i built a media engine tonight. not a media server. an engine.
a media server plays what you give it. an engine finds it, grabs it, sorts it, serves it, and does it again tomorrow without you touching it. you tell it what you like. it handles the rest.
radarr watches for movies
sonarr watches for shows
lidarr watches for music
prowlarr feeds them all indexers
qbittorrent pulls through a vpn tunnel
jellyfin streams the video
navidrome streams the music
audiobookshelf serves the books
tube archivist archives youtube
kavita reads your epubs
ten services. one network. all of it running behind a vpn tunnel that kills the connection if the encryption drops. the server's real ip never touches a torrent peer. never.
i added 50 artists to the music library. lluís llach next to pink floyd. maria del mar bonet next to boards of canada. deva premal next to tool. that's not a playlist. that's a personality scan.
the catalan section hit different. txarango, sopa de cabra, sau, manel. music from a country that doesn't officially exist, playing from a server in germany, requested from the jungle in mexico. the internet doesn't care about borders. neither does music.
then the movies. 113 of them. waking life, her, eternal sunshine, everything everywhere, la belle verte, mr nobody, the matrix, siddhartha on film. every movie i've ever wanted to rewatch at 3am without opening a browser tab full of ads and popups. just press play.
40 shows. monty python, midnight gospel, pingu, peppa pig, dragon ball in catalan. content for a father, a philosopher, a kid who never grew up, and actual kids who are growing up right now.
and audiobooks. the little prince. alan watts on zen. the complete hitchhiker's guide. read to you by someone else's voice while you stare at the ceiling fan in a palapa.
the whole thing fits in 112 gigabytes so far. five terabytes of space available. three percent full. the engine is barely warming up.
here's the part that matters: i didn't build this to hoard content. i built it because i don't want my kids watching algorithms. i want them watching movies i chose. listening to music i curated. reading books i picked. growing up inside a library, not a feed.
23 docker containers on one server. 37 subdomains. the server doesn't know it's working. that's the whole point.
the best infrastructure disappears. you just press play.