Music streaming consolidation on Apple Music and Spotify makes a subscription to either of those platforms a no-brainer. But the video streaming wars have a created a big headache and mess of options that incentivizes self-consolidation by the tech-savvy consumer. I have unlimited storage on Google Drive via my insitution, and a DigitalOcean droplet that costs only $5/month, on which I setup my own Jellyfin instance. Here's how you can do the same.
Movies and TV with Jellyfin or Emby
Create a DigitalOcean droplet
Install Jellyfin or Emby
Install Rclone
- Create a mount point in your
/home
folder and setup Google Drive
- Mount Google Drive
--allow-other
allows access to thejellyfin
oremby
user--daemon
runs the mount in the background--dir-cache-time 1000h
does some smart caching
- Configure Jellyfin/Emby
Open <DROPLET_URL>:8096
and follow the instructions. Add /home/movies
as a media library. And you're done!
Books with Calibre Web
Lets assume you keep a Calibre Library in a books
folder on your Google Drive.
First, mount your books directory:
That last flag is required for the content server to work.
Next, install Calibre Web by following the instructions here: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web. You can access the server from <DROPLET_URL>:8083
, where you can point it to your books directory.
Rclone mount on server reboot
If you'd rather not remount every time the Droplet reboots, you can do the following:
Add these to your /etc/systemd/system
:
- Movies
- Books
After you add them, run the following: