The Goal

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 *Arr's stack, which are:

• Radarr for movies
• Sonarr for TV shows
• Lidarr for music
• Readarr for books/audiobooks
• Prowlarr for managing indexers and downloaders for the other fours *Arr's

These are sometimes called the Servarr stack and this is a good entry point to that world. In addition to them, you will be also installing Bazarr to manage subtitles. Despite the similar name, this is not part of the Servarr stack and will require a different installation approach.

To actually access your media collection, you will need a streaming service. The *Arr's do not provide any way to access your media, you will be installing the Jellyfin media server, which is a neat and Open Source (FOSS) tool. There are other tools, like Plex or Emby, but at this time i choose Jellyfin so that's what you get here. You will add also Ombi to the stack to discover new stuff and send it to the *Arr's stack for search and downloads. This is actually optional.

As last step, i will show you my reverse proxy set-up that, while pretty peculiar to my use case, might help you be able to access your media collection when you are not at home, in a secure and private way. I have no desire no intention to share any media collection with anybody, so actual sharing is out of the picture in this page.

All this will be auotmated as much as possible.