As teased earlier this month when I began tearing down my old PC from 2010, I converted my old PC into a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device and home media server. After backing up the contents of the old PC onto my new PC (built in 2021), I installed the proprietary Unraid OS and threw in a couple of new Western Digital 8TB Red HDDs in addition to the 2TB drive that was collecting dust in the case. I set one 8TB drive as a parity and the other two are data disks. The great thing about using an old PC to do this rather than an overpriced Synology NAS device is that you can install some pretty cool stuff in your box... or in my case, use some pretty cool stuff that's already in there.

In particular, my box has a Blu-Ray R/RW drive; which has enabled me to rip disk images directly to the NAS without sucking up system resources and space on my PC. Additionally, because I have a boatload of processing power and RAM, I'm able to transcode those to smaller but still high quality mp4 videos. From there, I'm using Jellyfin to stream our movies AND HOME VIDEOS onto our Amazon Fire Sticks; which are attached to every TV in the KTracy Palace.

Creating a home media server has been a dream of mine for about 7 years, and I'm thrilled that it's finally managed to come together!

As of this evening, our joint DVD movie collection has entirely been uploaded to the media server. Additionally, I would estimate that we have more than half of our Blu-Ray collection uploaded. Unfortunately, due to the higher resolutions involved, the Blu-Ray process has been excruciatingly slow. It would be faster if I just installed the blu-ray drive on my current PC, but there's not really a bay to put it in and I have so few blu-rays that I'm inclined just to ride this out and add only one or two a day in my spare time. After the Blu-Rays, I'll be tackling the massive DVD library of TV shows I acquired from my sister, who decided to downsize when she moved several years back.

All together, we're looking at over 400 movies and 100 seasons of television programming that will be available at the KTracy Palace or on the go at any time!

In addition to the 400+ movies from our DVD and Blu-Ray collection, I've also been slowly building a library silent and even some talkie films that fell into the public domain. The lack of public domain content has been one of my biggest gripes with modern streaming services and I'm thrilled to be addressing it with my own streaming service.

Once we get the entire movie collection on the server, I plan on running a couple of stress tests to the server by watching various different movies simultaneously at the KTracy.com Palace, my parents' ranch, and Katie's parents' estate. I suspect we're going to have a bottleneck with our ISP's max upload speed. If that happens, we're probably going to have to limit family viewing to only the extremely low resolution home videos from our childhood.

I've been a bit obsessed with getting this setup and functional, and I think Katie and I have a really awesome collection of movies and music to make for a pretty fabulous home streaming service. With that said, I have a LOT of thoughts about the process, and I plan to be writing about those in the near future.