this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
127 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
60694 readers
4044 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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. A media server does not require beefy hardware.
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.
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.
Yeah i bought a small computer off of eBay, installed Proxmox and all this weird software started downloading and categorizing media. It was terrifying.
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.
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.
Pirating is not really much cheaper TBH...my media server, including power, has to run for something like 6-7 years without upgrades or repairs to break even with what Netflix would cost in that same time frame. It's not about saving money, it's about not giving it to them.
Depends, no?
Do you compare it to a cheap Netflix subscription, do you compare it to the 4K subscription? Do you compare it to Netflix with the multiple locations extra fee they charge now?
Do you add the cost of Disney+, Prime Video, and god-knows what else?
The costs can quickly add up.
And it's not like you need a beefy server. I could host Plex on an Nvidia shield (which I have anyway for my TV), in which case the cost would only be that of a USB drive or external HDD, and a trivial amount of extra power.
My time also has a price…downloading movies, finding the right subtitle files, managing a VPN, managing the hardware/software on the NAS, etc. I choose to spend my valuable time on that stuff but I can totally see how lots of people say “fuck it” and just pay the monthly streaming fees.
Sure, if you only watch Netflix stuff, but not Disney, Hulu, Peacock, Max, etc etc etc.
But also, if you're willing to give up a little content and a some quality, it's cheaper than Netflix. A lot cheaper, if you insist on not having ads in Netflix.
If I still watched TV, I the risk of me doing that accidentally is very high.