Selfhosted

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dooooo ittttt!

Edit: Forgot to add the useful comment.

Honestly if you're just starting out, straight up use your existing computer, plug that HDD in, load her up and just follow the instructions or a guide to set it up. Wait to see how much you use it before spending cash.

A recommendation however: Due to how Pokemon is and how Plex's two available metadata sources (TVDB and TMDB) categorize and lay the show out differently, make sure when you are getting the episodes in Plex that you have the TV show matched to TMDB (TheMovieDataBase), not TVDB (TheTVDataBase). Both have the show, but TVDB lumps a lot of the later seasons/series together, whereas TMDB will keep them separate as the correct seasons.

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.

Im pretty sure you could watch it all on 9anime.to

With a plex server youre still going to have to find and download it all no? I just set up an old sff mini PC to stream fmovies and 9anime, go pretty much everything id want to watch, isnt anything ive wanted that i havent been able to find yet.

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.

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 :)

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.

For Pokemon specifically I can recommend pokeflix.tv. I think there are all seasons on there.

This is where the beauty of sonarr comes in

I use Jellyfin deployed with podman. It is pretty simple to get it installed and then drop movies into the library

Does Plex have a plugin for Archive.org content?

Just slap the drives into an old optiplex or something similar honestly. If you're just streaming it to 1-2 people at a time you won't need anything too powerful

Your Post is driving me to get the pokemon episodes :D

I support this, I recently tried to watch all of Pokémon to get caught up after hearing they were making a new season (Pokémon new horizons)

the only place I found I could watch most of the seasons without paying like 5 subscription based services was archive.org because someone posted s1-s19, along with generations and origins on there (along with the every movie in order of when they were released up to "Volcanion and the mechanical marvel")

I wouldn't fuss about it if all of the seasons were on one subscription based service like Netflix, but I'm not paying multiple subscriptions for 1 show.

But, if you don't care about season 2-22 or just don't mind not watching them, Pokémon tv just released the final episodes for Season 24 so they have season 1, 23, and 24, plus the slim possibility that they will release season 25 (keep in mind they release an episode and a special set of episodes relating to a theme every 1-2 weeks, normally on Fridays)

There is also Kodi if you don't want to host something.

But I have to admit, I don't know if I'm using it wrong, but Kodi lacks very basic features. I don't know why there's still newer version being released and still no historic section by default. Irritating stuff like that makes me wonder if I should just host jellyfin. I don't really watch stuff often.

Jellyfin, not Plex ;)

I also work in IT and I hate for old things to go to waste so a lot of my Plex server is 'salvaged' hard drives from desktops that were collecting dust after the changeover to thin clients.

It's mostly desktop hardware I run, the only thing that's remotely 'server grade' is the Dell Raid card that came out of a decommissioned server also from work.

Also, if you can then encode your files in MP4 for maximum compatibility across devices and less overhead. Plex is great