I’ve been putting off having a local copy of the series and movies I watch because I still can access them quickly and cheaply enough in some streaming service, I think it’s time to plan ramping up my selfhosted setup.
I’ve been putting off having a local copy of the series and movies I watch because I still can access them quickly and cheaply enough in some streaming service, I think it’s time to plan ramping up my selfhosted setup.
Literally all you need is a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere. Don’t look back.
Can you elaborate for on this for simpletons like me? I’ve looked at raspberry Pi’s before but have no idea what I’m looking at or for because of the options.
If you don’t know anything about this stuff and don’t want to get into setting up linux software, you’re better off just getting a simple self-enclosed NAS drive like a WD MyCloud (just an example, I don’t know all the options out there now) that you connect to your LAN and then connect to it with Kodi or another player. With that you just login to it from a web browser to create your content folders, then map it as a drive in windows explorer and copy data to it over the network like any other drive. Then Kodi etc can be provided the network address for that drive and content folder. (And have a separate USB drive to make a content backup in case the NAS dies one day.)
Otherwise I use a raspberry pi 4, as it’s fast enough to be an emulator box with retroarch (etc), and a torrent seedbox for acquiring content with deluge installed (behind a VPN), and a pi-hole for blocking ads network-wide, and has 4 usb ports for content drives. For just hosting media you’d only have to make changes to the config for it to automount the usb drives every startup, and then the pi just acts like a NAS with several drives. The software for vpn, torrents and emulators (all included or free via git) can be a bit complicated to setup but once you have it correct, you can make a backup image of the microSD card that the os is on if you have to restore it later. I personally didn’t know what I was doing on linux when I first set it all up years ago, but got everything working properly just copy and pasting from guides on stackexchange etc.
Again, if all that makes your head hurt, just use a self-contained NAS drive for content.
edit: should probably add that I personally haven’t installed a vpn on the pi for torrenting, as I have a router with vpn built-in, and set the firewall rules so the pi can only access the internet through that (because it’s faster.) There’s a few ways to handle it.