Media Box

I have a media box sitting in my workshop I use to host and serve music, movies, shows and photos.

It also has a bunch of software geared towards pirating new media.

Hardware

HP ProDesk 400 G5 Desktop Mini
Intel® Core™ i5-9500T CPU @ 2.20GHz
256GB internal drive
2TB USB external drive
2 x 8GB DDR4 RAM 2667 MT/s

Software

Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)
Desktop environment XFCE

Media Related

Jellyfin
Sambda (including v1 enabled so XP can access server min protocol = NT1 in /etc/samba/smb.conf)
Nicotine+
qBittorent
Syncthing (to sync photos from my phone to the media box)

Music

I have samba setup to be able to access the music folder in the media box from my MacBook and XP machine. I’ll tend to download music via Nicotine+ on the media box to that folder. Then from my MacBook use MusicBrainz Picard to cleanup media meta data.

Windows XP Compatibility

Since I share the music folder with XP I’ve got a utility command/alias on my MacBook to convert .flac files to .mp3. Then after converting I have MusicBrainz Picard configured to play nice with XP and its media player, this is a case of in MusicBrainz preferences:

Using Folder as the file name for images.
Set ID3v2 version to 2.3.
Set ID3v2 text encoding to UTF-16.
having the following file naming script:

$set(albumartist,$replace(%albumartist%,‐,-))

$noop(--- Clean up Various Artists compilations ---)
$if($eq(%compilation%,1),
  $set(albumartist,Various Artists)
)

$noop(--- Build the Directory Structure: Artist/[Year] Album/ ---)
$swapprefix(%albumartist%)/
$if(%date%,[$left(%date%,4)] )%album%/

$noop(--- Handle Multi-Disc Sets ---)
$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),Disc %discnumber%/,)

$noop(--- Format Track Number and File Name ---)
$num(%tracknumber%,2) - %title%

Other Media Players

Since the music folder I have on the media box is picked up via JellyFin I am using that and Feishin on my MacBook and Symfonium on my Android phone. The media box is local network only currently so this only works at home.

Movies & Shows

On my macBook I simply use the JellyFin web UI to access these. On my LG TV I have the JellyFin app installed.

Torrenting New Movies/Shows

The Pirate Bay is my goto for torrents though can be difficult to access. Thus far unblocked.knaben.info has been working reliably for the most part.

Foreign Shows

Since I have a bi-lingual child (Czech & English) I have tried to find ways of getting Czech dubbed shows. Regular torrent sites are generally in English only with limited Foreign shows. I’ve found skTorrent to be a suitable place to find what I need in this regard.