Guide 6
Music, movies & TV
Own what you've bought. Stop the television from reporting on you.
Layers this moves to you: DataCompute
What you gain
Two different things, both worth doing:
- A library you own. Music you’ve bought, discs you’ve ripped, home video, podcasts, over-the-air TV — served from a box in your house to every screen, with no monthly fee and nobody logging what you watched at 2 a.m.
- A television that doesn’t phone home. Modern smart TVs track what’s on screen (including from other inputs) and sell it. Putting the TV on an isolated network segment with no internet, and driving it from a small streaming box you control, ends that.
This guide is not about avoiding paying for content. It’s about not renting access to things you already own, and not being watched while you watch.
The replacements
- Jellyfin — free, open source, no account. Movies, TV, music, live TV from an antenna tuner. The default recommendation.
- Plex — polished and popular, but requires an account with the company and has moved more features behind a subscription over time. Fine if you know that going in.
- Navidrome or Jellyfin for music, with any of the open-source phone apps.
- AudioBookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts.
- A cheap network tuner turns a $20 antenna into live TV with a guide and recording.
What you still rent
Streaming subscriptions you choose to keep — nothing here stops you. The point is that they’re on your terms, running on a box you can replace, next to a library that’s yours.
What this looks like at each budget
- Tier 0, $0
- Jellyfin on the computer you have, pointed at the music and video you already own. A streaming stick you control instead of the TV’s built-in apps, and the TV’s network disconnected.
- Tier 1, one small box
- Jellyfin on the small box, running all the time; an antenna tuner for live TV.
- Tier 2, a real home server
- Same, with a NAS holding the library and enough CPU to convert video on the fly for phones.
- Tier 3, the hobby got serious
- A dedicated GPU for conversions, every screen in the house served at full quality.
Hand it to Claude
Fill in the brackets, paste the whole thing into Claude (or any assistant you trust), and let it walk you through the rest one step at a time.
I want to set up my own media server for [music / movies and TV / audiobooks and podcasts / live TV], and stop my smart TV from tracking what I watch. What I own: [describe your library and where it is]. Screens: [TVs, with brands; phones; tablets]. Budget tier: [0 / 1 / 2 / 3 — see de-clouding.com/tiers]. Comfort: [none / some / fluent]. Recommend a media server for my tier and explain the trade-off with alternatives in a few sentences. Then walk me through, one step at a time, waiting for my confirmation: installing it, organizing my library the way the software expects, setting up apps on each screen, and — separately — putting my TV on a network segment with no internet access while keeping it working via a streaming device I control. Keep it legal: don't help me bypass copy protection or access content I haven't paid for. Tell me before anything hard to undo.