Personal Video Server
 

Suppose you are addicted to a particular TV series, like you play it in the background a lot. It is taken off Netflix and other “all you can eat” services.

Suppose you buy the complete DVD set of episodes, then set up a server to stream episodes to yourself only, on demand over internet.

Legally? May you do this.

Technically? How would you do this.

Asking for a friend.

Rip all the DVDs to a thumb drive. Stick the thumb drive in your pocket.

So you have a personal PC that you plan to host them on and a TV that's either smart or you've got a smart device Bluray/DVD player, game machine, etc... that can play them?

Yes, there's probably at least one option, but probably a couple. It would depend upon your TV and smart devices.

I've got an Apply TV that I use, so that makes it easy. But there are a slew of non-Apple possibilities.

Legally? I suspect that's a gray area. If I own the DVD/BD, and I rip them for my own use and don't then get rid of the disks or give the ripped movies away, I don't think I have anything to worry about. What "they" are concerned about is piracy and distribution. If you rent movies and then rip them to keep, you're bypassing the purchase. That's shady. If you buy and then let other folks have/download what you ripped, that's shady. If you buy, rip, and then sell the disks while keeping the rips, that's shady.

My NAS comes setup to do this.

Some NAS will do it, Kodi will organize is all locally, Plex will stream your content to other devices on your network.

My wife likes Poirot, for example, and it is no longer streaming. We bought the box set, ripped it to our library and she watches on her laptop, or the bedroom TV at night or wherever in the house. We use Kodi but with all the computers upgrading to Win 10 and no homegroup we have to rebuild the library so we might switch to Plex and try it. The free version.

I burned all my DVD to a Mac mini using Handbrake, and use Plex as the management system. It can be setup to view them online as well.

I have been using an AppleTV and iTunes to do this for years. It works well (but your PC needs to be running with iTunes running, which is fine as mine runs 24x7).

I was going to try Plex, but you have to create an account and login to that account for it to work. For instance, if you lose Internet, but your home network is up, I think you're screwed. As long as my home network is up I'm fine. It's going to depend upon your smart TV or device connected to your TV and what it supports. Once you determine what is supported, you can figure out what will work for you. My TV is a Samsung from 2007 (yeah, really) so I have to use something external to the TV. My TV is technically a smart TV, but back so early, that it wasn't anything like the TVs today. It was super limited on what it could do.

Look at Synology NAS options. I don't use any of the media server apps, but they look well-set-up to do what you'd like. I got a DS418 earlier this year and have been pretty happy with it.

I have a Netgear ReadyNAS 428. It comes pre-installed with Plex

https://www.plex.tv/

Very similar to what I have running. I acquired a D-Link DNS 323, put 30TB of storage in it. You can also load it up with funplug for additional features. Then I have a micro pc running windows 10 for Kodi and a Plex server. The plex server is to share my library across all devices on my home network.

Yes it requires an account with PLEX, but it doesn't need a constant internet connection for the server. How you get your library of videos to the NAS is something you'll have to handle. There are numerous means.

Thanks! This sounds doable!