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!

  • thehatfox@kbin.social
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Red Wizard 🪄@lemmygrad.mlOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.