Background: I've been writing a new media server like Jellyfin or Plex, and I'm thinking about releasing it as an OSS project. It's working really well for me already, so I've started polishing up the install process, writing getting started docs, stuff like that.
I'm interested in how other folks have set up their media libraries. Especially the technical details around how files are encoded and organized.
My media library currently has about 1,100 movies and just shy of 200 TV shows. I've encoded everything as high quality AV1 video with Opus audio, in a WebM container. Subtitles and chapters are in a separate WebVTT file alongside the video. The whole thing is currently about 9TB. With few exceptions, I sourced everything directly from Blu-ray or DVD using MakeMKV. It's organized pretty close to how Jellyfin wants it.
What about you?
RE autoscaling: effective distributed systems design isn't really language-dependent. Java apps can scale just as well as ones written in Go. That said, I can see there being a case for Java apps not making it as easy to build that way. There's definitely a lot of mainframe/monolith-oriented patterns in both the standard library and in enterprise Java culture.
As for the job market and career investment, I'd say this:
I've written a lot of Java in my career and studied it in college, and I've written one app professionally and several hobby projects and utilities in Go. There's a lot to like about it, regardless of its marketability on a resume.