I don't even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they're saying....hey do you want a worse experience?
So here's how I'm running things:
At the top level it's a Raspberry pi 5 running raspbian, then everything else (jellyfin, prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, Usenet download software, etc) is a docker container. If that sounds like how you want to do it feel free to message me and I can try to get you on your feet
I’m not who you replied to but I’ve been looking to set up something like this (I have a year old dedicated tower for hosting)
But I don’t know anything about docker, and it seems like a pretty big learn - is it required for the sonarr radarr and overseerr stuff, or just a nice to have thing?
Step 1. Get docker up and running (Portainer helps with other containers)
Step 2. Use prowlarr to set up all the search engines you'll use on other *arr apps
Step 3. Set up your libraries with Jellyfin
Honestly you can just run the app on your computer and tv connected devices. You don’t have to get fancy. I had trouble getting it setup to recognize and remember my library server address at first, but somehow I got it to work. I don’t like the UI though, and just use PLEX instead.
I don't see how this is giving up though. Been doing this to close to two decades in one form of another and I wouldn't consider any other way. Except kodi instead of plexus here.
I mean, steam made it work with games, you telling me that 6-7 of these giant media companies can't get it to work for video? The giving up part is that you have to embrace piracy (again?) to get to acceptable levels of service per dollar
I still watch TV through a Laptop running Windows Media Centre. MS have given up on trying to kill it. The Microsoft remote has seen better days but is still functioning.
Other server software are available of course. The concept stays the same though. Very much recommend doing this. I'm halfway there, running Plex on my desktop PC and watching on my TV and other devices at home. Very comfortable setup. But I wish I had a small computer like a Pi or something, and a NAS to hold my drives. That way my desktop PC could rest.
Personally I was a fan of buying something like a Dell optiplex as my my NAS and Pihole but I do wish I had a better enclosure for the drives as any truly good one seems to be hundreds of dollars and mildly defeats the idea of self hosting being cheaper.
I just use an old crappy hand-me-down mid-tower gaming case I stuffed some drives into. As long as you can keep them cool, dusted, and away from vibrations (with HDDs), plenty of (used?)cases will have enough HDD slots to get you started.
Also old rackmount servers on ebay have plenty of slots I hear, but rackmount fans are waaaaay louder.
Room is my main issue. Living in an apartment I can't have large boxes/computers just standing anywhere. So it has to be very small and quiet. 😅 Pi should be perfect. Maybe mount it underneath my desk where my desktop PC is or something. 👍
If you're not planning on storing absolutely tons of data at first, you can also squeeze a lot into so-called "1 liter PCs". Traditional platform, a little more power and room than a Pi, and you can neatly tuck them away!
I hear they float around eBay quite readily these days.
Sadly haven't been hearing the very best things about the Pi 5, but earlier ones can do well as little servers.
I've been learning a lot from the self hosted podcast lately haha. Also one of the hosts runs this site (which I happened to find first) that can be pretty helpful!
I remember some folks on reddit saying USB isn't the most reliable connection for long-term drives, but I'm not 100% sure what that was about. Maybe the connectors wear out?
What I've heard about the Pi 5 specifically is that they dropped hardware acceleration support for video encoding. Which is kinda weird, but admittedly I'm a bit out of the Pi loop to really weigh in.
I believe I heard this on the "Self Hosted Podcast" a while back. (Edit: oh I mentioned them already lol)
I imagine that might hurt for someone trying to use it for streaming Jellyfin or something like that 🤔.
Plex is a great example of how proprietary software will inevitably become exploitative, and only purely Free Software systems can ever be trustworthy in the long term.
Interlacing only sucks on progressive TVs because they have to interpolate and scale the Missing information causing artifacting, watching interlaced content on an interlaced television is actually unnoticeable from a progressive display in my opinion, perhaps less sharp, but still.
Honestly, I'm just using a cheap Android TV box with stremio and smart tube. Those two apps pretty much cover everything I'd wanna watch. Those $20 Walmart ones are super easy to root/bootloader unlock too, so you can put lineageOS on it if you want
You go ahead and destroy something that cost you hundreds of dollars. Be it a TV or cans of Bud Light, I'm not going to destroy something I already got out of some need for a moral victory.
I hate 'smart' TVs. I wish they didn't exist. But telling someone to destroy the one they already had- meaning that if they want to watch TV, they'll just have to buy another- doesn't really make much sense to me.
Or, if you must (cringe), use anonymous credentials, have a router level VPN, and maybe even run pihole. But much better to just hook up a PC to your TV and run all of your apps off of that.
Just get a cheap PS4 or Xbox and watch all your stuff on there. We have an LG "Smart TV" that just doesn't need to be connected to the internet because our PS5 (formerly PS4) is fast and snappy, and has all the apps we could want to stream off. Plus, both have a Bluray player installed right off the bat, so we can even watch those if we're up for it.
Don't bother with sluggish performance on your Smart TV, it's just not worth it.
The UI is better and not as slow as on smart TVs from what I've heard. Plus you can play games on the console and watch DVDs and Blurays if that's your thing. Apart from that, not much.
This is true, because smart TVs have shitty processors, and consoles do not. Consoles are made for media, smart TVs have shitty embedded software on slow hardware, comparatively.
Sony famously pushed DVDs into the mainstream and won a generation of console wars by building a pretty good DVD player into the PS2 which also happened to cost not much more than most DVD players did at the time
Who said that? There are lots of streaming devices you can connect to your display, from game consoles to streaming boxes like Apple TV, Nvidia shield, Android box or if you really want to tinker a PC connected to the TV. The point is, don't connect the TV itself to the internet as it has the most access to the whole viewing experience to drop ads on you.