Right there with you! Though I must be honest, I spent a lot more time and energy on automating the thing than I expected. Now that it's up and running, it's bulletproof and very low touch. I'm now permanently out of the streaming ecosystem. Which is really testament to how badly these companies screwed up. I still subscribe to Spotify because I get access to everything for a fair price. Visual media streaming could have been the same thing, but no. They created 10 different competing services, constantly switching where content could be located. All the apps are different and many suck. They're full of DRM so I struggle to watch them on planes or car trips, depending on the service. They gave us a terrible experience and continue to jack up the prices. I'm out.

@blackstampede any guides you would recommend? Asking for a friend

Hey @blackstampede now that is impressive!!

Edit: Also wondering if there are any guides, for a friend also.

Interesting, do you mind elaborating? I’ve been contemplating something similar but not sure where to start.

Does your VPN cost $5 a month (Nord/Express)?

You can get cheap shared (99p per month) or private netflix (with PIN) by checking out https://payhip.com/chillzone

Message me if you wanna test it out. it works so far worldwide,

A couple of people have asked for more info about my setup, so here's what I did. I'm on mobile, so forgive any typos:

1. I bought a refurbished Dell mini PC from some website or other - if you Google "refurbished Dell mini PC" it'll probably be the top result. It doesn't need to be fast or have too much memory, but I've got a 2TB hard disk in mine, which is surprisingly cheap. Also needs at least one HDMI port.

2. I installed Ubuntu 20.04, and made a single user with no password, then set it to boot straight to the desktop. Plugged it directly into the t.v. with an HDMI cable.

3. I bought a cheap wireless keyboard with a roller ball in it that (barely, need a better one) can be used from my couch.

4. Installed Jellyfin and set it to run as a background service on boot. It has two directories it cares about: ~/Videos/Film and ~/Videos/Television

5. Set up ssh so that I can use scp to push files from my personal laptop to the server without having to dick around with thumb drives etc. I also have a script that checks how much disk space is available on the media server so I don't run out (that 2TB drive fills up fast).

6. Got a NordVPN subscription and use Transmission on my personal laptop to download anything I want to see, push it to the server.

For a while, I also had an external domain name and IP so I could watch my videos on my phone while travelling, but I switched routers recently and something broke. I haven't set this back up, but there are services that will give you a static IP and route requests to your actual IP so you can have a static domain name without having to pay your ISP for a static IP.

EDIT: also, you can set commands to run at login, so it boots directly to Firefox running in kiosk mode on the Jellyfin web app. The end result is that on boot, I get the Ubuntu symbol, a brief flash of desktop, and then I'm browsing my media library full screen.