Offgrid internet-in-a-box project - Part five

This is part of a series I am writing about a fictitious scenario where I am moving offgrid for an entire year and want to bring some tech with me. Part one is the rules of the game and the hardware I chose. Part two is which distro. Part three is prepping software for offline installs. Part four is about downloading website content.

Continuing from the previous post, I wanted to detail what other content I have archived in this fictitious build for my fake year of touching grass. This includes movies, tv shows, music, podcasts, and books.

In the last couple posts in this series I detailed how I archived a full apt clone, many flatpaks and docker containers, plus archiving webpages and full websites. This post is about entertainment.

I’m not going to go into a full list of everything I have archived in this build or how I did it. Instead, this is just some notes on roughly what I have and how I’m grabbing them some of them.

Movies & TV

I’ve had a Plex or Jellyfin server for over 10 years at this point and I have amassed a sizeable library, all totally from my own library of DVD’s and Blu-Rays… Officer.

Since storage room is precious in this build, I re-encoded all of the files to a lower resolution. Since it will be entirely consumed on a 1366x768 laptop or a 5” phone screen, the quality of video is not that important. There is no reason to have 4k rips of movies taking up multiple gigabytes per movie.

Since quantity over quality is important for this build, after all I’ll be offline for an entire year, I focused on encoding everything in standard definition. Good old 480p.

Since I am hard-of-hearing, I also took the audio down to 96 kbps and burned in the subtitles.

I know there are people out there screaming at the poor quality. But again, quantity over quality and low resolution screens. The audio doesn’t mean crap to me since I struggle to hear it. I could take the audio completely out, but I can still hear some noise and like the sounds of car chases.

I was able to get most movies down under 800 MB in total size and TV episodes under 400 MB.

This makes it so I can bring over 200 movies and 12 seasons of various TV shows.

YouTube

Using yt-dlp I grabbed whole channels of videos for the archive, with the same settings as the movies and tv shows. I have several flags I use when downloading YouTube videos, including getting subtitles and auto-captions, write a NFO file with the video title and description, plus grab the thumbnail.

I’ve writted a previous post about the yt-dlp flags I use.

In total, I have about 300 YouTube videos archived on this porjects drive.

Podcasts

As a certified data hoarder, of course I archive podcasts. I run a very old instance of podgrab and have been saving various shows for years so I can go back to them at any time without fear of them being taken down.

For example, on this project build I have:

• Night Attack before Brian and Justin changed the show to Great Night.
• All of the original episodes of The Bugle when John Oliver was the cohost.
• Every episode of My Brother, My Brother, and Me, one of my all-time favorite shows, especially during “the Yahoos” era.

In total, there’s around 1,000 podcast episodes in this build.

Music

I am from the Napster era and I’ve been playing my local music on a computer since 1998. I’m not new to this game and yes, all my music files from Limewire are named correctly.

My entire music collection is about 80GB, so I just put the whole thing on there.

However, during this build I discoverd spotdl, which will download Spotify playlists from YouTube. Simply feed it a Spotify URL and it will download it. Needless to say, I was able to add some to my library while buiding this project.

Books

I normally read 2-4 books a month. As long as there’s no follow-up questions, I put about 50 books into the archive.

What’s next

In the next posts in this series I will discuss backups and redundancy. There’s no award for creating a huge archive only to lose it when the drive dies 4 months into the year.

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