DadFlix: A Personal Media Server

The problem

When my first child was born, I was awake at all hours of the night, holding the baby and wishing it were easier to find something to watch on mute. It was harder than it should have been. My physical media was scattered around the house, there were too many streaming platforms to check for something good, and the real obstacle was the decision itself. Scrolling through options is a poor use of the few free minutes a new parent has.

What I built

I went down the research rabbit hole and learned about Plex, software that turns a computer into a private streaming service. I compared it with Jellyfin and chose Plex because it was the easiest to run out of the box, and because several friends already managed their own Plex servers and could answer my questions. This was early 2023, before AI tools could walk me through a build, so I did the research the old-fashioned way.

The server is a Windows PC I built and keep running at home, connected to a 16 TB external hard drive that stores the library. I bought an external disc drive and digitized every disc I own, and I added royalty-free public media where it was something I wanted. Plex identifies and labels most files on its own, so the most time-consuming step was simply moving everything onto the drive. The idea came in January 2023, and the server was live in May.

The library has two sections, Movies and TV Shows, organized into collections such as Kids Movies, Middle Earth, Star Wars, Marvel, the Breaking Bad universe, Avatar, and War Movies. Today it holds more than 500 movies and more than 40 TV shows.

DadFlix

The part of the project I care about most is a channel I named DadFlix. It works like live television without the commercials: an endless loop of my personal favorite movies, running all the time. You do not pick the movie, and you do not pick where in the movie you start. You press “View,” not “Play,” because it is always playing. It might be the opening scene, the middle, or the last ten minutes. The rule for what belongs on the channel is simple: if I saw it playing, I would sit down and watch it. That removes the one step that made finding something to watch so tiring.

How it is used

About nine people use the server, including my household, extended family, and a few friends. They watch on TVs, phones, laptops, and tablets, and some use it in hotel rooms and on flights. At home it is used every day.

My family was hesitant at first because they expected it to be clunky. Once they tried it, they said it had a polished, Netflix-like interface, and they started requesting titles to be added.

Keeping it running

The server is never really finished. I keep adding new media and removing older titles to make room, and I keep improving how the library is organized. It takes about an hour a week, more when I want to make a larger change. The project is entirely mine, from the original research and the build to the digitizing and the upkeep.

What I took away

The most useful decision was subtraction. The problem was not a lack of content, it was the effort of choosing, so the best feature removes the choice. Starting from the friction a real user feels, rather than from the technology, shaped the design. Adoption followed the same pattern: skeptical users became active ones once the experience was easy, and their requests became my list of improvements. And a system people rely on every day is mostly a maintenance commitment, which is a lesson I see in any operational work.