I accidentally set up a home server running Plex/Jellyfin, and now I control all my media without paying £18 per month (and probably due to rise soon, like the US pricing) to a company that only has a handful of things I like and regularly takes away content, plus prevents account sharing.
You wouldn’t want someone else to accidentally do that, would you?
E: yes people. I get that your setup is expensive. But you don’t have to spend a lot. You can host a Plex server on an Nvidia shield with some external storage, you can buy an old crappy PC/laptop on eBay (bonus: a laptop comes with a built-in UPS!). A media server does not require beefy hardware.
Weird. Similar thing happened to me. One day I was thinking, “Damn. These streaming services are getting too expensive. I may have to get back to sailing the high seas if this keeps up.” I shit you not, all of a sudden my home server is sucking up all kinds of movies and TV shows and streaming them to my living room. It’s like The Brave Little Toaster if the toaster were actually a Dell PowerEdge and it went on a long journey to find the master (me) as much high quality media as possible.
Yeah i bought a small computer off of eBay, installed Proxmox and all this weird software started downloading and categorizing media. It was terrifying.
Same thing happened to me, but with an Overseerr frontend for my older parents (with my domain just routed to my house with nginx), with a backend of Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, Unzipperr (not sure if this is the name but it’s vital)…
So many accidental automations like being able to just wishlist something on plex when I’m out and about and have it ready when I get home.
Im slowly wrapping my head around the jellyfish thing …very slowly. But lets not pretend the server space isnt the price issue. I couod spend 5 years of netflix subs to get to a decent raid protected level.
If you want to take on archiving a huge library of media, more power to you. But that isn’t a requirement. Many people use streaming downloads so that local storage is basically not required. Others download and set up services/plugins to delete episodes after they have been watched to ease storage requirements. Even if you want to keep all media, Raid is certainly a luxury, not necessity. Losing all of the media from a drive just means needing to download it all again.
And all of this is completely out of the argument of “feature parity” with Netflix. They drop shows and movies from their services all the time.
yes, now I’m paying 10 times more.
Don’t mind it though, experience is better in every way possible besides occasional maintenance need, but it’s definitely not for everyone.
Could be done cheaper, but it’s tradeoffs all the way as with everything in life.
You shouldn’t joke about these things, man.
I accidentally set up a home server running Plex/Jellyfin, and now I control all my media without paying £18 per month (and probably due to rise soon, like the US pricing) to a company that only has a handful of things I like and regularly takes away content, plus prevents account sharing.
You wouldn’t want someone else to accidentally do that, would you?
E: yes people. I get that your setup is expensive. But you don’t have to spend a lot. You can host a Plex server on an Nvidia shield with some external storage, you can buy an old crappy PC/laptop on eBay (bonus: a laptop comes with a built-in UPS!). A media server does not require beefy hardware.
Weird. Similar thing happened to me. One day I was thinking, “Damn. These streaming services are getting too expensive. I may have to get back to sailing the high seas if this keeps up.” I shit you not, all of a sudden my home server is sucking up all kinds of movies and TV shows and streaming them to my living room. It’s like The Brave Little Toaster if the toaster were actually a Dell PowerEdge and it went on a long journey to find the master (me) as much high quality media as possible.
Yeah i bought a small computer off of eBay, installed Proxmox and all this weird software started downloading and categorizing media. It was terrifying.
Same thing happened to me, but with an Overseerr frontend for my older parents (with my domain just routed to my house with nginx), with a backend of Sonarr, Radarr, Jackett, Unzipperr (not sure if this is the name but it’s vital)…
So many accidental automations like being able to just wishlist something on plex when I’m out and about and have it ready when I get home.
Im slowly wrapping my head around the jellyfish thing …very slowly. But lets not pretend the server space isnt the price issue. I couod spend 5 years of netflix subs to get to a decent raid protected level.
If you want to take on archiving a huge library of media, more power to you. But that isn’t a requirement. Many people use streaming downloads so that local storage is basically not required. Others download and set up services/plugins to delete episodes after they have been watched to ease storage requirements. Even if you want to keep all media, Raid is certainly a luxury, not necessity. Losing all of the media from a drive just means needing to download it all again.
And all of this is completely out of the argument of “feature parity” with Netflix. They drop shows and movies from their services all the time.
Self-hosting media can pretty much be as cheap or as expensive as you want.
My friend plugs an external drive into an Nvidia shield and it works fine.
An old laptop from eBay works well too, with the additional benefit of essentially having a built-in UPS.
You don’t have to have a crazy setup.
If I still watched TV, I the risk of me doing that accidentally is very high.
yes, now I’m paying 10 times more.
Don’t mind it though, experience is better in every way possible besides occasional maintenance need, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Could be done cheaper, but it’s tradeoffs all the way as with everything in life.