My 2.5 year old loves watching classic Pokemon. I’ll be honest, so do I. But have you tried doing that? It’s fucking insane.
- The first half of S1 is on Netflix
- The second half is on Amazon but you need an extra subscription to watch it.
- The theird season (johto) is also Amazon.
- The 4th is no where but Archive.org of all places… Which is called Johto Champions, so it really feels like the end of the season but it’s another 52 episodes!
You would think pokemon.com would have all this (they have a lot, and it’s all free) but they don’t!
Seeing S4 (is that even right?) On Archive.org is really pushing me to want to build a Plex server. Having all this content in one place would be very nice.
I do IT work by day, and I have some older 2TB platter drives from a retired camera server laying around. What’s the easiest way to get my foot in the door? Do I save up some $$ for a Synology box?
Love to get your input!
You must log in or register to comment.
Would 100% go JellyFin vs Plex, also toss in some sonarr/radarr automation and organization. Everyone should have some kinda media streaming server, even if its just kept in house.
Yo, I already have Plex set up. I can add Pokémon and invite you if you want as long as you don’t need 99.9% uptime, I’m just some dude :)
“I’m just some dude”
I relate to this so hard.
As a Pokemon fan I understand your pain. It’s not like it’s an obscure series, or from a small company. Why is it so hard to stream such a popular anime? I’m surprised The Pokemon Company hasn’t rolled out their own streaming platform yet.
Before diving in to Plex I would highly recommend looking at Jellyfin first also. It’s offers much the same features as Plex but is fully free and open source.
For my own media server I use an old HP Microserer G8 purchased second hand, and upgraded with a Xeon e3-1260L, also sourced cheaply used. It’s small, easy to service and happily runs my Linux disro of choice. I know other people using various SFF PCs, or even repurposed old desktops. For best performance look for a CPU (or GPU) with hardware video encoding support. Otherwise, the rule of thumb for Plex used to be a CPU with at least 2000 Passmark score on cpubenchmark.net per concurrent 1080p stream.
It’s so funny because you can watch the show on the pokemon app but it has the same issue. The seasons are broken up weird, they have weird names. I think they have indigo league and orange islands and that’s it. But it’s not a “streaming service” by any stretch.
I’ll look into jellyfin. I might just try and run it off my PC for now until I have a device I can chuck into my rack.
Building a NAS if your comfortable with it is the better option, better hardware/cost generally then pre-built synology (the benefit is really they are the ones responsible for managing the experience). Once you have the case/hardware, you can toss TrueNAS on it.
Personally, I have one machine setup as a NAS, one machine as a router running VyOS (virtualized on proxmox) with core services, then a few extra machines for things like jellyfin, etc.
I have most of the pokemon collection, you can find a lot of the seasons on ebay and rip them once you get the disks. There are several auto ripping scripts out there (personally made my own, pass through the dvd/blu-ray drive and auto detect media type).
I don’t have to worry about a company just not providing video service anymore for some licensing issue or something
I used plex for like a decade. I loved it. It had all the features i would ever need. A year ago i tried out an open source media server called Jellyfin and was blown away. It was so easy i started digitizing my library again. I use makemkv to backup the bluerays (it handles multiple audio streams too), and handbrake to reencode them to a streaming format. If you encode the movies into a streaming format, there’s mo need to re-encode when serving them, thereby saving a lot of provessing.
I’ve still been using Plex, bought a lifetime license a long time ago and it’s mostly been set-and-forget for years (except when they broke plex on the shield for like 3 months, ugh). What are the top things that makes you want to use Jellyfin over Plex?
I’m using Jellyfin on a cheapo dell sff from shopgoodwill website. I hear you on the fragmented children’s content. The kids stuff was a big motivation to set it up.
deleted by creator
100% agreed on the advice to just start going with it on your current setup. That’s exactly how I started out with Plex and it worked really well.
I’ve since made upgrades, but it’s all been incremental based on what has been helpful at the time. For instance, I got an Nvidia Shield Pro and started running Plex on that, which has been nice since I don’t need to keep my desktop on all the time. I also use it for streaming games from my desktop to the TV, so it’s not purely just for Plex.
After building up a lot of media, I got a bit concerned about having a single point of failure in my single HDD, so that’s when I got a Synology NAS box and I have their RAID setup going for redundancy. I could also just run Plex from the NAS box and I’ve been considering it, but I’ve been really happy with how things are working right now, so I’m not messing with it.
find a paid plexshare. Cheaper than Netflix, has everything, no weekends wasted on being a devops
p.s. sorry I didn’t look where I’m posting. I’ma open
notselfhostedHaha this comment is keeping it real. That’s a good point. I’ve never looked into a plexshare before. I’ll have to look it up.
There are also free ones, BUT they’re a lot harder to get into, and a lot of times don’t have as much content or aren’t managed as well. They do exist if you’re patient though, I managed to get into a pretty good one a while back.
I use a paid plexshare and it rules. Cost aside, it’s so convenient to have everything on one place, especially for kids shows.
How would one go about finding one of these plexshares?
For Pokemon specifically I can recommend pokeflix.tv. I think there are all seasons on there.
I use Jellyfin deployed with podman. It is pretty simple to get it installed and then drop movies into the library
For me it’s because all these companies hate Linux for some reason. I have Amazon prime, Hulu, HBO max, and Apple TV, but they would only show sd if I’m on Linux.
Dooooo ittttt!
Edit: Forgot to add the useful comment.
Honestly if you’re just starting out, straight up use your existing computer, plug that HDD in, load her up and just follow the instructions or a guide to set it up. Wait to see how much you use it before spending cash.
A recommendation however: Due to how Pokemon is and how Plex’s two available metadata sources (TVDB and TMDB) categorize and lay the show out differently, make sure when you are getting the episodes in Plex that you have the TV show matched to TMDB (TheMovieDataBase), not TVDB (TheTVDataBase). Both have the show, but TVDB lumps a lot of the later seasons/series together, whereas TMDB will keep them separate as the correct seasons.
That’s a very specific but relevant tip!
Anyone know well Plex handles Chromecast? I’m interested in trying it out, but basically only watch stuff on Chromecast with an Android phone as the “remote”.
You’re set. I’ve watched Plex on Android (including TV), Chromecast, and Linux casting to a Miracast.
Casting from the android app works great, the only bug I notice is that using the skip forward/back button briefly sets the playhead at 0, and if you happen to tap skip again while it’s briefly at 0, it’ll skip from 0 and lose where you were. But as long as you avoid that it’s been smooth sailing.
Works well enough in my experience.
I fully support this, I recently tried to watch all of Pokémon to get caught up after hearing they were making a new season (Pokémon new horizons)
the only place I found I could watch most of the seasons without paying like 5 subscription based services was archive.org because someone posted s1-s19, along with generations and origins on there (along with the every movie in order of when they were released up to “Volcanion and the mechanical marvel”)
I wouldn’t fuss about it if all of the seasons were on one subscription based service like Netflix, but I’m not paying multiple subscriptions for 1 show.
But, if you don’t care about season 2-22 or just don’t mind not watching them, Pokémon tv just released the final episodes for Season 24 so they have season 1, 23, and 24, plus the slim possibility that they will release season 25 (keep in mind they release an episode and a special set of episodes relating to a theme every 1-2 weeks, normally on Fridays)
Im pretty sure you could watch it all on 9anime.to
With a plex server youre still going to have to find and download it all no? I just set up an old sff mini PC to stream fmovies and 9anime, go pretty much everything id want to watch, isnt anything ive wanted that i havent been able to find yet.
I also work in IT and I hate for old things to go to waste so a lot of my Plex server is ‘salvaged’ hard drives from desktops that were collecting dust after the changeover to thin clients.
It’s mostly desktop hardware I run, the only thing that’s remotely ‘server grade’ is the Dell Raid card that came out of a decommissioned server also from work.
Also, if you can then encode your files in MP4 for maximum compatibility across devices and less overhead. Plex is great
