from garbage_world@lemmy.world to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 14 Jun 11:45
https://lemmy.world/post/48156514
This post contains content related to media piracy. I couldn’t find any rules for this community and I don’t know if it’s allowed. I accept the risk of getting this post taken down or being banned without knowing the rules.
With that small disclaimer out of the way, let’s tackle my question.
I’m a simple self hoster: I have single server made out of an Optiplex 3060 Micro (i5 8500T, 32GB, 14TB of storage in one drive), I use duckdns instead of a real domain and I have no supporting infrastructure. I don’t really like watching things, I set up arr stack mainly because everyone says it’s the best thing to use a homelab for.
My family have strong opinions on piracy and I know for a fact they wouldn’t use my jellyfin, even if I tried to manipulate them, which btw is a really bad practice (if it’s as common as responses under posts about getting people to use your homelab suggest).
I also have hard time getting them to even allow me to run my homelab (I’m a teenager, I live with my parents), because it takes space and uses power (for context idle is around 8W).
As I said, I don’t watch things that often and even if I watch, I’m extremely monothematic, I watch basically only AOT and sometimes some random popular movie.
I understand that my situation is quite unique, but I find it hard to argue for Jellyfin+arrs when fmhy and countless reliable streaming sites exists.
I already made my mind, I’ll stop using those services today. I’m interested how others look at this “problem” tho.
Are you hosting arr stack/plex/jellyfin?
How much is it utilized (in watch hours/week for example, mine was less than 2/week)?
Have you considered not using it?
If you stopped using it and went back, what happened, why did you change your mind?
#selfhosted
threaded - newest
then this shit aint for you. just because you can do something doesnt mean you have to want to do it.
im old and have been doing this for almost 30 years. long before jellyfin; my kids never suffered commercials, never had to worry about some streaming service going up or down. they never had to care whether some source had the show they wanted. even when away from home, they were streaming my shit.
my very large curated collection may be less random than some iptv streams, but sure as fuck is more reliable, dependable, quality controlled and well, i dont even need to have fucking internet access for my shit (my library) to work for me.
I just like actually owning all my stuff and don’t want to deal with sites randomly shutting down, moving, having an incomplete or miss-organized library, bad quality, etc. My own collection certainly isn’t prefect but if there is issues I can fix them, it’s all in one place (no different sites for movies, tv shows, anime, music, etc) and it tracks all my watch-history which most free sites don’t. I can one-click download stuff to my laptop or phone for offline-watching (guess you can do that with yt-dlp for most sites, but again more effort)
Yup.
I get about 3 days of watch-time between my 10ish active users per week.
Nope, I’m so done with the free streaming site whack-a-mole, not going back.
I never had any issues with the entire site whack-a-mole thing. I just go to fmhy, select some of the starred services and watch.
Because you’re a child who can’t have been at this for more than a couple years. Most of the sites you use now probably won’t be there in 5 years.
And? The indexes are constantly updating, based on working sites. It might have benn different back in 2000s or 2010s, but now it’s pretty easy to find a new site when the old one closes
…which is the whack a mole you claim wasn’t an issue for you.
No one said it was hard. It’s annoying. And unnecessary with an arr setup.
Unless you are on a private tracker, the trackers go up and down and require changes every few years too.
So done with the paid services whack-a-mole and price hikes too.
I only use Jellyfin because we want to watch it on the TV and not on the laptop.
So ,use HDMI cable or mirror cast
Or Jellyfin…
Some people don’t want their living room to look like set decoration in an 80s hacker film. Not all of us are single dudes who sleep on a mattress on the floor
Welcome back from the coma, grandpa! We stopped calling computers “mainframes” a good while ago and started shrinking them so they’d comfortably fit behind a TV screen, in a drawer or some place else that’s out of sight. You’ll be amazed once you see it all…
Apparently they forgot to teach you about context in reading class, this thread was about plugging a laptop into your television.
You must have the tiniest of sofas inside the tiniest of living rooms to be disturbed by a simple laptop. But to each their own, I guess.
Well, make sure your interiour decoratour knows about media players which are about the size of a Visa Black card.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5d75705e-1e28-4620-8c45-25ec1eee3e49.png">
Yeah, maybe tell the guy who suggested plugging the laptop into the TV INSTEAD OF USING A MEDIA PLAYER.
You know, the guy I was responding to.
This site is populated by the illiterate.
Some of us have kids who absolutely love dangling wires
Sorry for going on a tangent, but what exactly are your family’s opinion on piracy? I understand that they do not agree with piracy, but why? I have never seen any common person saying no to free stuff like that.
Piracy is bad because it’s stealing, illegal (I live in Poland, a country with almost no practical restrictions whatsoever and I personally know my ISP, my parents are good friends with them) and “there can be some problems”.
Piracy isn’t stealing. Stealing deprives someone else of something. Piracy doesn’t deprive anyone else of access, it creates wider access. That’s copyright infringement, not stealing.
If there’s no restrictions, then how is it illegal? What problems can there be? The rest of this doesn’t make a ton of sense.
If they use free streaming, tell them that’s also piracy. (It really is) 😅
But actually don’t. They don’t sound like they came to these conclusions through rational reasoning so they prolly won’t be convinced by rational argument. Keep it to yourself and coexist.
You can run a homelab as VM on your personal computer if you have one. Then there’s no “other” computer for them to suspect. 😂
Unless you’re watching your shows on Netflix, or other commercial streaming services, then you’re committing piracy too. ‘Streaming’ a show is just downloading it and them immediately deleting it.
Piracy is downloading/making a copy of a piece of media that you’re not licensed to copy. It doesn’t become less illegal because you delete it.
If you’re against piracy then you should not be streaming content that you haven’t paid for.
My still-learning-to-read children are able to use it. They’d be unable to navigate a streaming site even if I trusted them to do so.
Now that it’s set up, the maintenance is negotiable. I can just browse my TV shows to see what new episode has aired.
nice try fbi
We’re all fine with piracy because of enshittification and the spread of shows/films across too many services. Happily paid for Netflix when it was good but it slowly got worse and worse. If there was one fairly priced single (maybe max across 3) source(s), I’d switch back.
In terms of stream vs arr’s. Quality of video and sound matters to us but not for everything we watch. I actually use Stremio with Debrid for most items, especially my family choosing what to watch. When I want top quality I will use my arr stack. When stremio fails I’ll use my arr stack. For TV shows we watch regularly we use the arr stack, partly to remind us when they’re released. For TV shows we regularly re-watch I use the arr stack.
Its allowed up to the limits of the lemmy.world TOS, so no direct links, discussion is fine.
Great for self-hosting if its something you use. Not really a homelab thing, these two things are not necessarily the same either. My hosted services for the family are entirely segregated from my lab, which does a very different job.
Over the past 30 days…. Up to 6 streams at a time, 15 days worth of streaming hours.
Nice, how many users?
Just family, but everyone has their own home. So my moms house, brothers house, sisters apt, BILs, F/MIL, etc.
Videos of dance recitals and such just went up too, so thats probably about 8 hours of watching this week alone.
My thoughts exactly. OP should look for something else to host on the homelab, there’s plenty out there.
Those services get shut down randomly by cops and money problems. My local server doesn’t get shutdown.
Mine regularly gets shut down by my skill level. 🤦♂️
testing in production builds character
I want to meet the person who has a dev environment for their home media server. That man is my hero.
I suppose some people like to collect stuff. You’re right that it’s easy to access mainstream stuff, but once you decide to watch some less known movie - especially an old one - you may struggle to find it. Even with somewhat popular movies there are things like extended/director’s cuts, remasters, re-releases, etc. So I get it.
With that said, I watch on average one movie per week, so android tv with a video player that can browse a samba share is more than enough for me.
This ^. I was able to find media that is not available to view on any streaming service that I saw as a kid and unedited. While I understand the need to tweak certain programs for modern audiences... ok no I don't.
I’ve hosted my own media since before Plex existed. But I understand that almost all of my video is “collection”, not actually useful.
My server was useful for about 5 years when my kids were young and it provided all their shows without ads.
I’m starting to delete stuff.
What is AOT? Attack on Titan?
Yep, attack on titan, arguably the best show ever made.
I reccomended maintainerr for deleting stuff
Thanks but as I said, it’s about the collecting, not the watching. I captured/filtered/converted shows like Buzz Lightyear of Star Command for my nephew 25 years ago. I’m not going to delete it despite that no one is watching it or will watch it for decades (maybe when nephew has kids or if I have grandkids). It’s not even available on any streaming.
I think if I ran maintainerr, it would tell me to delete everything except the home videos that my mother in law likes to watch.
It sounds like it’s just not worth it for you, and that’s totally fine! Plenty of people get by just fine with using random streaming sites.
Personally, I want something more reliable, I want to have copies of what I watch in my possession that cannot be taken down, and I want to share this with others so that my friends can benefit from my time investment instead of using a solution that only works for me. So that if my friends ask me “where do you get your stuff” I can offer to share with them at 0 extra effort instead of telling them “go do all these things that I already did”
As for usage, I only watch a few hours a week myself, but I share with 15-20 friends and family who watch a collective 160 hours a month last year and around 360 hours a month this year (about 15 days of watch time per month).
I have a fairly comprehensive arrstack, torrents and Usenet, seerr, Plex and jellyfin side by side with identical media mounts for maximum user choice, running on a nuc with quicksync so it handles 8+ simultaneous 1080p live transcodes without using much power or increasing CPU usage much more than 5-10%.
I like having stuff. I particularly like having stuff and not having to go look for it when I want to watch it. 'scuse me, I’m gonna go start a random Doctor Who episode from over 60 years of material. That said, I live somewhere where torrenting is dicey, so free streaming sites are pretty convenient if you know how to use jDownloader.
Streaming services exist, and i used to use them faithfully, here are some issues with streaming services:
Those are just some that come to mind.
shitty uis deserve a spot on this list too. i love britbox but the ui is just the worst.
netflix and its auto play previews is pretty awful too.
I’m talking about piracy streaming sites. I never even considered paying a subscribtion, thar’s why I don’t have a real domain
So piracy streaming sites are ok for you and your family, but pirated copies are not. Did I understand this right?
No, for my family no piracy is okay and for me all piracy is okay. They use their streaming services and I use my free streaming sites
Well, this is a question about your family’s and your stance on piracy, the self-hosting part is immaterial to your decision.
Anyway, i think it’s a bad idea. It’s not for me. Good luck if that’s what you want to do. But for the love of your parents don’t use a modded streaming stick unless you want them to get targeted by fraud/ identity theft. No amount of free content is worth that risk.
Is your next post going to be in a baking comm asking people if they have considered just buying a loaf at the grocery? Its an important life lesson to get early that its OK that other people have different tastes and priorities than you do.
Welcome to Lemmy!
Thanks!
There is a great book on this called the ‘The Let Them Theory’ by Mel Robbins. Stop wasting energy on things you can’t control and stop comparing yourself to other people.
If you aren’t a big consumer of shows and movies, just use the free services if they fill the need for you. Personally, I’ve purchased hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc and digitally over the years. Jellyfin lets me put them all in one place for my whole family to access. No need to try to remember what service it’s on or where the disc is.
Here is a few off the top of my mind:
Streaming services take away content all the time, license expired and goes to another service.
Streaming services do not have everything, they are actually quite limited on content.
Streaming services often remove episodes from seasons, so you don’t even get all the episodes.
Pirate streaming sites go down all the time as governments crack down.
Streaming services cost more and more and more, with less and less content.
Some media is only available on older mediums such as VHS (and never came out on dvd, streaming, etc) but pirates have archived these rare movies.
You might feel like the world is available to you online, but I have been around since the start of the internet and have seen many, many things go the way of the dodo 🦤. Things go away. Websites gone, files gone, laws change, etc. if you’re not archiving it, you may never see it again.
I’ve got a couple of Optiplex including a 3020 micro. Snappy little machines.
Do a cost analysis. Present your parents with the results. Offer to do odd jobs around the house to offset the incurred cost of power consumption. For instance, generally speaking, that OptiPlex 3060 Micro running 24/7 in my locale would cost me about $3 per month to run 24/7. Which is pretty negligible, but understandable that your parents are concerned with costs and resources. Sometimes parents default to that boomer mentality that ‘I didn’t have a server when I was a kid and I walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, barefooted’. LOL However, when presented with some facts, charts n graphs, and a goal to learn a life skill, you might see some leniency.
I do not run the 'arr stack, but I do run about 38 other containers on my Ubuntu Jammy server. I prefer reading to watching.
Not sure why you are getting down voted, but don’t let it get under your skin.
I prefer to have a collection that’s mine that I will be able to use even if they lock down the internet someday.
This is just silly, but I’ll chime in I guess.
I’m guessing you only ever deal with public trackers om the torrent sode of things.
Since I’m on private trackers (someone with usenet subs probably feel the same) the quality and moderation is far better than the streaming sites.
Also, I’m off the legit streaming sites like Netflix because I’m tired of them shoving things I do not care.
Setting it up the first time is a hassle but nowadays, I’ll just open up my Seer instance and that’s it. This inclide movies, shows, and anime. I don’t hoard.
I know it’s available cuz there will be a notification for it, most just a few hours after the broadcast at most.
I just open JF and watch it, idk what’s more convenient than that.
I don’t count since I do not care about stats. But my whole family use it. Shows/movie for my parents, k-drama/anime for me and sibling.