I have the same. I rip DRM off of all content I have, both for futureproofing and to allow me to use the devices and playback software of my choice. I currently have around 6 TB of content.

My PS4 "Pro" (lol) retroactively dropped support for my 4K monitor in a software update.

I knew consoles were screwball, but that was special.

I've been bitten by this with sony removing Other Os from PS3. I haven't bought anything "smart" from Sony since. Not phones, laptops, game consoles, TVs. Nothing. In fact, I don't think I bought anything sony since.

When you take advertised features that your customers payed you to have, you're no longer a legitimate business. You're a thief.

I would be curious to hear more about both of these. I've often thought about setting up a private server, but the set up and maintenance seems like a massive undertaking.

And then being able to extract from a display buffer seems like a good skill to have.

My media server is currently a FreeNAS system from iXSystems. It provides about 26TB of RAID-6 protected storage and relies on open source products so if iXSystems goes away I can still maintain/upgrade it. My "management" consists of some Nagios scripts that tell me if it is complaining about anything (disk goes bad, scrubs haven't completed, ECC errors have spiked, etc).

In its "media" volume it holds my movies, books & papers, and music that have been de-DRMed (if necessary, I always prefer buying non-DRM products). Each medium has a slightly different method of de-DRMing. My toy search engine only indexes the books/papers though.

If you don't mind to answer, how do you deal with backups for that much data?

Is RAID the only redundancy?

You don't need to buy dedicated hardware. Get a big hard drive, install it in your personal desktop, stick a bunch of media on it. Download Plex, that will handle all your streaming requirements. Download Teamviewer Free, that will let you do remote administration with zero learning curve. Is it the slickest, most capable setup in the world? Nope, but it's free and it works while making you learn almost nothing new.

I run something similar with Serviio, but in general I think a lot of people around here are going to be laptop-only at home.

While I don't know much about the internals, I have used both syphon and spout. I can't comment about how well they work on latest OSes, but they seem to be buffer sharing implementations.

(Windows)

https://github.com/leadedge/Spout2

(Mac)

http://syphon.v002.info/

FreeNAS (open source, ZFS, requires ECC ram) Unraid (paid license for connivence that wraps open source mergerfs and snapraid) OpenMediaVault (open source unionfs + snapraid) Drobo (appliance) Synology (appliance)

There's a lot of near brain dead point and click options.

I love my Synology. Perfect balance for me between easy and powerful.

https://www.synology.com/

I have friends with FreeNAS / QNAP which are clearly technically superior, but I wanted to minimize work / maintenance of which I already have enough of in my life.

I second this. I consider myself to be capable of running big servers on a very technical level, but I didn't want to in this case. Synology has a really good balance between being easy and technical possibilities.

Case in point: If I wanted to run a VPN server on it too, I could install the official VPN Server package and configure it in their (excellent) web UI. It offers OpenVPN, L2TP/IPSEC and PPTP. I could also however install their Docker package or Virtual Machine package and set it up myself in the command line. Or possibly look up a community-built package that provides a Wireguard VPN server.

It all depends on how much time and money you are willing to invest in it, usually trading time for money. This can range from setting up hardware and software for a server from scratch using old PC components that you're upgrading from on your main PC to buying a hardware/software device that already does everything (and you only need to get drives and put them in).

Since I had some hardware around from an older PC upgrade and I'm generally curious and experienced with hardware and software configuration I rolled my own for now.

Whichever route you go, don't forget to use something like Plex to organize your audio/video collection and access it from a multitude of devices. It's like your very own personal Netflix.

Depends on what you want to run on the private server. If you want to run some app like emby and file sharing and things like that, https://cloudron.io is a good choice. Basically, you don't have to worry about updates and maintenance. If you want to do it all on your own, maybe you can learn to deploy via docker and friends.

If it's not accessible from the internet, and there's nothing especially sensitive on it, the maintenance becomes less of an issue. ie, you don't need quite as good security if you don't put your server on the internet. I'm not going to say there are no security concerns, but they could be mitigated pretty well by setting up a DMZ, or just otherwise protecting it from your other LAN clients.

extracting from a display buffer is something i realized while working with LCD panels but the principal is similar. There are two approaches reading the data structure, or reading the logic state on the physical connections to the display device and converting to ascii strings, its a display version of analog hole recording of a locked media file. so instead of defeating DRM by elegance, a brute force approach is used to capture the data that has been unlocked by DRM services for human eye consumption.

you want a device that will not cost too much if you screw up ripping it apart. There was a good sized discussion regarding multiline LCD displays here on HN if we dig about we may find it. I think you should have an idea how its done but i dont want to extrapolate too much for the sake of the platform [HN] you could make a PIC device or any other stamp computer like arduino to manipulate the control switching and read the data bus out to a file thus translating one character at a time. it could be done in the 50's way using a row of toggle switches and a debounced "doit" button to send a binary command to the display controller but 10 fingering is slow in return for simplicity, thus automate the task with a device such as arduino or pic F84

SERVER-- if you can set up a local webpage and know how to code html as a minimum you can set up a local server, the next thing is if you want to let it touch the internet connection, so operational security is a first consideration. next is your ISP and how they filter your connection [or not] with some ISPs they want to "protect you from the web" so you have to workaround that, often using a nonstandard port will do it like setting your webserver or ftp server or smb[carefull!] server to ports like 1337 or 21337 as an example. You will also need to port forward your router to whatever internal IP your server is using, one port per IP for each server. next is working with DNS or not. If you have static address you can just memorize the public IP that leadsto your router and tack the port number on the end such as 192.168.1.80:1337 as an example for an internal address or the public address such as 2o7.1o7.o7.7:1337 {not a real IP!} for example. if you want a kewl DNS there are places where you can get a DNS subdomain or real domain if you have money for it. i use http://freedns.afraid.org/ often for this so i can use a name and it helps with the issue of dynamic IP.

Instead of figuring out what the public IP is for my router every time the lease goes stale, freedns will update the DNS entry to point to the new public IP.

  Its not a massive undertaking as i can rip it all down and put it back up in about 15mins [slow but i hate running], 
 by hand, but it is an undertaking until you get settled in the topography and commit it to memory.

>> Something i didnt mention is the topic of HTTPS. when you send anything across the internet there are a number of machines in the middle that can read or manipulate the information when your server is HTTP, so you have two choices other than open coms. One being some homerolled encryption or something like https://letsencrypt.org/

You can set up for an HTTPS certificate and lock things down a somewhat for MITM attacks that dont have time to break the encryption. <<

I started my digital hoard 15 years ago (if anyone remembers i2Hub across university networks it was amazing), and have slowly continued to build up a personal library that I've since made available anywhere I need it (NAS running Plex).

Did you also go through that phase where you had people asking you why you bothered collecting content because of Netflix streaming anything you could ever want? Followed a few years later by seeing content slowly get stripped from Netflix and spread out across multiple other streaming services, and suddenly you have people asking you if you're still running that personal server...

Me as well.

Know what "plays for sure"?

VLC.