Faceman2K23

a remux is just the video and audio data put into a new container, no compression. but it is just the main movie file, no menus, no extras, nothing like that.

the common tag for searching for whole disks (BDMV folders, Video_ts folders or ISO images) is BR-DISK

Totally different software solutions aimed at different users, and many people use both.

Plex is a Server software that handles media management, libraries, users, etc etc.. and a range of player apps that have a somewhat beginner friendly layout requiring little to no setup

Personally, I run a large Plex server that provides content for my family across dozens of mixed devices in home and out of home, different users have access to different libraries and have different preferences. If needed it will automatically transcode content for remote users out of the home to fit my upload bandwidth and their available speed if they are on mobile. it keeps track of watched content and position for all users so they can move between devices seamlessly.

Kodi is an extensible media player frontend, it can play files from a remote server or NAS but there is no server management, it is just doing basic file access. there are addons for many common services and media sources but there is no user management, no transcoding, no sharing content with other clients etc etc. Having multiple kodi installs on multiple players requires each client to be configured more or less from scratch and no easy way to have multiple setups for different users with their own preferences, libraries and/or content restrictions. It is extremely powerful and configurable and has strong format support.

I have Kodi installed on one of my Nvidia Shield Pros but only use it for playback of surround music files (support for 5.1 flac on plex seems to be limited to audio within video containers for some reason) I find the interface (and all the skins I tried) extremely clunky for use as a music player, the way the remote works within the player itself is unintuitive and makes for an annoying experience restarting the track when you just want to move the playback a few seconds, a bit unfair of course as that isn't what it was made for but that's just my experience.

Jellyfin is great and I follow its development and test it every now an then but it is nowhere near fully featured or well supported enough or me to transfer my family over to.

I will eventually, when it's ready.

Another Tdarr alternative with (i think) a more flexible and automatable setup is FileFlows (the free version is all you need) you can build node based rulesets and apply those rules to different libraries.

Found a few users with heaps, but a lot of fake amateur algorithm upmixed stuff mixed in with real professional mutlitrack mixes.

Also a lot of Tidal rips, though they are mostly very poor quality upmixes done by engineers who don't know how to use surround properly.

I'm hunting through there at the moment but so far nothing that I don't already have or have access too.

Ubooquity does this if you use the web reader across multiple devices, not sure about any third party apps or e-reader integration though.

I've been using Prowlarr and Jacket to do mass searches of public trackers and my Usenet sources for every variation of surround, multichannel, dvd-a, bd-a sacd, dff, dsd, atmos, ac3, dts, 5.1, 7.1, etc etc etc...

I think I have about 70 surround albums so far, excluding concerts that I have a separate collection of.

basically any PC with a recent (intel 10th gen and newer quad cores) CPU will work great for any normal media server build. You will just need enough space for your disks and some room to grow, the motherboard, cpu, ram and psu.

since you already have disks with media on them moving to a dedicated NAS OS will be a bit of a pain if you want some form of data protection. I'd definitely allow in the budget for at least 2 new large disks to start with. Personally I went down the unraid path as it allowed the most flexible disk mixing and matching, I could just throw whatever HDDs I had into it and all data was parity protected. it's not free but it makes for a good home NAS. moving existing data and re-using the disks is a pain as you need to start with enough space to dump a whole disk to, then wipe that disk then add it to the array, then repeat for all of your disks, this can take days but it works and gets your data loaded and parity protected with a minimum number of new disks required.

Freenas, now called Truenas is an excellent option but it will be less flexible in adding disks that arent the same capacity. you cant just buy one HDD and drop it in to expand in the future, you tend to need to plan it out a bit more, but it is extremely fast and very reliable. so it's free but can cost more in the long run.

If you like to tinker you can just run something like ubuntu and set it all up from scratch, or there is one called Xpenology, which is a clone of the synology software, it is very easy to use and reasonably flexible.

You can just plug the HDDs into the motherboard if it has enough ports, but I'd recommend getting onto eBay and getting yourself a SAS HBA card and sas-sata breakouts, there are sellers that have them as combo kits just for this purpose.

My first couple of server builds used the motherboard ports and the SATA controllers died pretty quickly, then I got a LSI 9211-8i, than added a sas expander for more ports, and more recently a newer 9300-16i card that will do me forever.

I do get about 2 weeks out of my Boox tablet usually, but that is with all the radios turned off, no light and using the built in reader app that puts it into a super low power state as opposed to third party reader apps that burn through battery like nothing else.

I have a Boox tablet (an older Note3) for the actual reading, I run readarr as a downloader/manager and use Ubooquity as the server. If you arent a massive nerd I'd probably suggest a kobo reader over an android reader.

I dont tend to "stream" the books from the server, because there is no point, they are tiny files, so i use the ubooquity webui to download the file to the device when needed. though even that is unnecessary as I can just vpn into the server itself and pull the files, or have them all sync automatically when on wifi since it is just an android device so i can run whatever apps I want to do that, I just use ubooquity as I used to use its web ui reader to keep in sync between multiple devices but stopped reading on my phone as I preferred the e-ink display. could also just dump them to a usb-c disk and move them manually.

I might soon replace ubooquity alltogether and just have Readarr put the files into nextcloud or something directly and have that sync with the tablet when on wifi.

The source for the titles themselves is the usual suspects, public trackers, usenet etc.

I've used calibre in the past to convert and de-drm books for a kindle I used previously, but I never actually needed any of its other features like re-formatting or editing metadata so I stopped using it as soon as I replaced the kindle with the Boox reader.

Yep. I'm 100Tb deep into that rabbit hole.