Plex

When I was in high school, I hacked my original xbox, upgraded the hard drive, and installed XBMC. It made for a really cool media center at the time but it wasn't the most user friendly. After that attempt, I tried to set everything up in iTunes and stream to our TV using an Apple TV. It was a lot more work to get all the information into iTunes, you had to have your computer on and logged in and the Apple TV interface still wasn't very nice for your own media. At this point, Netflix's library had become massive so I just gave up on digitizing our DVDs.

A lot more streaming services have come around since then and a lot less of the TV shows we own are available on Netflix now. This weekend I set Plex up on an extra Raspberry Pi 4 with an old 1TB USB hard drive. I was blown away by how simple it was to setup and how user friendly it is. Both of our smart TVs have a Plex app so it has made it really easy for anyone to use. I used the linuxserver.io docker image which was fairly straightforward if you are comfortable with docker. The Raspberry Pi is too weak for transcoding 1080p content but it is able to burn in subtitles to 480p content without issue.