home media server software?

[Cramig88]

hey all,

 

so forever i been doing media sharing, basically ever since PS3 or DLNA came about.

issue is, at this point in time i have terabytes of movies.  ill explain the story below if ya care to read how that came about

 

anyway so my catalog is gigantic and as of lately i ran into plex.  yay i have a gui on my "smart" tv and my pc is a server.  whooo!

well... it dont exactly organize everything.  idk how many movies i have but i dont get a full "netflix" or "xyz" lineup of my movies.  sure i can flip to the entire library but then i just see the folder names (title/year/etc).  another menu shows box art A-Z but for some reason if i find a title i like, play a trailer, hit back, im at A again not F or something.  Another shows categories and theres like at least 16 and only some populate despite me having idk Titanic and being in Drama or Thriller yada yada.  searching works fine, everything pulls up.

also for some reason my pc transcodes each bleeping video!  this has to be plex client requesting this cause my TV has codecs for all these diff formats.  Ive used various formats on usb with multiple apps and they all work fine.  I dont really care that it transcodes but thats stupid.  My network is all hardlined 1gb ethernet!  Although the TV might be the reason why, its a sony x85k and i think it only has 100mbps ethernet.  i guess they expect ppl to use wireless?

 

anyway is there any kind of open source software to give me all my movies in a nice gui?  plex only shows new movies, just added, history and thats basically it.  be cool if i could just keep going down thru idk "best rated horror" or something like that

 

---

 

movies came about easily.  my older brother was into films, i was into computers.  them aol disks came in handy for R&D, then id goto the library and download the software and shove em on floppies. 

one day i finally figured it out, showed him, then he let me copy them so long as i put them back.  bam, grabbed his zipper dvd binder and went to work.  finished that off, probably like 200 movies.  of course new ones came into the house so the library grew accordingly.

he moved out to college, bought a house and occasionally id visit with my laptop.  same situation as usual.  then one day as im leaving i ask if i can borrow his cd collection - all old school rap.  i mean mob deep, ODB, spice 1, you get the idea.  nah, denied.  turned into this whole thing, they take like 25 mins a disc so whats the problem man?  whatever

as irony would have it, his house ended up burning down the next weekend!  guess who calls me after things get situated and asks for movies?  i mail him a 1tb ssd with the last 5 years of his movies; given hes ~50 now ive got everything hes ever owned except his music.

so yeah thats the story.  at this point i share my media with him via plex but as noted above theres some caveats to the client interface...

[Blue4130]

47 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

anyway is there any kind of open source software to give me all my movies in a nice gui?  plex only shows new movies, just added, history and thats basically it.  be cool if i could just keep going down thru idk "best rated horror" or something like that

 

 

 

 

You can sort by rating as well as other things. Isn't that fine grained enough? Choose your category and then soft by rating if you want to see the "best horror" or any other designation.

[manikyath]

your problem is most likely a lack of metadata on all the files you have, so plex has to do a best guess, or base itself on metadata it auto-applies to what it thinks the movie is.

[Nayr438]

I personally use jellyfin if you want an alternative, but to my understanding Plex has a better UI and supports far more devices.

 

As mentioned though metadata is probably the issue here, I am personally a big fan of TinyMediaManager it can fetch data from multiple sources and organize everything into folders and rename files, the pro version is like $14 USD a year and I'd recommend it.

[Cramig88]

On 4/14/2025 at 10:27 PM, Blue4130 said:

 

 

You can sort by rating as well as other things. Isn't that fine grained enough? Choose your category and then soft by rating if you want to see the "best horror" or any other designation.

issue there is it dont display that info on the client end\tv

 

edit: 

I actually found this after looking at the post later that night on the client end. Wasn’t hard, I just wasn’t looking. User error!

anyway, yeah buddy!  Amazing since I can sort by YEAR, given the lifetime worth of films, feeling very nostalgic.  
MUCH appreciated!  Now for the metadata…

some titles aren’t pulling up - I know why. At the time of ripping the dvds/compressing/encoding I was using “old” software which didn’t apply the metadata as mentioned @manikyath @Nayr438

Edited Wednesday at 09:31 PM by Cramig88
Found it!!

[Cramig88]

On 4/15/2025 at 5:21 PM, Nayr438 said:

I personally use jellyfin if you want an alternative, but to my understanding Plex has a better UI and supports far more devices.

 

As mentioned though metadata is probably the issue here, I am personally a big fan of TinyMediaManager it can fetch data from multiple sources and organize everything into folders and rename files, the pro version is like $14 USD a year and I'd recommend it.

ill look into that.  ive seen a few.. plugins? that do sort of the same thing.  idk exactly how they work but it seems there all localhost:port apps that point to each other to index\retrieve information.  figuring out TinyMediaManager would be a simple answer to my issue, or figure out the plugins.  regardless 99-100% of the movies i *can* auto-retrieve subtitles for but that does not say the same for the metadata since they're all home-rips

kinda glad i threw in the story cause i didnt think of metadata.  most of the plex stuff, i thought anyway, pulls the info from the movie title, searches imdb\rotten tomatoes\otherwise and boom.

 

seems like a solution to me!  whoop! thanks!