Setting up a home media server
2026-11-02
Our movie collection had outgrown the shelf and the streaming services kept removing things we wanted to rewatch, so I finally put together a small media server. The whole thing runs on a used mini PC that draws about 12 watts at idle, with two external drives for storage.
The software side is simple: Jellyfin for playback, and a nightly backup of the library database to a second drive. The first lesson was that the backup matters more than the server itself — rebuilding the library metadata from scratch took a whole weekend the first time a drive failed, and I do not want to do that again.
The second lesson was about the network. The server sits on a wired connection, and everything else in the house connects over Wi-Fi. That split turned out to be the right call: the one time I tried running it over Wi-Fi, a 4K file stuttered every few minutes, and nobody in the house was happy.
Total cost was less than a year of the streaming services it replaced. It is not fancy, but it works, and the movies stay where I put them.