A 'communist Netflix' with friends (merging our servers), is this doable?
Hey everyone,
I'm coming to you guys because my friends and I had an idea and I'm wondering if any of you have ever set up something like this (or if it's completely unrealistic). Basically, we all have our own little servers at home.
The idea would be to make a sort of 'communist' Netflix: we merge all our libraries to have one big unified catalog on Jellyfin or VidHub. And when you play a movie, the stream pulls directly from the server of the friend who hosts the file. The main goal is to stop downloading and storing the same stuff 4 times.
We just want to pool a portion of our hard drives. That would let us optimize our space, handle a bit of redundancy if a server goes down, and above all, avoid having one single person tank the storage for the entire global library. The issue is, I'm not really sure how to tackle this so that it actually runs smoothly.
Are there any plugins (for Jellyfin, for example) that handle federation natively? Or do we absolutely have to build a nightmare networking setup (like linking our servers via Tailscale/Wireguard and doing remote network mounts)?
If you guys have any leads, tools, or if you've ever tried to hack together something similar, I'd really appreciate your feedback. Thanks in advance !!!