There’s a scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold finally gets his Christmas lights working, and his entire house lights up like a small nuclear reactor.
That’s approximately how I felt when I got Jellyfin running on my home server.
Every Christmas, without fail, I want to watch Christmas Vacation. It’s tradition. There are certain movies that have become fixtures in my life, and I don’t particularly care how many times I’ve seen them. In fact, that’s kind of the point.
When I’m feeling down, nothing cheers me up quite like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I defy anyone to remain in a bad mood while watching that movie.
Groundhog Day is another favorite, although I’ve always found it a little amusing that every time I watch it, I’m essentially experiencing my own little version of Groundhog Day. The same movie, the same jokes, the same story, over and over and over again. And somehow, I never get tired of it.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly might be my favorite movie of all time. I could watch it for the cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s score alone.
Guilty pleasure? Step Brothers. I make no apologies.
And then there’s Sling Blade.
I love Sling Blade so much that, over the years, I somehow acquired four different copies: one VHS, two DVDs, and a Blu-ray. That’s an impressive level of commitment to a single movie, particularly considering that I currently cannot locate a single goddamn copy.
But I reckon they’ll turn up.
Mmmmm-hmmmm.
A Movie Collection That Actually Belongs to Me
One of the things I’ve been doing lately is building out what I’ve dubbed “AndrewServer3000,” a little home server that has gradually become the headquarters for an assortment of personal projects and self-hosted applications.
The latest addition is Jellyfin, an open-source media server that lets me organize and stream my own movies and videos to televisions, computers, and phones.
Think of it as my own little Netflix, except I supply the movies, control the library, and don’t have to worry about whether something will disappear next month.
I’ve purchased plenty of movies digitally over the years, including through Amazon Prime Video. But there’s a distinction between purchasing the right to watch something through a particular service and actually possessing a video file that I can store, back up, and play however I choose.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
I’m not interested in accumulating another mountain of subscriptions. I don’t want to hunt through half a dozen streaming services to find a movie I already bought. And I certainly don’t want my favorite Christmas tradition to depend on somebody else’s licensing agreement.
So I’ve started building my own digital movie library.
I still have a collection of DVDs and Blu-rays, along with the optical drives to read them. Using MakeMKV, I can turn a compatible disc into a video file while preserving the original picture and sound quality. Those files go onto AndrewServer3000, where Jellyfin organizes them into a browsable library complete with movie posters, descriptions, and other information.
My first addition was Christmas Vacation.
Naturally, the process wasn’t entirely straightforward. My Blu-ray drive was configured for the wrong DVD region, which produced a spectacular assortment of errors until I figured out what was happening. After correcting that, I was able to extract the movie, transfer it to the server, and add it to Jellyfin.
A few minutes later, Clark Griswold was staring back at me from my television.
Success.
Eventually, I’ll move the media collection onto dedicated network storage with proper backups. For now, I’m getting the system working, learning how the pieces fit together, and figuring out how I want to organize everything.
And somewhere in the house, Sling Blade continues to evade capture.
But the Movies Are Only Half the Story
The other reason I wanted Jellyfin is much more personal.
I make home movies.
Not just the occasional clip recorded on my phone, although I have plenty of those. I mean actual little productions that I’ve spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time planning, shooting, and editing.
Sometimes I’ve even shot them on Super 8 or 16mm film, because apparently ordinary digital video wasn’t sufficiently complicated.
I love the look of film. I love the process. And I love the idea that these moments were captured on something tangible.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a reliable projector for either format, which makes casually watching those movies a little difficult.
And even when I’ve digitized and edited them, there’s another problem: where do I put them?
YouTube seems like the obvious answer. Upload a video, keep it private or unlisted, and watch it whenever you want.
Except that home movies and copyrighted music don’t always get along.
Who doesn’t love adding a favorite song to a home movie compilation? Music can completely transform a sequence of otherwise ordinary moments. It can make something funny, emotional, nostalgic, or just wonderfully ridiculous.
But upload that same video to YouTube, and automated copyright detection may flag the soundtrack. Depending on the rights holder and the music involved, playback may be restricted, blocked, or otherwise affected.
And that’s frustrating when I never intended to publish the thing in the first place.
I’m not trying to launch a television network. I’m not monetizing somebody else’s music. I just want to sit on my couch with my family and watch a movie I made.
Jellyfin gives me a place to do exactly that, without relying on YouTube’s content-detection and hosting rules. It doesn’t magically resolve every copyright question, but it does let me keep our private home-video collection on our own equipment.
The first family video I uploaded was a Halloween production featuring my son, Henry.
Henry went through a phase where he loved everything involving balls. Basketballs, footballs, you name it.
Naturally, I decided this called for a basketball movie.
I dressed up in a Flint Tropics basketball uniform and a ridiculous blond afro wig. Henry wore a miniature Michael Jordan outfit. We headed to a local basketball court and filmed a one-on-one game that became progressively more absurd, eventually involving an enormous inflatable ball about four feet in diameter.
The soundtrack?
AC/DC’s “Big Balls,” of course.
It is among my finest cinematic achievements.
And now, instead of hunting for a file on a hard drive or wondering whether YouTube will cooperate, I can open Jellyfin on the television and watch it.
That alone made the whole project worthwhile.
The Slide Projector
All of this reminds me of something I loved when I was a kid.
Every once in a while, Mom and Dad would break out the slide projector.
They had several carousels full of slides, along with one of those freestanding projection screens that unfolded on its own built-in stand. I can still picture the screen, including the stain in one corner that never went away.
We’d set everything up, turn off the lights, and work our way through years of family photographs.
I loved those evenings.
And what fascinates me now is how the pictures seemed to get better as they got older.
At first, they were just pictures of things we’d done. Vacations, holidays, birthdays, family gatherings.
But as the years passed, I started noticing everything else.
There was that old truck Dad used to have, parked in the background.
There was Jingles, our sweet family dog, back when she was just a puppy.
There were houses, cars, clothes, furniture, and little details that nobody had thought were particularly important when the pictures were taken.
And there were people, looking younger than I remembered them.
The photographs hadn’t changed. But the world around them had.
I suppose I’ve always been nostalgic. Even as a kid, I enjoyed looking backward, remembering things, and trying to hold on to moments that had already passed.
Now that I’m a father, I understand those evenings a little differently.
My parents weren’t just showing us photographs. They were sharing pieces of our family history.
And whether they realized it or not, they were giving us a way to revisit it long after those moments were gone.
Building Something for Henry
That’s what I want for Henry.
I want him to be able to watch the silly movies we’ve made together. I want him to see himself as a little kid, running around a basketball court in a Michael Jordan uniform while his father makes an absolute fool of himself.
I want him to see the family trips, the birthdays, the ordinary afternoons, and all the little things that might not seem especially important right now.
Because someday, they will be.
And I don’t want those memories buried in a directory on an old computer, scattered across external hard drives, or trapped inside a service that might not exist in twenty years.
I want them organized, accessible, and preserved.
Which has given me another idea.
Jellyfin supports separate media libraries and user accounts, so why not create one specifically for Henry?
I could build a collection of kids’ movies and television shows that we’ve already approved for him to watch. Give him his own account, restrict it to the appropriate libraries, and let him browse a collection that’s entirely his.
No algorithm trying to decide what he should watch next. No endless stream of recommendations. Just movies and shows that we’ve chosen for him.
And since Jellyfin also has mobile clients, that could be useful on family trips. With the appropriate remote connection, he could access our collection away from home.
It’s a modern version of the family movie shelf, only considerably easier to carry around.
The Home Server Keeps Growing
When I first started experimenting with AndrewServer3000, I had a handful of ideas about what I wanted it to do.
Since then, I’ve been adding applications, learning more about Docker and Linux, and gradually replacing services I previously depended on other companies to provide.
AFFiNE has become my personal knowledge base. Vaultwarden handles passwords. MemPalace helps preserve and search old AI conversations. And now Jellyfin is becoming the home for my movies and family videos.
None of this is particularly exotic technology, but putting the pieces together has been enormously satisfying.
There’s something rewarding about having a service running on a little computer in your own house and realizing that it exists because you put it there. You understand what it does, where its files live, and how to keep it running.
Of course, I’m also discovering that self-hosting is a potentially bottomless rabbit hole.
First you need a server. Then you need storage. Then backups. Then you start thinking about a NAS. Then you wonder whether you need another NAS to back up the first NAS.
At some point, I fully expect to find myself explaining to my wife how purchasing several thousand dollars’ worth of computer equipment is actually saving us money.
But I digress.
For now, I’m happy.
Christmas Vacation is on AndrewServer3000. Henry’s Halloween basketball epic is there, too. My Fire TV can access both, and I can keep expanding the collection as I go.
Eventually, I hope Henry will be able to browse those family movies the same way I once watched my parents’ slide carousels click through years of photographs.
Maybe he’ll laugh at the costumes. Maybe he’ll wonder what the hell I was thinking. Maybe he’ll notice something in the background that I’d completely forgotten about.
And maybe, years from now, one of those ridiculous little movies will mean as much to him as those old slides still mean to me.
That’s worth a little tinkering.
Now, if I could just find one of my four goddamn copies of Sling Blade.
Mmmmm-hmmmm.