I self-host Immich for my photo library, and it has broken on me in two completely different ways — both instructive, and both sharing a reassuring punchline: the photos were always fine. The failures were in the plumbing around them, not the data.

The first was a storage problem wearing a data-corruption costume: thousands of “unsupported image format” and “input file is missing” errors for files that were perfectly healthy. The second was a self-inflicted supply-chain problem: an overnight auto-update yanked the database extension out from under the server and put it in a boot loop. This post is both stories, because together they’re a decent field guide to operating Immich in a homelab.

Getting video off a disc is the part everyone talks about. The part that actually eats your evenings is everything after: a folder full of title_t00.mkv, disc1/, C3_t01.mkv files that mean nothing to a media server. Jellyfin wants very specific names and folder layouts, and if you don’t give them to it, you get “Unknown Movie,” mismatched episodes, and bonus features scattered as phantom entries.

So I extended a post-processing step into a proper Python pipeline that takes whatever came out of my ripping setup and turns it into a Jellyfin-perfect library: correct movie names with IMDb IDs, TV episodes matched to the right SxxExx, extras bucketed into the folders Jellyfin recognizes, then rsynced to the NAS and scanned in — with an ntfy ping at the end. This post is about that pipeline. It is deliberately not about disc decryption — it starts the moment you have plain .mkv files.

Here’s a problem specific to people who rip their own discs: you’re standing in a thrift store holding a $3 Blu-ray, and you genuinely cannot remember whether it’s already in your library. Pull out your phone, squint at a media app, type the title, hope you spelled it like the metadata does… by which point you’ve put it back.

So I built jf-barcode-search: point your phone camera at the barcode on the case, and it tells you instantly whether that title is already in your Jellyfin library. It’s a small Flask app, and this post covers both what it does and — because I decided to open-source it — the pre-flight review that makes a homelab repo safe to publish, which is a checklist worth having regardless of what you’re releasing.