GatesFlix

GatesFlixis a private, self-hosted movie library — a Netflix-style browse-and-play interface backed by my own 2,000+ purchased film collection. Built it for the family, not the public. No subscription, no ads, no random “coming soon” pages — just the films I own, indexed and streamable from anywhere on the home network.

The streaming services kept losing the films I actually wanted to rewatch. Licenses expire, catalogs shuffle, the title you queued last month is suddenly gone or behind a different subscription. I'd already bought the physical media. The right answer was to own the experience too.

So I built one. Started 2017, kept it running and growing since.

• .NET / C# / MVC for the web app — server-rendered pages, clean controllers, EF for the catalog data.
• IMDb integration for metadata enrichment — posters, runtimes, cast, plot summaries automatically pulled per title.
• Synology NAS as the storage tier — bulk movie files live there, accessible over SMB for management and HTTP range-requests for streaming.
• VLC-based encoding pipelineon the NAS — normalizes incoming rips into a browser-playable format so the app doesn't have to transcode on-demand.
• Home-network deployment — runs on local hardware, accessible from any device on the network, no cloud bill.

The web app is the easy part. The interesting bit is the pipeline behind it — the ingest workflow that takes a freshly-ripped disc, normalizes it through VLC, writes it to the NAS, enriches the metadata from IMDb, and lights it up in the browse UI. That's where the engineering lives: storage, transcoding, metadata, and a tiny bit of media-server discipline so nothing ever fails silently on playback.

• Full-stack ownership. Web tier, data tier, storage tier, encoding pipeline, deployment — all of it. No team to lean on.
• Long-running production. Live since 2017. Real workload, real uptime, real maintenance. Not a weekend toy.
• Pragmatic stack choices..NET / MVC because that's what I knew best in 2017 and it's rock-solid for this. Synology + VLC because they do the job without a SaaS subscription. The boring stack is often the right stack.
• Personal problem, engineered solution. The kind of thing I build when something annoys me — and the kind of project that proves the motivation is the work itself, not a paycheck.