LOVE my Jellyfin.

Buy a good inexpensive TV. The manufacturer can make them cheap because they're losing money and hoping to gain it back with ads and analytics. Don't connect it to the internet. Get a Steam deck or small form factor PC (Intel NUC or variant) install Linux, profit.

I've bought a few small form factor PCs, and again Steam Deck works great, for $300 and then a great TV. And I don't have to put up with any ads, any crap applications that barely work, it's just browsing ANY website I want, playing ANY PC game I want. It's honestly the best outcome and I'll never go back at this point.

Don't let yourself accept the subpar TV applications that are just a website with awful frontends, that run like shit and that the companies creating these apps have 0 incentive to make properly because their app isn't there for a good experience. It's there to track you, just like the TV.

WHEN IT'S TIME TO PARTY WE'LL ALL PARTY HARD!

PC Gamer is giving it a 60/100:

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/warhammer-40-000-space-marine-2-review/

I'm weirdly on board with this and I think my kids will love it.

Others already suggested great answers, so I won't repeat them, but I let my kids play on pbskids.org . tons of fun and educational videos and games for kids if they're younger.

I am technical, but here's the installation for Owncast

curl -s https://owncast.online/install.sh | bash

https://owncast.online/quickstart/installation/

That's it. The rest is handled from a website front end like Twitch's. But yes, it's more than Twitch.

I switched. :-). People on Reddiy used to tell me no one would switch to Lemmy. Also look at Mastodon.

I also know some streamers that stream to both Twitch and their Owncast. To each their own. It's here if folks become interested. Most don't even know a self hosted option exists.

Anyone for Owncast here besides me? :-D

!owncast@lemmy.world

I'm not the developer, but I can pass it on if you'd like. :-D The dev reads the Steam Forums and has a Discord as well. I think it should work with Steamdeck and the touch pads, but I'm guessing the menus are going to be SUPER small and probably quite difficult to see, though I haven't tested on my Steamdeck.

Absolutely! I bounced off Songs of Syx personally, but I've played DF, Rimworld, Oni, etc. I love the look of Odd Realm personally and I had quite a few hours in it, but then the entire UI was reworked, and it seems a bit daunting to get into. There isn't a tutorial atm, but the dev and myself have put up some video tutorials to get started. I think it's unique in the colony sim genre due to the graphics, music, but also the flexibility of the UI. It's not DF deep, but the UI allows you to REALLY dig in deep to automating things if you want, or just manually queue up stuff. I think it still has some rough edges, but for $15 at the moment it's got a lot to offer.

I'm planning on streaming some more Odd Realm 1.0 to my Owncast as well if you're interested. :-)

Have fun and best of luck!

I also created some very quick and dirty tutorials for Odd Realm if anyone just wants to take a quick look at it:

Odd Realm 1.0 BASIC Tutorial - Just to help folks get started - 2024-08-16 - https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/6crH1bx8t7USve3p4XfXU7

Odd Realm 1.0 BASIC Production Tutorial - Basics of Production - 2024-08-16 - https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/5FGjgEN1wb6G9zWLdVbUMu

Honestly it's probably the easiest install I've ever done. :-D Don't hesitate to ping me on Lemmy or on Matrix or where ever if you have any issues, questions, etc. :-)

Yes, my understanding of anything on the web is that it's STILL just files that are broken up and sent to you.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/video/what-is-streaming/

Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices. With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.

I reserve the right to be wrong about EVERYTHING! :-D

If you're interested, just go check out the directory. Go watch someone. See if anything strikes your fancy. :-) https://directory.owncast.online/

I'm not trying to sway your opinion in the least. It's not for everyone in the least. I'm just trying to help folks realize there is a REAL alternative to the big platforms. We ARE talking on an open platform Reddit. ;-)

On that $8/month VPS I think at the time I had 2 qualities. 1080 5kbps was the 70+ open streams. I don't expect "big streamers" to join Owncast soon if ever. But if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3. We're not talking MILLIONS per months. I don't think even think we're even talking thousands, hundreds probably. But yes. You make a good point. And sadly it's the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn't use Owncast. I personally just try to create a welcoming community for anyone interested in trying Owncast. As time goes on those costs of tech continue to go down. If you're running a server from your house, unless you have a datacap, then you don't even need to worry about cost of bandwidth, obviously infrastructure does matter though.

As far as CDNs go, streams are just bunches of files. Your player goes out, grabs some files, and you watch it. So a CDN works for vidoe streams like anything else and I almost guarantee that Twitch leverages CDNs as well.

You could do the same with a S3 bucket as well. So if the CDN is too expensive (I honestly don't know the prices), you could do a S3 bucket.

I have about 12 folks watching me on average at this point. Still better than I had on Twitch. :-) But also, this is MY page. I've tweaked the CSS to make it look more like mine. I can show what I want, I don't have to jump through hoops to keep up with Twitch's algorithm, I don't have to show ads, my page doesn't take 20 seconds to load because it's loading all kinds of junk in the background. I love it personally. It's mine. :-)

There are numerous folks that dual stream, I don't know how folks do that. But I have some friends in Owncast that are in Matrix as well that could tell you. Ety (Owncast: https://ety.cybre.stream/) does exactly that.

I don't personally agree. Again, I've had 70+ connections open at one time and when I estimated the cost of bandwidth, I wouldn't even hit my monthly budget that Hetzner gives me for "free". But Owncast has S3 and CDN support built in if you really need to handle something like that.

While I game, others play music, others show movies, there are even churches that use it to broadcast their mass, public broadcasting, etc. It's fun imo. :-)

Oh yes! Integrates with the Fediverse and announces to the Fediverse. I'm all about open and interoperable platforms.