Bittorrule

And that Linus Torvalds poster? I'd be on my knees in an instant. To propose of course.

yeah to propose
thats what i would be on my knees for too

I LOVE SELF HOSTING

fuck yeah

Plex & sex

Emby & embrace

Jellyfin & sin

Stream and cream?

I didn't hear no chill though.

"Jellyfin and put it in"

You got to learn how to shuck those Western digital drives when they go on sale.

Shucking drives? What part of JBOD did you not understand. Half of them don't even fit in the case, they are just piled up on top of each other.
🤤

Love the potrait of Linus Torvalds behind Xenia

What exactly is the point of a Jellyfin server? Wouldn't it be easier to just like, open the files? Why would that require a server?

Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate "trickplay" images so you've thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don't end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.
Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don't Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn't actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).
If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I'd need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I'd need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that'd only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but... no thanks.
In addition to the UI others have mentioned, I host mine behind a VPN so all my friends can use it over the Internet, too. It gets a decent amount of traffic every week.
- How did you get started with hosting your setup?
- Are you just giving them a shared login or do you set them all up individually?
because it is convenient to access the movies from a smartphone or laptop from anywhere in the house without dealing with the headaches of windows file explorer shitting itself upon seeing a folder with 3000 files in it
You get a cute little user interface to browse through your movies and shows with little posters and information. You also don't have to use a flash drive and move stuff over if you want to watch from your PlayStation or other device. just a browser is enough.
If I can just add to what @glinncor@lemmy.world said:
I personally have one so that I don't have to mess around with plugging in any hdmi cables and moving my laptop from where it's docked, I can flick on the server and then it can just be accessed on any tv in the house by anyone.
- This is the way. And you can watch from anywhere in the world if you set things up with a VPN.
So one can watch from a phone, tablet, TV etc.

setting up a small jellyfin server for my family instead of getting 32402398423948 subs to shitty streaming companies was the best thing i did

Just don't talk about the part where we spend ~$1000 on acquiring 20TB of HDD
- refurbished drives are great for storing easily replaceable data
- 24TB Seagate drives are on sale for 249 right now, actually a good time to stock up

Jellyfin and fuck.

I'll show you how hard my drives are.

How do people have so much money to buy so much storage?

They are not paying for all the streaming services
Used enterprise drives and a SAS controller. Last batch of SAS drives I bought were 16TB for $115 each.
Unraid (and I think ZFS and Ceph as well) supports adding drives 1-by-1 and different sized drives to your array. You can just buy single drives or spares whenever a sale comes around to keep expanding your storage.
You don't need to buy it all at once.
Long-term planning is a pathway to many powers CEOs would call...unnatural.
You can buy this amount each year or pay for Netflix 4k for the same year. HDDs are not that expensive.
The Standard Plan for Nextflix is about 216 bucks a year. A new 10gb HDD runs around $200. Less if you look for deals and/or go for refurbished. But a total of 20tb of storage would be equivalent to two years of Netflix without ads if paying for brand new drives and not looking for deals.
- 10 gb hdd for 200$? Dude I have a bridge to sell you :)
- i got 18tb drives at £190 a few years ago, pretty much all streaming services are about £100 each a year.
Like $300? Plenty of foxes can afford that.
Trick is to buy used disks. My entire raid pool is cobbled together from large-ish drives that got pulled from commercial servers and sold off on the cheap. Last set i bought was 3x14tb for $400.
You don’t have to buy it all at once
I made do with a bit over 2 Tb for a bit over 15 years.
But earlier this year I bought two 3 Tb drives, and they're a bit more expensive here in Denmark due to 25% VAT, so it was 648 DKK per drive (or $101 USD / €87 EUR). And I'm on the lowest income you can get here.
So it is possible to upgrade every now and then, and I'm very happy I'm now on 6 Tb storage (+ 2 Tb NVMe main drive, though not for storage).
I imagine if I had a job in IT, I'd be swimming in it, I'd probably have nerded out on a NAS, though even now I don't see what I'd need it for.
4 x 5 TB internal HDDs costs roughly $500.
Thats roughly a Switch 2 or Steam Deck...
... or about $42 a month, for a year, of maybe what, 2 simultaneous subscription services?
- You don't even need to get new drives to begin, just use what you probably already have lying around, old external hard drives. Use a RAID and swap drives as they fail.
- Netflix premium (4k) is like $7.35/month. But HDDs are not comparatively cheaper.
The real question is:
How do people have so much media to fill up those drives?
Followed by: how do people have so much time to watch that media?
Followed by: human driven climate change is real. How can people waste energy just to hoard media that they rarely ever see again?
I understand somehow if you are torrenting and contributing to the sharing ecosystem, but just hoarding?
- Q1: They have a knowledge of how to use BitTorrent, or Usenet or somesuch, without being caught.
  Q2: They don't, the point of a library is having things in case you want or need them, or maybe somebody else does.
  Q3: I guarantee you it takes less energy and carbon to set up and operate a relatively small local library than it does to operate a giant realtime global streaming enterprise, by probably multiple orders of magnitude.
  Fuck, I could do this with a SteamDeck, external drives or something, and run it all on a home solar power / battery system you can get off the shelf.
  Have you ever seen, like physically seen, a massive datacenter the size of an auto manufacturing planr, a high rise building that is 50% server racks by floor?
  Just how many racks there, how much water and energy is used?
  Also: You're arguing here that feeding evil megacorps is somehow better for the environment, than starving them?
  Really?
- On my own, I can somewhat regularly use 1tb of internet data in a month and I'm not even a data horder. I always keep a tv on in the background (which these days usually means streaming stuff). I also stream music pretty frequently.
  Its not at all unrealistic these days for someone over the course of 2+ years to get 20tb of data all in one place. And if thats media that gets accessed frequently (like music) it probably saves bandwidth and energy storing it that way.

How's the barrier to entry for Jellyfin? I just got done investing in Plex when they started changing their payment model

Dockstarter with jellyfin + sonarr + radarr + qbittorrent + swag is your friend. I actually found jellyfin easier to setup. Don't have to worry to much that streams are getting transcoded. Setting swag up was some effort though.
- I just use jellyfin, what is all of the rest of those things for?
Harder than plex to set up, but not difficult.
If you want to watch outside the network then you’ll need to port forward.
- You really shouldn’t port forward Jellyfin. Hell, you really shouldn’t port forward anything. A domain is like a dollar per month. Use a reverse proxy with some sort of login gate like Authentik or Authelia.
- So if you want to watch outside you're home network, the solution is to blow a hole through your firewall and just raw dog the internet through it? Air out your delicious little jelly hole for the world to see?
  I wonder how we teach the kids about VPNs? Clearly their favorite brainrot youchubers/twitchies/tiktogglers nordvpn ads aren't getting through........
- Or reverse proxy, but that's a bit more complex
Install the package, chuck files at it, it basically runs itself.
- Is there a time investment for scanning and importing my library? That's where Plex got me, so much stuff to sort and edit metadata after getting started
Jellyfin is great if you are only streaming content locally. If you have people outside your network trying to stream, it is more cumbersome to set up than Plex
- A reverse proxy is like 3 lines in Caddy, it's really not hard to set up

those are rookie numbers

Gotta start somewhere
My nas started with a pile of old 2-8tb drives I had amassed through the years from fixing computers and upgrading storage of various things. Back then 20tb was crazy. Now I have a nas where a single drive is 18tb and the full array is over 200tb.
I highly encourage anyone to build with whatever you can. Get off streaming, save your money. You can run this shit on a raspberry pi with a 4tb hard drive for under $100, probably way less with a refurb drive and a used pi. Or buy an old ewaste pc for $1-200 and stuff it with drives.
it doesn’t need to be a workhorse unless you want to create some monster Jellyfin server that can transcode 8+ uhd remux streams concurrently (and even then it doesn’t have to be that crazy, 10th gen intel igpu will handle a lot). But if you genuinely need that many streams you’ll probably need a gpu so make sure you get something with a pcie slot of appropriate bandwidth (x16 most likely)
Additionally if you truly want to stuff it full of drives def make sure it has pcie x16 so you can add hba card. Most mobos (especially office pcs and stuff like old dells and thinkcenters) come with like 2-4 sata ports max. Lsi 9300-8i or 16i will add 8 or 16 sata lanes for like $30-50 bucks (though beware of the many counterfeits) and you’ll either have to move to a new case ($) or fashion some kind of external drive bay (sff cables running out of host of to whatever drive bay)

Okay, I want to see your RAID.

I'm using ceph with 100tb of drives and 30tb of nvme, but it's a bit overkill.
Nowadays that could just be an external drive bay with a few HDDs + ZFS.
Or if you just want to rawdog it with no redundancy they make single hard drives with 20 TB capacity now.
- This is what I do, 2 different speced 20 TB drives. One NAS speced drive that's actually installed in the PC, and one budget drive that's in an external enclosure and is periodically used for back up. No need to be fancy.
- Yeah, I had two 10s but replaced one of them with a 20.
  I need to get a proper setup.
I do a 6 drive synology btrfs with double redundancy with WD ultrastar 14TB for about 50TB storage after accounting for all overhead.

O woe us, what are we gonna do!

My QNAP NAS is rapidly approaching 20 years old, I just dump media onto it and then use Infuse as the front end on my Apple TVs.

It does the trick for the time being, but I do want to spin up a HexOS system with a set of 3x16TB drives to eventually replace it.

I actually did this 3 years ago... and it also legitimately worked.

Yeah I got sick of Plex before it was cool, lol.

Granted, only 15 of the 20 TB was for movies... gotta have some space for a miniature personal archive of selected written works, as well as music.

You know, for the uh... playlist.

Ahem.

Self-hosting is pretty cool. I want to buy a nas

the best nas is the grimiest most disgusting computer you already own, filled to the brim with hard drives and shoved in the basement to slave away at media consumption and file sharing
- Mine is literally that, an HP Z600 from 2006. It needs new RAM and probably a processor upgrade, but it's working pretty well for now, so I'll get to it "eventually"

Mines "in the cloud" and my 20TB storage box is almost full 😭

Hmm curious, what's the cost for something like that? Do you also encrypt / employ any security for the data?
- My total cost for the VPS that runs my stack, plus the Hetzner storage box is around $50 USD/mo.
  I have the storage box mounted as an encrypted volume using rclone.