The family streaming service

Somewhere around the fourth streaming subscription, the math and the principle both break. The household answer: a dedicated media box in the apartment — docker-media-01 — running our own streaming service, with the same rule as everything else in the lab: our library, our hardware, our interface.

Two front doors, one library

The box runs Jellyfin and Plex side by side over the same library. Why both? Because they’re good at different things and the household is not a monoculture: Plex has the polish and the living-room apps every TV already speaks; Jellyfin is fully open-source, subscription-free, and beholden to no one’s cloud login. Running both costs nothing but RAM, ends the holy war at the dinner table, and means no single vendor decision can strand the family’s evenings.

The test it had to pass: the TV in the living room, the iPads in the car, a rainy week at the beach house — same library, resumable everywhere. It passes.

The librarian is software

The unglamorous truth about a media server is that the library is the product. An unorganized pile of files is not a streaming service. So the stack includes an automation layer — the Sonarr/Prowlarr family of tools — acting as a full-time librarian: series tracked, releases monitored, files named and sorted to spec, artwork and metadata fetched, seasons complete. When a show we follow airs, it simply appears, correctly filed, usually before anyone thought to look for it.

The practical effect is the one every project on this blog chases: decisions collapse to zero. Nobody manages files. The library curates itself; the family just watches.

The stack tends itself

The supporting cast: Watchtower auto-updates every container on the box on its own schedule — the whole stack stays current without a maintenance night. A small web file manager covers the occasional manual touch. And because the box lives on the apartment side of the two-building split, a media binge never competes with the main house’s serious workloads — and vice versa.

Verdict

This is the lab service with the highest customer-satisfaction-per-watt. The infrastructure entries on this blog impress other nerds; this one impresses the household. Every family has a killer app. Ours streams.