Sailing the High Seas

This is not about piracy or about stealing other people intellectual property, please do not assume i condone these kinds of acts in any way, nor i do support people who steal in any way, even if we could debate a long time on the philosophical implications of today's media push toward services, streaming and in general not owning anything you pay for anymore. I like to own what i pay for, which means that nobody should be entitled to deprive me of what i have lawfully purchased just because some upstream content license has changed or some agreement between companies i cannot control has changed. It's far too common nowadays that a show i paid for is no longer available to me, or an e-book i (think i have) purchased gets pulled automatically from my electronic devices because something happened. Then i discover i paid good money only for the right to access it as long as somebody else sees fit. This is not ethically correct and poses lots of issues to me, from long term preservation of digital media to right of access for impaired people.

The core point is that accessing media, once i paid for it, should be a protected right and just because corporations can and will force you to pay again and again for the same stuff is un-ethical and should be prohibited by law.

So please do not take these pages as a push to illegally download copyrighted material. All the software, steps and tools described in these page are lawful, at least in the place where i live and the page is hosted. Also, remember that there might be many ways for you to actually download copyrighted materials using these tools that it is still lawful in your country. For example, downloading stuff for which copyright has expired, or stuff for which you lawfully purchased copies.

To be able to manage a home media collection. Grow it, organize it and access it. You will be able to sort and organize your media collection, find missing items and add new items to it. You will also be able to access your media collection at very least from inside your home, but maybe also when you are not at home. As much securely as possible.

Organization of your media collection requires some tools and some effort. I will describe the tools, you will have to spend the time and effort to actually move and organize the files. This can be helped a bit with the tools themselves, but don't be fooled: keeping a well sorted house requires effort and mind to it, and this is up to you.

In order to be able to understand all this i expect you to do your own research and don't follow what's written here blindly. Everything written here is purely from my own home setup. It caters to my needs and to the peculiarities of my home network and requirements. The main scope of all this is to be able to reproduce a similar setup in the future if i will ever need to.

I have selected some specific tools and discard others. You might prefer the ones i discarded or find even better ones for your specific use case. Be this just a starting point.

When we talk about digital media, we refer to many different things. This page will refer to the following main categories: movies, TV shows, music, and books/Audiobooks.

The tools you will be using to this task are the The '*Arrs Stack as organizers, while to actually access your media collection, you will need a streaming service since the *Arr's do not provide any way to access your media, so you will be installing the JellyFin media server, which is a neat and Open Source (FOSS) tool.