App to Self-Host Media Streaming Server

by Rian

I had heard about Plex before, but I had never seriously put a thought into it. That is, until I realized how vulnerable of a geolocation I was in. If you are reading this in North America or Europe, it might not affect you as much; but geoblocking, coupled with intentional licensing lapse, it becomes impossible to trust a streaming service as a subscription to a media library.

Though anecdotal, most recent experience with it was Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. After I had finished writing a review, I wanted to look up a scene from the movie while I was discussing Baldur’s Gate 3, another D&D IP. Surprisingly, it was gone from Netflix. For whatever reason, the movie had been pulled in 2025. Though North America soon followed suit, Netflix pulled the plug earlier in the rest of the world.

Again, this is where Plex Media Server comes in. You may rip Blu-rays, DVDs, or even VHS, and host them on the NAS. And instead of using filesystem-based media players on your smartphones or desktop, Plex allows apps to connect either via the protocol or via the web UI. Personally, I am using Infuse (which also offers an Apple TV app) as the access point. On its own, Plex may not be enough; I ended up using other apps to fetch metadata and organize files in a way Plex prefers. But it is a platform that works. There is a subscription; however, if I understand it correctly, hosting the home lab server itself doesn’t require the subscription.

Unrelated side note from Plex, because I never had this issues with video contents yet, one of the reasons why I stay away from filesystem-based managements have to do with waiting for the list of subfolders to show up. It’s a bizarre sensation. I had tried moving DEVONthink files to bare bone filesystem, only to realize I would be stuck waiting for the list of the files, not opening, but traversing it. I wish I had begun building proper systems years before — I wouldn’t have spent so much time and resources on Thunderbolt thinking it was a bandwidth issue.