THE MEDIA BOX

Documentation

Using The Media Box

Everything from inserting your first disc to sharing the library with the rest of the house. No jargon required — if a setting needs explaining, it's explained here in plain terms.

01

Getting started

Insert a DVD or CD into the drive. The Media Box tells the two apart the moment the disc spins up, so there's no mode to choose and nothing to configure first.

A pre-filled entry appears within a few seconds — title, year, cover art, cast, and (for a DVD) which audio and subtitle tracks look worth keeping, all matched automatically against TMDB or MusicBrainz. Check it over: for a well-known release, it's usually exactly right; for an obscure one, or a boxed set with several similar-looking discs, it's worth a glance before confirming.

Confirm, and the disc starts ripping in the background. You can keep browsing or insert the next disc — nothing here needs you to sit and wait.

If a match looks wrong — a different edition, a different year, or (rarely) a movie and a TV adaptation sharing the same title — search again with the year added to the query. That alone almost always surfaces the right one.
02

Your library

Everything you've ripped lands in the catalog, organized the same way whether it's a single film or a full season. The search box looks across titles, cast, and directors at once.

Beyond text search, filters narrow things down by actor, director, the audio languages actually present on your rips, and whether you're looking for a movie or a series — each filter only ever lists what's genuinely in your library, never a language or a name nothing you own actually has.

03

Sharing it

Ripping something makes it visible to you in the catalog and playable on your own account right away. To let someone else in the house watch it too, an admin grants them access to that specific title from the account's own page in Settings — nothing more than a checkbox next to each title.

Access is deliberately narrow: being able to watch something shared with you never carries the right to rename, remap, or delete it — only whoever ripped it (or an admin) can do that.

04

Watching & listening

The everyday way to watch is Jellyfin — browse and play from the Apple TV app (Swiftfin), a phone, or a browser, complete with resume-where-you-left-off and per-profile watch history.

Prefer VLC directly — on a laptop, say, without going through Jellyfin's own interface — each title's catalog page has a Play in VLC link that hands the file straight to VLC. For a series, every season also gets its own Play season in VLC link: it loads the whole season as a playlist, so VLC's own playlist panel is what you use to jump between episodes, rather than clicking back to the catalog for each one.

Music plays over AirPlay 2 to whatever speaker is on the network, or via DLNA to a compatible receiver — see the Music page in the app for the actual playback controls and queue.

First time using Play in VLC on a Mac or Windows PC? — a small one-time helper needs installing so the browser knows to hand the link to VLC; the link itself walks you through it the first time you click it.
05

Subtitles

If a disc didn't come with a subtitle track in the language you want, a movie's catalog page has a Find subtitles button right next to the ones it already has. It searches by matching the exact file you ripped — not just "the same movie" — so what it finds is properly synced, not a guess.

Pick a language from the list (only languages the file doesn't already have are ever shown) and add it — it's saved permanently alongside the film, no need to search again next time you watch.

06

Accounts

Every household member gets their own sign-in. An admin decides, per account, whether it can rip discs, use the music player, or both — a new account starts with neither until it's explicitly given one. Nothing here affects what's already been shared with an account; it only governs whether that account can add new discs or use the music player itself.