What is a Media PC?

A media PC is a computer that is dedicated to serving media such as TV Shows or Movies within your own household using a variety of software. They can be used to serve media to various devices in a household and can even be used to serve media over the internet. Often times these computers are used to serve not just media but other useful applications.

Why do I own a Media PC anyways?

• Saves Money — Streaming services used to be great way to avoid paying the high costs of cable when you only care about a small subset of channels. But now that everybody and their dog wants to have their own streaming service it has turned into cable 2.0. I was spending a ton of money every month across multiple streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Crunchyroll, Funimation, etc) just to watch a handful of shows. Often those services would go unused for most of the month.
• Never Lose Content — Streaming services lose series all the time. They only pay to have the rights to stream them for a limited time. If I pay for content, I should own it forever.
• Higher Quality — Many streaming services don’t even offer 4K or surround sound audio and if they do, you usually have to pay a premium to watch in HD.
• It's Fun

Unlike gaming computers, you can build a media pc for very cheap. They do not require crazy hardware especially if its only going to be used to serve media within your own household. I built my media pc in 2016, a time long forgotten before Covid when you could get computer parts at a fair and reasonable price.

My old media pc was windows based since all I wanted to host was a plex server that served the media off my drives. I didn't need anything fancy... until a couple months later when I needed something fancy.

That something fancy...

I wanted to automate my server. I didn't want to have to manually add shows and movies to it since I'm lazy. So I set up Sonarr and Radarr which are softwares for automatically tracking tv shows and movies and kicking off torrents when new episodes are found. Luckily those worked on Windows.

Since I was going the automation route, I didn't want those torrents happening on my media PC even with a VPN so I bought a seedbox which lives in the Netherlands.

And since those torrents are no longer on my media PC I needed a way to automatically get them from Seedbox to my media PC so I wrote a Powershell script that can run on a schedule to do that.

As you can see... This got a lot more complex than simply hosting a Plex server and being Windows based was not helping.

Old Media PC Software

Here is a quick rundown of all the software I was using in my fancy setup... Keep in mind originally the only software I was running was "Plex Media Server".

• Plex Media Server
• Sonarr - Tracks TV Shows
• Radarr - Tracks Movies
• Drive Pool - Pooled all my drives into a single drive and balances them
• Snapraid - Software for recovering data in the event of a hard drive failure
• Private Internet Access - VPN provider that doesn't save logs
• Custom Powershell Scripts - I wrote these to fully automate the stuff that normally isn't automated and requires manual intervention.
• Seedbox.io Seedbox - (~$11.5 a month, located in the Netherlands) where all the torrents happen.

How does all of this work?

No but really...

Basically, I add a TV Show to Sonarr (or Radarr) using its web ui to track. Sonarr watches various torrent sites for new episodes of that show. When it sees one it sends the torrent link to my seedbox in the Netherlands.

My seedbox will download the episode. At the same time, I have a powershell script that connects to my seedbox every 10 minutes and looks for new files. When it sees a new file, it uses the WinSCP DLL to download that file to my Media PC. Once that’s done, it scans my media pc’s download folder and any file it sees it tells the local running Sonarr instance about it.

Sonarr then grabs the file, renames it in the format I have specific and moves it to my storage pool under the correct show and season folders.

Plex Media Server is watching my media pool for changes, sees the new file and lists it under the “Recently Added” section to anyone who is on my Plex server.

TL;DR / I Can't Believe It's Not Netflix

Sonarr & Radarr track TV Shows / Movies. When new episodes or movies appear, stuff happens and they magically show up in my Plex server. Completely hands free.

Here is a super professional diagram of how this works

You might be wondering...

What absolute beast of a machine made having a self hosted Netflix possible? Behold! The old media PC in all it's glory...

Surprisingly, this PC ran for 6 years with ZERO issues.

Why the upgrade?

• Current build is old and dusty (literally) and at risk of causing me 20+TB of data loss if something were to go majorly wrong.
• Snapraid needs more ram than I had available to properly secure 20+ TB of data.
• Cheap parts, risk of critical failure that could cause problems in my data and recovery.
• Maxed the number of hdds it can handle.
• Limited to using Proboxes over USB for more drives.
• Dual core CPU struggles at times when multiple high resource processes happen.
• Windows as an OS has a lot of overhead.
• Unraid is Linux based and will be able to act as my media pc and web server.
• DOCKER CONTAINERS

Why Unraid?

• Linux based.
• Operating System is built around storing, managing, and protecting data.
• OS level data protection, recovery, and monitoring built in.
• OS runs off of a USB drive. Easy to backup and restore.
• Everything is installed via Docker containers. I can host any number of things easily now including this blog.
• Now I can look down upon all the standard windows / linux htpc peasants from my pristine podium.
• Massive Community Support

What am I Self Hosting?

My media server is still completely automated working in an almost identical way as I explained before. The only difference is that I converted my Powershell script over to a Shell script that uses RSync instead of WinSCP. This script runs as a cron job.

I'm also hosting a number of Docker containers, some of which are my own personal projects that I built.

New Builds Hardware

Total Upgrade Cost: $827.31

Netflix User Rentention

With Netflix increasing the costs of their streaming plans and no longer allowing people to "share" their accounts many users are abandoning Netflix.

I Can't Believe It's Not Netflix User Retention

The name of my Plex Server aka Shaneflix

What does this tell us?

Simply put...

• Netflix’s business model is dated.
• They have lost a tremendous number of users due to their new rules and pricing.
• I have only ever gained users. I have never lost any. Period.
• I can offer 4K streaming to all devices. Netflix does not.
• Netflix removes TV Shows / Movies after some time.
• TV Shows / Movies never leave my system.
• Netflix is worth $176 Billion… Shaneflix is only worth $827…

What if they stop you from acquiring data??

1. IMPOSSIBLE! My Torrents download in the Netherlands.
2. The Netherlands doesn’t care about Netflix
3. Netflix would have to invade the Netherlands to stop me!
4. Oh? Netflix / Amazon have armed security guards guarding their data?
5. In 1949 the Netherlands helped found NATO.
6. If Netflix has a problem with the Netherlands, it has a problem NATO.
7. NATO IS LITERALLY GUARDING MY TORRENTS.

What does all of this mean?

Eventually when Netflix and other streaming services go out of business because of their own dumbass practices guess who will still be standing with access to all their favorite movies and tv shows?

............. Me

Streaming services and media licensing have become almost predatory... You no longer pay to own anything. You pay to have the ability to maybe see something you like until it's on a different service in which you will have to now pay them if you want to see it again. Sometimes things disappear for good and not all media is made into DVD where you can purchase your own copies to own.

I still go to movies in theaters whenever possible (less so during covid unfortunately). I like the theater experience and I also like supporting my favorite movies.

I occasionally buy merchandise related to my favorite shows which I otherwise would not have bought if I had never seen them. If I didn't torrent, I'd have never seen them and thus the studios producing them would have never gotten my merchandise sales.

Streaming has turned into Cable 2.0 and it's only getting worse.