And I'm actively trying to go back to that. I ripped all of our old DVDs and Blurays and cancelled most of our streaming services. I told my kids that we can buy pretty much anything they want (so they don't miss out), provided it's not an exclusive.
The net result is that my kids really like Clue (1985) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008).
Yup, Jellyfin. Unfortunately, my youngest kept watching even after I said no, so it's locked behind a passcode. But when it's watching time, I unlock it and let them pick. We have some Pokemon seasons, Studio Ghibli animations, and a bunch of other kid-friendly shows and movies for them to choose from.
That's awesome. This is my next project. I want my kids to have a library of movies/shows that I've personally curated, instead of letting them loose on a handful of streaming services.
Do it! It's a bit tedious to rip everything, but you can always "rip" things by looking up whatever you need on the internet from less... copyright approved sources, which can help to seed the collection.
We happened to have a bunch of movies and shows, so I went ahead and ripped everything, and I ended up buying a Bluray drive and flashing open firmware onto it to rip those properly as well.
I'm planning to combine this project with learning how to set up a Linux machine (thanks Lemmy) as the media server and local backup storage for pictures/videos. Might as well learn how to do some safe sailing at the same time, I suppose.
Check out the servarr stack + jellyseerr for your sailing activities. It is very nice to have one ui to search in then everything is sorted and just appears in jellyfin when it is ready! I set it up on a home server running TrueNAS recently. The only thing i might have done differently is run proxmox as os and set up a TrueNAS as a VM for my storage needs instead.
Do you by any chance use AppleTV to watch jellyfin media? If so what app do you use? I couldn't get the only jellyfin app I was able to find to install for some reason.