a form of wizardry I had no idea how was possible, but I knew small good quality files could be found, and it was on! During various travels, I was looking at a way to automate the sorting and maintenance of my library. I found Media Center Master (MCM), which in turn led me to MediaBrowser for WMC. At first I was just using MCM to generate the dvdid.xml files to render correctly in WMC video/dvd section. But MediaBrowser was a breath of fresh air and I was hooked. My media grew, and I migrated to Win7 and a newer Shuttle PC SH67H3 (current). MediaBrowser turning into EMBY. I was a strong user of the Live TV option in WMC and with the loss of WMC in Win10 I held back migration. Reluctantly I migrated to Win10 and effectively lost my LiveTV option, and my dual TV tuners sit idle. I currently cannot get a working NExtPVR setup working, but EMBY as a whole is working well across all of my devices (Apple APP doesn't like to play nice). I'm looking to migrate my library to a QNAP TS-453A, but am still working out how much I'm willing to spend on that project. My library is relatively small, around 1400 movies and 190 TV series and takes up around 5-6GB of space spread across a few USB and MyCloud devices, so consolidation will be nice. I also want to take more advantage of the photo upload feature across devices. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dredd1963 14 Posted January 14, 2017 Share Posted January 14, 2017 For me it was the kids finger prints and scratches on the dvds. Push came to shove when we became kinship carers and the socal worker complained that the 3 tall bookcases of dvds were cluter (no soul that women) Started off with a dell optiplex as the server, have now moved on to a dell inspiron recased with about 12tb of content and growing. Feeding 3 nowtv/ ruko boxes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maegibbons 1267 Posted January 15, 2017 Share Posted January 15, 2017 WOW @@dredd1963 How do you put up with the dreadful old interface on the Roku/NowTV boxes? I bought a Roku3 because I was moving from plex to Emby for live TV. It sits unplugged now as I went to the FireTV which is a nice interface!! Krs Mark Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14960 Posted January 15, 2017 Share Posted January 15, 2017 How do you put up with the dreadful old interface on the Roku/NowTV boxes? New Emby for Roku public preview beta Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now