From disc to stream

My problem

a pile of physical discs. I recently dropped most of my streaming subscriptions because the total cost was too much for how little i used each service individually. I thought about just buying movies from Prime or Youtube but I had heard that sometimes licenses from those platforms would be dropped and I’d lose access to what I paid for. A friend of mine and I decided to move over to a self hosted platform to watch movies we had at home. It would also be a good way to archieve our piles of cds/dvds

How it works

1. A disc goes into the workstation (Site A) or the mini PC (Site B).
2. HandBrake rips and encodes it to a consistent format: [codec, quality settings].
3. The file is synced to the shared library on the server over Tailscale.
4. Jellyfin (films and TV) and Navidrome (music) pick it up automatically.
5. Anyone in either household streams it from their phone, TV or browser.

What I’d do differently

Google what works first. I had spent several days just trying different ripping services/apps. ARM (automatic ripping machine) I thought was very promising and was what I needed exactly had dropped a lot of support and the drives caused me so many issues I realized it was way easier to just switch dvds manually faster. Even with all the computing power we had ripping still takes a long time so I still wrote scripts to atleast semi-automate it.