The real winner of the streaming wars.
The children yearn for the streams. They make jokes about seeding. The netflixes have won, at least for now.
I have Amazon prime, so I get access to Prime Video.
My family phone plan comes with a Free™ Netflix account per line.
As a student, my Spotify account gives me access to Hulu.
I can use all of these services at zero additional cost to myself and I still steal acquire it through different legal avenues. It takes an extra 2 minutes to make sure that I have it forever and that it’ll be easily accessible.
I got amazon prime mostly for the free games, it’s pretty much a steal in my country (if you pay for one year it’s about $1 a month) and I still have to pirate things that are available in the prime video. Why? Because I use Linux and amazon won’t allow me to play videos in 1080p. Only 480p is available.
Usenet may be old, but it’s come a long way. Just about all scene content is there, and I max out my gigabit connection during the download from start to finish every time, without having to care about the quantity/quality of seeders, or needing to seed anything myself after downloading.
I was perfectly happy with streaming services for a couple years when there were only like 2 good ones. I stopped torrenting for a long time and now I’m back to torrenting again
Do you use a VPN? I downloaded a random movie a few years ago and got the email from my cable company stating something along the lines of “we recently notice a download of blah blah blah was detected on our network. Please call to re activate your Internet”. So I called and told them “I just got my son a computer I didn’t know you could download movies”
But laying for a VPN will cost as much as a streaming service and it’s so slow. And I guarantee sooner or later VPNs won’t even work in a few years (meaning your ip could be backtracked to the original computer)
The best, most reputable VPN, Mullvad costs $5 USD. Plenty are cheaper than that if you pay in advance for a few years.
The cheapest streaming service will roughly double that.
This, plus self hosting jellyfin and *arr and I basically have a better service, with no ads, nice UI, access from all my devices, offline access, 4K resolution, music streaming. Basically the all-inclusive premium plan, not exactly for free, but for a very reasonable cost.
I dump Blu-rays to my NAS with zero re-encoding. Even for older shows the quality is leaps and bounds superior to any streaming service with plenty of bandwidth.
My brother in Christ please get Handbrake. Your storage space will go much farther if you’re at least re-encoding after the fact.
Some people are just insane and swear they can see a quality difference between compressed and uncompressed.
I think it’s bunk, but it’s not my storage space.
I have spent hours trying to get some kind of server set up, without ever really being able to connect. Eventually in my furious troubleshooting Googlepalooza I eventually found a guide that had my problem addressed in it and it boiled down to “you should find a different way to do this.” I’ve long since given up
There are some plug’n’play solutions out there, all off-the-shelf NAS you can find nowadays will have an “app store” type of things that will let you install Jellyfin and others Webservice in one click.
The DIY way is cheaper, more flexible, more powerful, but it’s a journey and it can be very frustrating. I too, regularly spend hours if not days on problems that end up basically as “I’m an idiot and had a typo in the config file the whole time”. It’s a hobby for me, I don’t feel like it’s wasted time, I enjoy it, I’m learning stuff.
The best home-lab way to do it is to have a standalone computer to act as a media server, then a NAS to actually store the content. Just grab a pre-built computer with an intel chip that supports QuickSync. The HP EliteDesk is a popular choice, since they’re commonly used in corporate settings; There are always a ton of refurbished units available for super cheap, since corporations will upgrade their entire cubicle-maze and recycle their old computers.
Some people will try to run things directly on their NAS, but basically every affordable NAS on the market will end up being underpowered for most users.
As for actually connecting, what part were you having issues with?
As I recall it was an issue with either my router or the actual modem I got from CenturyLink. I would have to go back and actually try again to get specifics. I right I’d eliminated the router as the culprit but I could be wrong about that, I was going back and forth between them. Port forwarding wasn’t doing anything, there was some issue trying to forward between the modem and router, and from what I remember that’s where I ran in to the “yeah you can’t do this try something else” bit in the guide I’d found.
I was basically never able to see the server I had running on any other device. I’d set up firewall permissions as far as I could tell.
Just out of curiosity, what was the issue that made you throw in the towel? Was it a really specific setup you’re trying to build for a specific use case or something? I don’t have a lot of knowledge, but I can’t think of anything that would come up during a simple home server setup that would require you to completely change your approach unless you were doing some advanced custom stuff as a first go
It’s been a little bit, I suspect the issue was getting my modem and router to allow that type of traffic. It wasn’t the firewall. I remember spending a lot of time trying to get port forwarding set up so these fucking things would talk to each other the way I wanted and that’s when I hit the “you can’t do this with your set up try something else” message in the last guide I looked at.
