Building a Home Media Server

Almost a year ago, I began a journey that started with an innocent question:

Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to find a disc when we wanted to watch a movie?

Original Goal

The original goal of having a media server was to simplify the process of watching movies from our collection.

The setup was simple enough, we would purchase the parts for a small desktop server along with some hard drives. This is where things started to get a bit crazy.