João Rodrigues

Part 2: The Media Center (Your Personal Netflix)

3 min read

If you're tired of juggling five different streaming subscriptions just to find something to watch, it might be time to build your own. Part 1 got the hardware and storage foundation right. Now it's time to make it useful: a self-hosted media center that finds, downloads, and organizes your library automatically — no subscriptions required.

The software stack: RunTipi

Managing a dozen interconnected Docker containers by hand — networking, volumes, environment variables — gets old fast. That's exactly why Part 1 installed RunTipi: a self-hosted app store that gives you a one-click dashboard for this kind of Docker sprawl instead of a pile of docker-compose.yml files to maintain.

From the RunTipi dashboard, I installed three pieces:

  • Plex — the front-end that streams everything to the TV, phone, or laptop.
  • qBittorrent — the downloader.
  • *The Arr suite (Sonarr & Radarr) — automation. They watch for new episodes and movies and grab them the moment they're available, so nothing has to be searched for manually.

Keep everything on the NVMe drive, not the SD card

The single most important setting in this whole stack: every app's data — downloads, library, metadata cache — has to live on the NVMe SSD mounted at /media/storage in Part 1, not on the Pi's boot SD card. A month of Sonarr/Radarr activity plus Plex's metadata cache will happily fill, and eventually kill, a small SD card.

When configuring each app in RunTipi, map its data and download paths explicitly onto that drive:

# Example volume mapping for qBittorrent
volumes:
  - /media/storage/downloads:/downloads
  - /media/storage/config/qbittorrent:/config

Sonarr and Radarr watch that same /media/storage/downloads folder and move completed files into a media library structure like:

/media/storage/media/
├── movies/
│   └── Movie Name (2024)/
│       └── Movie Name (2024).mkv
└── tv/
    └── Show Name/
        └── Season 01/
            └── Show Name - S01E01.mkv

Plex just points at /media/storage/media, and everything else — posters, episode titles, "next episode" prompts — happens automatically from there.

Turning on hardware transcoding

The Pi 5's GPU can decode and transcode H.264/H.265 video without pegging the CPU, which matters the moment you stream to a device or network link that can't handle the original file directly. Before flipping the switch in Plex, confirm the video device is actually exposed:

ls /dev/dri
# Expect to see renderD128 (and possibly card0/card1)

If it's there, enable Hardware Acceleration under Plex's transcoder settings and make sure /dev/dri is passed through to the Plex container (RunTipi exposes this as a config option on the app). Skip this and a single simultaneous 4K transcode can max out all four cores of the Pi.

A pro-tip that will save your drive

If your server lives anywhere near speakers: mechanical or enclosure-mounted drives do not like vibration. Sustained bass from a subwoofer on the same shelf can misalign a spinning drive's read/write head and cause slow, silent corruption over time. Keep the server on its own shelf, away from anything that thumps.

Next steps

With Plex, qBittorrent, and the *Arr suite running, the media center is alive — new episodes show up in the library without anyone lifting a finger. But there's an obvious problem next: how do you stream geo-blocked content to a Smart TV that doesn't support VPN apps, without routing the entire home network through a VPN? That's Part 3.