Hi there! This is a video that I made that I’m hoping can act as a beginner friendly entry level point to the world of self hosting and running a homelab. Just thought I’d share in case anyone is interested, and I hope it can be a resource to share with noobies. I don’t claim to be an expert at all so I’d also love some feedback. Thanks!
Dad said we’re getting a sourcebox!
I set up my home server, then realized my Internet is shit and my upload speeds can’t even steam 1 4k movie, let alone several at once.
I am not excited to triple my monthly Internet bill for better upload speeds, but it will have to happen soon.
I’m more worried about my electricity bill tbh. Low-power devices aren’t easily available and the second hand market is crap in my area.
IMO 4k resolution is overkill its way past the optimal between file storage and visual fidelity. Nobody has ever complained about the visual quality of my 720p or 1080p sourced stuff much in the same way most sane people wont notice the difference between FLAC and mp3 on average listening. Bhack in my day we were lucky to get 480p on a square box tv.
I would gladly spend more for better (10mbit up atm) but all the upgrades get me to like 25 up and that’s it. I have no incentive to spend more for basically nothing. I hate it.
Just get a service that can download the movie from ur sever and then watch it offline.
Every time I spin one up. I spend weeks setting things and playing with it. And then never use it again until I get bored and rebuild it.
Everyone is a really, really big target
The first disclaimer in the video is the most relatable thing I’ve read in a while
We should have never lost the capability to have LAN parties for all games.
Just yesterday I wiped the drive and installed Linux on the 3rd old PC for the LAN setup I’m putting together, literally “for the children!”
It’s an i7-920 from 2008. It has TRIPLE channel ram, baby. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and it was as quick and painless as usual.
I already get the warm fuzzies when I walk into the room and find my 3rd grader playing on my PC instead of their tablet or even the console. Our first LAN party is gonna be sweet.
I used to dream once that I would be able to give my future son Q4OS to grow up with and if a daughter, something like PuppyOS. Alas, I’m a single 30-something guy living in his parent’s basement with no real prospects of owning my own home or getting laid—so go figure. At least somebody out there is living the dream! 🤝
You’re spitting rn
Thanks for using peer tube
How beneficial is connecting via ethernet instead of wifi? My wifi mesh pods only have 1 ethernet out port, so I use it for my desktop. Not sure if I could split it or not, but I imagine if I did it’d slow down my desktop’s internet connection, which I’d rather not do.
A switch won’t slow anything at home.
It’s super cheap and literally plug and play.
I can’t be sure since technology has so many different factors, but splitting a single Ethernet out into multiple with a network switch won’t really affect it much if at all. Cat5e cable/jack (common for most cables) gets 1 gigabit, so unless you have a gigabit connection and maxing out the connections already, you shouldn’t notice it.
As for WiFi, even though a lot of newer technology is great, it’s not going to beat Ethernet.
Good to know, thanks! I did just upgrade to a gigabit fiber connection, but you’re right that I’m not usually maxing that out.
Yeah it barely makes a dip. It is one of the first things I tested when putting in a switch where I just go do the ookla speed test.
Agreed. It’s time my occasional minecraft/PZomboid server got a nextcloud upgrade.
I have my own server and it’s great, but the real product these streaming services sell isn’t access to content—it’s discoverability and recommendations. We need a better solution for that!
Yeah I use jellyseerr with jellyfin and they work great together
I need to learn more about the *arr stack.
Tbh, I pretty much never use site recommendations. I almost always learn of shows and movies via social media and memes
Hosting email just saved the day! My ex got locked out of her email account and password resets were blocked. However she still had one “home” forwarding email configured as a recovery address, so we were able to redirect it somewhere accessible and unlock her email account!
I want a future where communities self host their media and circumvent media companies like Netflix and Disney. Local film clubs, TV clubs, hobbyists, etc. can come together and host as a collective bringing down costs and making this more accessible.
Like ham radio ppl
Who’s making the media?
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Okay, so you don’t even need a socialist system for this, just a moderately sane government. Even here in Estonia, the government hands out funding for cultural projects. Now this is still a capitalist society, so you likely can’t get full funding for a big project.
In an actual socialist economy, the government will give you full funding for projects. The actors and everyone else working on a movie or TV show have guaranteed income that’s enough to live their lives, guaranteed living accommodations, etc, so they’re more likely to do it as a passion project, but they could still be paid as extra motivation. Funding is still required for equipment, etc. Unless you go fully money free as a society, in which case you ask the government to assign equipment to you.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine a reality outside our own.
imagine it for us then. what would this model look like and be sustainable?
Sure.
The premise is to bring down costs, and not be free. This is a reality where we can share media we buy, because we own them again.
So you can kind of imagine the world 20-30 years back with VHS and DVDs. Just in the digital world.
Fewer people would buy the content, and less shareholders will be rich. Actors will also not go for multi million dollar salaries. But actors would still exist.
You can argue that this will bring down the number of movies, but most likely there will just be alot of small studios making movies instead of Netflix and Disney controlling the market from start to end.
There will be a much larger varaity in movies, and not that many reboots of past succes from the VHS/DVD age.
Outside of the “stars” and directors, people working in the film/tv industry already have a fairly low income (median salary for professional actors is ~$47000/yr).
you can’t compare old VHS DVD market to digital one today. it’s completely different with no physical formats. with digital media, unlimited copies can be made with no cost. there’s no friction of having physical medium. youre also saying to go back to a system that completely failed.
even if small companies came about, they will have no budget if only a couple thousand copies are being sold and distributed for the whole community if sold at current prices. basic economics will just cause inflationary pressure and they’ll raise the price to fit the demand too. you need large companies to make large productions.
having a small companies also means nobody has a security blanket. you’ll be working in an industry where if your small studio produce a poor movie, your studio will fail and you’re out of a job.
A tax on corporate use of AI to fund an artist stipend, to provide a living wage for artists.
The same people who already make the media. Just cut out the corporate middle-men & shareholders, who soak up all the profit and contribute nothing to the content.
There are a lot of independent creators out there too.
I just imagine a federated, YouTube-like platform. Except better in literally every single way. You are a member of your local community instance, and thereby connected with every other federated instance throughout the world.
Sounds suspiciously like Peertube
As an in-between measure, may I suggest Nebula? Creators get 50% of the earnings, it’s assigned by view time. Price is significantly cheaper than Netflix or YouTube Premium. Yes, most of the creators are on YouTube too, but a lot of them do bonus content on Nebula + there’s no ads + they get more money. If you use an ad blocker on YouTube, the creator gets nothing.
You can get a discount for your first year by using your favourite small-medium size creator’s marketing link (which gives them a bit of money). If you don’t have one, may I suggest Patrick H Willems? He has cool video essays on cinema. You could of course use a bigger creator’s link too, but I figure I’d rather pump some smaller creator’s numbers.
We can do this, once we transition to socialism, and cut out the corporations. Run nodes on the community-owned fiber for free access to the citizens.
What media do you think you’ll be getting under socialism with no corporations? Lol
I don’t even consider the Soviet Union to be very successful socialism, but here you go.
Here’s a 1970s sci-fi noir movie from Soviet-occupied Estonia that I would recommend. It’s honestly a pretty cool movie, even if janky. But it’s not like 1970s western movies feel much less janky nowadays.
And inb4 “you only get the state approved media” - well right now you only get the capitalists approved media (so same-same) and also in a functioning socialist society, for bigger art projects like film and TV show, projects get funding from government without being government-initiated. I mean it was the same in the soviet union, but since it was a dictatorship, the government was picky in what was approved.
In fact, best thing about government funding is that there’s a lot less pressure to be commercially successful than with corporate funding. Commercial flops can still have cultural value and the fun thing is, a socialist government as the source of your funding can see that as a value unto itself, whereas a corporation has no value for culture other than the money it can bring in.
You must be joking. The people who make any money producing online content are a very, very small minority.
And if people didn’t have to work 60 hour weeks to barely make enough to survive, we’d get a lot more creative content. All that would change is there wouldn’t be some talentless suit exploiting it.
You wouldn’t be getting any tv shows or movies. You’d be getting YouTube style stuff……like you do now.
People put shows and movies on YouTube already. You’re just not getting corporate backed media on there.
I’m not sure what role you believe capitalists have in creating media, but it’s clearly disproportionate.
You think you’d be getting Avengers: Doomsday in a socialist/communist world?
Tv shows and movies wouldn’t be being created in that world, that’s the point you don’t seem to get.
How do you figure? China has been putting out some of the best big budget stuff in the world this past decade (games & movies), and AI is lowering the barrier to entry for special effects for low budget stuff.
My entire life is Linux and self hosted, aside from Email. I may get to that one day too. Love my Plex server, even with the more recent baloney the company’s apparently been up to.
I should be using Jellyfin but once I get home from work I don’t want to tinker any more, I just wanna play a game or dick around.
Agree with the message in the video, these companies should be told to pound sand the minute they do a single anti-consumer thing.
Is there a way around the problem that plex only feeds from ex fat/nt drives but Linux has permission issues networking such a drive? I wanted to have one computer where I’m doing all the formatting and the other being the standalone plex server with them both connected. Samba is being a pain.
Curious about your problem. I’m using NFS instead of samba now, but legitimately never faced any problems doing what you’re describing previously.
I set up jellyfin recently. Haven’t tinkered with it any more than plex to be fair
I just have my old PC’s running Linux connected directly to the tv or projector.
I use a super basic webdav server or free arr matey streaming sites.
I sometimes sftp into devices.
That’s my setup.
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I pay for netflix… dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I’ve kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.
Now it’s running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD’s it could hold. I’m slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go… to add to the 4 already done.
I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me… but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn’t require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.
Over the last 15yrs, it’s been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many… adding extra drives, swapping out CPU’s and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020… Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts… Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.
Currently about 70TB capacity.
My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity… it’s the one thing I’ve never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives… hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.
