What's everyone using for their media management?

[ianfontinell]

@frostycab to be fair it wasn't an assessment of thte software, i never downloaded it in the first place. It's more of an assessment of the situation itself.

[eonflux]

I would pay good money for an app, NO sub for certain aspects of this website to be made into a cross-platform (win-man-linux) electron app.

For me it needs to:

• Lets me keep my folder structure as is
• Has a build in video-player, grid view with remote support (play multiple videos - gooner-mode)
• Lets me add pictures, notes, and information to any folder (.nfo-like)
• Extensive database to search and find terabytes of videos, actors and tags I want to add.

Something like this as a starting point:

[frostycab]

@eonflux Have you ever looked into Stash?

[eonflux]

@frostycab Yeah years ago. It was browser based and slow. Not sure how it's now but that put me off.

[Shepard69]

Nothing. Nothing at all. Have various hard drives connected and unconnected, not labeled, no organisation whatsoever... porn anywhere and everywhere... it's a complete and utter mess. Just the way I like it = never know Where or When I'm gonna find anything, keeps things interesting.

[frostycab]

@eonflux I'm surprised to hear you think it was slow. As long as the drive is spun up it works pretty well for me. It does take a while to indes all the videos and create the supporting files, but I would expect any software to need time for that.

[eonflux]

@frostycab said:

@eonflux I'm surprised to hear you think it was slow. As long as the drive is spun up it works pretty well for me. It does take a while to indes all the videos and create the supporting files, but I would expect any software to need time for that.

It was pretty new when it came out but the aspect I didnt like is that everything needed to be done it the browser frontend, but this was years ago. Ill try and look into again. Thanks.

[MrMazda]

@rnd256 said:

@MrMazda Hey I have a really dumb question for you (and for others) where my porn collection is significantly smaller. Do you just use external hard drives, or do you use something like a NAS?

For the NAS, do you manage it through Windows Explorer or speicalized software (does it come with anything, or you use Plex)? Sorry for all of these basic questions, I've always wanted to take the leap every time Black Friday rolls around but always on the edge

I have a most unique system in that especially for torrent activity, I've found that external drives don't last nearly as long, so I have three different computer towers in my basement that are attached to my own internal network (which is quite complex to say the least). One of them runs on Ubuntu 24.04, and shares a rather large drive across the network using Samba, and even uses Winbind so that all my machines on the network (even the ones on Windows) can show up on all sides of the network and in every network location (there are a few... Long story). The other two machines are still running Windows 10 Professional.

In my bedroom in the basement, there's another PC tower that connects to my TV (among other devices). This one does all my torrent activity, and shares a rather generously sized hard drive through Windows File Share. Also in the basement is a third PC tower that I have in a room I have setup like an office. It hosts THREE different different rather large drives (all internal) through Windows File Share. You can either open Windows Explorer and go to the "Network" icon down by the bottom of the left bar and poke through the network shares individually, or make use of the specific file shares using mapped network drives on the other devices.

The result is that no matter which physical machine the drive is located, the contents of the drive are accessible from any device on my network, and even on the DSL network that runs alongside mine through a super custom network bridge. This was done in part because we have an IPTV service on the Amazon Fire TV Sticks in the house for which I host the network storage for the DVR features, however only the Fire TV Stick in my bedroom is physically attached to my side of the network. The result of this little magical bridge is that even if you're recording (or viewing) the IPTV using the DVR feature, the storage may be on my side of the network, but it is still accessible from the other side of the network.

There's a couple friends for whom I have provisioned a Mikrotik router to run as an extension to their regular home network in such a way that for normal network and internet traffic, it just runs on their equipment as it always has, but for traffic that is going to or from my network at home (such as the PCs that have all the porn), their router knows to send the request through said Mikrotik box, which uses a VPN bond into my home network, so as to route the connection through the VPN tunnel, which acts like a bridge, so that although it's running through the internet through the secure VPN tunnel, it works on any device on their network seamlessly as though my system and network resources were directly on their local network.

The added bonus is that when I'm traveling with my laptop, I can VPN tunnel the laptop into my home network from a public WiFi to not only bypass network censorship of that public WiFI network, but also still have the whole collection available to me through the same Windows File Share methods. I could get into a Plex setup or some other such type of setup, but I have the system I'm still using to this day refined down to a fine art that just magically works... From ANYWHERE

[eonflux]

@MrMazda Dude WTF. I wont pretend to understand how and why. But How much do those server cost in the electricity bill? Why not consolidate them into one sever.

You could take one of those towers and convert them into a Nas with something like Unraid. Unraid has the ability to take various disk sizes and still make raid as long as the parry drive is equal or bigger than your largest data drive. If you dont want to tinker you can look at at NAS. Something from Ugreen or Minisforum. Those are powerful and allow 3th party OS installs.

[MrMazda]

@eonflux The impact on the hydro (electric) bill isn't actually all that much. It's less than a $20 monthly difference.

There's only ONE server, and that one's in the furnace room, but can only hold an OS drive, plus a single add on drive. The second one is also in the basement, but in a room I'm using as an office. It's actually setup as a workstation that I use for doing my business work. It just so happens that there's a bunch of spare hard drive bays in that machine, so there's currently TWO add ons (both of which are huge), plus the OS drive. The third one is in my bedroom, and it too is used as a workstation of a sort. It is connected to the TV in my bedroom so that I can do things I can't do with a fire stick alone. That one though is mostly used using Remote Desktop, but is there so that in cases where my laptop is not in my bedroom and actively connected to everything, I still have a way of streaming porn on the TV haha.

Also, the tower that's in my bedroom is also only capable of handling an OS drive, plus ONE additional drive. I know I could use external drives, but my experience with external drives (especially when using them for torrent traffic) has been less than ideal, and I've found that using them as internal drives is way better for a few reasons.