Donations in Action
Funding our entertainment
Your donations keep Billflix up and running and I cannot thank you enough for your generosity!
Today, Billflix 4.0 serves around 35 users made up of friends and family members. It hosts 3500+ movies, 700 TV shows, nearly 200 audiobooks, and Live local TV.
Billflix’s origins were in Kandahar Afghanistan during my first deployment. We needed to move from one base to another, but had no money for computers, so I (being the nerdy one of all the aircraft mechanics) was tasked with piecing together computers out of scrapped and decommissioned ones.
In addition to the regular computers I put together, I also built a server, that probably had ~80GB of space on it, which was huge for the time. That computer was connected to a big screen TV that we found in the scrap pile and repaired.
After returning from that deployment I set about creating a Plex server for personal uses. Over time this grew, and I wanted to start sharing, so Plex 2.0 was born. Woefully underpowered and on horrible internet, the early days were rough, but it did the job for most people.
Billflix 3.0 was the first purpose-built Plex server, although it was still running on consumer hardware. With a couple of iterations, the 3.0 server lasted for about 5 years.
Enter Plex 4.0
Plex version 4.0 is a huge upgrade across the board. In addition to nearly doubling the space, we can expact nearly indefinitely. Currently only 5 hard drive bays out of 12 are taken. With 20TB hard drives, that means we currently have 80TB of usable space!
The server can also support multiple concurrent 4k streams, and a wide variety of add on features, such as health monitoring, reporting, metrics, this website and much more!
Along with the hardware upgrades we have quality of life upgrades for end users. The biggest improvements should be a more reliable up-time, overlays on top of movie and TV show thumbnails which show their IMDB rating and resolution, and new categories in the Plex library.
