it has been an obscene amount of time and an inordinate of money, but between kodi/plex and calibre, i'm starting to feel like i can just enjoy media again rather than having to worry about whether im on the right streaming service, getting flooded with ads, or having my data scraped to be sold to other companies. Not to mention the fact that it all works without an internet connection!1
If there's one thing about this that depresses me its how much duplicated work was involved, and even moreso, how much duplicated work OTHER ppl will have to go thru to get a similar setup-- i'm picky enough that i likely would've done a lot of this organization and metadata massaging anyway, but most people don't care, and rather than being able to just share this with friends to make their own libraries, i'm only really supposed to provide the tools for them.
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This was actually the original impetus for this project, as at the time I had just been laid off and was trying to figure out what ELSE i could cut from my expenses, and my monthly internet bill was high enough that i was debating cancelling my service and just using the library or friends' houses to use internet, while still having access to most stuff I would want over my LAN. it didn't end up being as necessary as i thought it would, but hey, it sort of took on a life of its own!
