My 2.5 year old loves watching classic Pokemon. I’ll be honest, so do I. But have you tried doing that? It’s fucking insane.

  • The first half of S1 is on Netflix
  • The second half is on Amazon but you need an extra subscription to watch it.
  • The theird season (johto) is also Amazon.
  • The 4th is no where but Archive.org of all places… Which is called Johto Champions, so it really feels like the end of the season but it’s another 52 episodes!

You would think pokemon.com would have all this (they have a lot, and it’s all free) but they don’t!

Seeing S4 (is that even right?) On Archive.org is really pushing me to want to build a Plex server. Having all this content in one place would be very nice.

I do IT work by day, and I have some older 2TB platter drives from a retired camera server laying around. What’s the easiest way to get my foot in the door? Do I save up some $$ for a Synology box?

Love to get your input!

  • NSA_Server_04@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Would 100% go JellyFin vs Plex, also toss in some sonarr/radarr automation and organization. Everyone should have some kinda media streaming server, even if its just kept in house.

  • adj16@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yo, I already have Plex set up. I can add Pokémon and invite you if you want as long as you don’t need 99.9% uptime, I’m just some dude :)

  • where_am_i@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    find a paid plexshare. Cheaper than Netflix, has everything, no weekends wasted on being a devops

    p.s. sorry I didn’t look where I’m posting. I’ma open notselfhosted

    • Red Wizard 🪄OP
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      1 year ago

      Haha this comment is keeping it real. That’s a good point. I’ve never looked into a plexshare before. I’ll have to look it up.

      • KidsTryThisAtHome@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There are also free ones, BUT they’re a lot harder to get into, and a lot of times don’t have as much content or aren’t managed as well. They do exist if you’re patient though, I managed to get into a pretty good one a while back.

    • peroleu@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I use a paid plexshare and it rules. Cost aside, it’s so convenient to have everything on one place, especially for kids shows.

  • Justin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m using Jellyfin on a cheapo dell sff from shopgoodwill website. I hear you on the fragmented children’s content. The kids stuff was a big motivation to set it up.

  • david@hoodratshit.org
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    1 year ago

    I pretty much followed these guides. I’ve completely cut the cord and streaming services. I just go to my Overseer page and click what I want and it automatically sends it to sonarr, a few minutes later shows up on my plex.

  • icewave@proit.org
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    1 year ago

    Building a NAS if your comfortable with it is the better option, better hardware/cost generally then pre-built synology (the benefit is really they are the ones responsible for managing the experience). Once you have the case/hardware, you can toss TrueNAS on it.

    Personally, I have one machine setup as a NAS, one machine as a router running VyOS (virtualized on proxmox) with core services, then a few extra machines for things like jellyfin, etc.

    I have most of the pokemon collection, you can find a lot of the seasons on ebay and rip them once you get the disks. There are several auto ripping scripts out there (personally made my own, pass through the dvd/blu-ray drive and auto detect media type).

    I don’t have to worry about a company just not providing video service anymore for some licensing issue or something

  • thehatfox@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It’s not like it’s an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I’m surprised The Pokemon Company hasn’t rolled out their own streaming platform yet.

    Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It’s offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.

    For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It’s small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.

    • Red Wizard 🪄OP
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      1 year ago

      It’s so funny because you can watch the show on the pokemon app but it has the same issue. The seasons are broken up weird, they have weird names. I think they have indigo league and orange islands and that’s it. But it’s not a “streaming service” by any stretch.

      I’ll look into jellyfin. I might just try and run it off my PC for now until I have a device I can chuck into my rack.

  • skamansam@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I used plex for like a decade. I loved it. It had all the features i would ever need. A year ago i tried out an open source media server called Jellyfin and was blown away. It was so easy i started digitizing my library again. I use makemkv to backup the bluerays (it handles multiple audio streams too), and handbrake to reencode them to a streaming format. If you encode the movies into a streaming format, there’s mo need to re-encode when serving them, thereby saving a lot of provessing.

    • maniajack@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve still been using Plex, bought a lifetime license a long time ago and it’s mostly been set-and-forget for years (except when they broke plex on the shield for like 3 months, ugh). What are the top things that makes you want to use Jellyfin over Plex?

  • nieceandtows@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For me it’s because all these companies hate Linux for some reason. I have Amazon prime, Hulu, HBO max, and Apple TV, but they would only show sd if I’m on Linux.

  • Dax87@forum.stellarcastle.net
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    1 year ago

    An easy way to set it up is find any old PC or Android device, hook up your hard drive to it in any way, download the Plex server application on your chosen platform (Linux, windows, whatever), and just run with it.

    If you’re IT you’ll find it’s relatively easy to set up and get going.

    You can make it as simple or complex as possible: android server, kubernetes, do an arr-stack, add tautulli, etc.

  • ollie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The easiest would be a Synology Nas, but make sure it has transcoding capabilities otherwise its such a headache if the device you’re playing the video on doesnt support the codec.

    otherwise i’d just try and see for a 2nd hand thin client which will be way more powerful than a synology and sweet sweet intel quicksync.

    Also look into Jellyfin instead of Plex :)

    • charles@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Can Synology nas with transcoding handle 4k content? I’ve been using my old desktop for ages to handle Plex, but the CPU is too old to handle live transcoding of 4k

      • ollie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        depends on which synology model. any intel cpu thats like 8000> generation has very good transcoding support.

        • charles@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Thanks! Trying to grok the list. For the hardware transcoding that reports “H264 Output”… What does that mean? Like what limitations will be on the transcoding that they didn’t say “yes”. Does that mean it’s effectively downconverted out of HDR?

          • pascal@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Exactly. For HDR content you usually need 10 bits, which is supported by h265 but not h264.

            You can technically generate a HDR stream with 8 bits, but good luck finding a TV that can decode such mess correctly.

            This means the h264 output (if the file needs to be transcoded) is only SDR.

      • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Would have to be on the beefier end of synology boxes, in my experience my 220+ has not been great for 4k. Perfectly fine for less than that though. So maybe you wouldn’t have to step up much.

  • jargoggles@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    100% agreed on the advice to just start going with it on your current setup. That’s exactly how I started out with Plex and it worked really well.

    I’ve since made upgrades, but it’s all been incremental based on what has been helpful at the time. For instance, I got an Nvidia Shield Pro and started running Plex on that, which has been nice since I don’t need to keep my desktop on all the time. I also use it for streaming games from my desktop to the TV, so it’s not purely just for Plex.

    After building up a lot of media, I got a bit concerned about having a single point of failure in my single HDD, so that’s when I got a Synology NAS box and I have their RAID setup going for redundancy. I could also just run Plex from the NAS box and I’ve been considering it, but I’ve been really happy with how things are working right now, so I’m not messing with it.

  • nieceandtows@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For me it’s because all these companies hate Linux for some reason. I have Amazon prime, Hulu, HBO max, and Apple TV, but they would only show sd if I’m on Linux.

    • CoderKat@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      While I understand Linux consumers are a tiny, tiny fraction of the market, it also admittedly feels a bit weird that Linux support can be so poor, considering that I bet every one of those is hosted on Linux and developed by a Linux-heavy set of developers. It’s DRM bullshit that just makes things worse for legit users while not seeming to stop pirates anyway.

  • adj16@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yo, I already have Plex set up. I can add Pokémon and invite you if you want as long as you don’t need 99.9% uptime, I’m just some dude :)

    edit: whoopsie, sorry about the double post. lemmy.world is a little upset today

    • SpectralSprites@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is it that easy to add new content to plex? I’ve just started looking into hosting one myself, was wondering how easy it is to get new content.

      • adj16@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Once you have Sonarr/Radarr/actual downloader set up, it’s basically trivial. Now I just add it to my Plex watchlist and Sonarr/Radarr automatically pick it up within a day or two

          • adj16@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Just to cut down on the intimidation factor of learning a bunch of new things, Sonarr and Radarr are basically the same thing. The former is for TV shows, and the latter for movies. So you really only have to figure it out once, and then copy all those same settings into the other