Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace the media I’d been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.
Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn’t possible.
There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay’d server and some drives.
By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.
Everything auto converts to 1080p x265 using tdarr. Ombi is set up so any of my friends with access to the plex server can request whatever they want.