Correction: no one deserves your money. Fuck big business.
stremio + torrentio + real debris = W
Pirate Everything at This Point
Way ahead of you.
I pay for an emby share personally.
Plex/emby/jellyfin, there are a ton of paid shares out there that are cheap.
Aliexpress summer sale started. Getting a 150 eur ryzen mini pc and slapping some hdds onto it for a cheap media server/nas with 4 digit nas specs.
This seems like it could be a fun project. Mind making a post about the build sometime?
So far it’s; genmachine 5500u pc barebones, will get random ram and steam decks 256gb ssd, fedora server and some rabdom twin drive hdd enclosure with used 4tb disks to start with. 8gb of ram should be plenty as going 16gb ddr4 to 32gb ddr5 made no difference at all on my main gaming/dev/3d rig.
Total cost: 158 for mini pc, twin drive enclosure 60, 4tb drives: 50 eur each, ram 15 eur or around entry level twin drive nas price.
Id if there’s any build thread to post about “i shoved an external drive up the ass of a chinese mini pc and labelled it homelab”
Honestly, those are the most interesting builds to me. As an American, I’m waiting for tariffs to die before buying stuff of AliExpress, but one can hope.
I have built and maintained all manner of home servers using inexpensive used hardware. Any PC or old laptop can do this stuff. Unless you’re doing something crazy on them, I’ve not encountered a lot of situations that I could not sort out. Usually throwing some more memory and storage into them solves most issues.
I ran a used desktop machine with an i3 processor (retired school system) for YEARS as my NAS with zero issues beyond adding a little cooling. Did the same with a firewall, worked for ages with no issues.
Getting a mini pc is nice if you are putting it in your living room, but there are still many choices for small form factor devices. Not quite as small, but still pretty small. Lots of them were used as POS terminals at stores. Wipe 'em, reload and start fresh.
Depending on how much space you want the HDDs will probablybe the biggest cost
Always gotta overcomplicate things.
Sickbeard and dozens of drives is far more complicated.
Do I misunderstand emby or does it just not seem like a good deal on the basis of it being an ongoing subscription? I use the free version of emby and it’s really great. There was at least one feature that required payment to unlock. I like emby already and when I tried using jellyfin, the core features that were on both it and the free version of emby worked far less reliably and the paid feature on emby that was free on Jellyfin, worked extremely unreliably. Obviously resources and development had been spent to make something that worked very well and their paid feature probably would too. I use emby to make it easier to cast media locally to my chromecast and to access media on my computer, from my phone in my bedroom, so for me, it’s a fancy file browser and media player. The feature I wanted was to do with free to air tv streaming and I was thinking I’d be happy to pay for the Emby software to unlock this since they made good software that works. But here’s the thing, it’s FREE to air TV and yet they want me to pay, ongoing, in a perpetual arrangement to use it. I don’t get it. I use it to play media, but the media is my media stored on my machines. I understand software development isn’t free, I was happy to pay ONCE, but why would I keep paying when they don’t actually produce the media I use it to play? That seemed unjustifiable.
If you were going to pay, the one-time $119 sub is the only thing that makes sense.
Historically, I’ve never been sad about a lifetime software purchase. That said, none of them continued to work unchanged for a lifetime, but I’ve always felt I’ve gotten my money out of them.
In the end, everyone eventually enshitifies their product to make more money.
Playon stopped supporting their old model which just stopped working slowly over the following year as streaming companies changed their tech, while their “new product” which only had monthly fees kept working. I used it for enough years it ended up being something like $2 a month.
Plex nixed their plugins, then screwed over their offline viewing and offline sharing, then their watch together. My original lifetime was somewhere around $70 and I’ve used them for 15 years, that’s $4.60 a year :)
Piracy isn’t the only alternative to streaming! Please consider putting a side a certain amount of money each month to buy physical disks, making films isn’t free and buying disks is the best way to suport them. Then you can pirate the rest.
I care where my money goes, i dont want to support this shit.
Stremio is everything I could ever want and more.
Yep, link it with real debrid As you are, sailing the seas in style… Great UI. Evan has a calendar to keep track of your series.
Trakt too 🫡
Yeah… Trakt also started in the enshitification path though (for some it has been there for a while).
idk its free and it lets me subscribe to lists so I can find stuff easily. Until they break that I won’t notice.
I am an old pirate and I cringe when people bash debrid services for their pirate pride, honestly it is a life changer if you are willing to switch to fully stream (I still seed the content I gather with the Arr stack for my Plex).
It just seems silly to be like “I’m not going to pay for streaming, so I’m going to pirate” and then paying someone to do the piracy for you.
It’s because paying isn’t the issue. I’m not rejecting streaming on the basis of price (though, the current price of paying for even a couple at once doesn’t help), I’m rejecting it on the basis of it being a fractured, inconsistent and lacking service that fundamentally acts against the interest of its users. If a streaming service offered the same things stremio+debrid does I’d happily pay 10x the price.
People used to pay others for burnt DVDs and CDs back in the day if they didn’t have a pc with a burner themselves. Same thing really.
Isn’t the problem that legal streaming services don’t provide a good enough service/content? Even if you put the cash out to subscribe to all services, searching each one, one at a time, they still might not have the video content you want. The market failed us, and culture is locked away.
I love it, but I wish there was a way to still seed while using it.
While using Stremio alone without a debrid service?
I think you do… perhaps not in the healthiest way, but it is something.
I love Stremio it is so simple to use and relatively easy to set up, I like the set it and forget it format it has (and your settings and setup are synced across all the devices you like).
With that said, geek me can’t leave aside Kodi for good, I have a Nvidia Shield TV Pro 2019 and that is where I use it, even when the setup I’ve for it is somewhat heavy (it makes my Shield struggle sometimes) I love thinkering with it, because… there is fun thinkering right?
My gf does Stremio almost always though.
My only criticism is that they have the big bang theory as the main thing shown right when you go to the website. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least a few people just left as soon as they saw that.
Why would that be an issue? It’s a tv show like any other one.
I agree it’s full of stereotypes and bad jokes, but it’s a show that’s easy to watch and that doesn’t require concentration. I am a Physicist and an Engineer myself, very much a geek and generally considered to have a very twisted sense of humor, but I still enjoy watching this show, generally while doing other things on the side.
Question, what even is a “Generative AI ad”?
Is the lead actress of the horror movie I’m watching look into the camera and tell me about the new coca-cola while she waits for the monster to come get her?
I actually haven’t seen one yet. I just assume it’s an AI voice, reading AI generated text, about something that Netflix’s data about you says you might like.
Well, it’s not that difficult to cancel a subscription…
Don’t give them any ideas
Installed jellyfin this week, it is awesome. My roku found the server and streamed a movie without buffering.
Did Plex enshittify recently? I’ve seen a lot of people switching to jellyfin.
Yep, big time. Basically dead at this point, forcing payments to stream your own content.
I started setting up my homelab last month and immediately went to Jellyfin because Plex just screamed “corporate bullshit” to me. Sure enough, it was the right call.
Basically dead at this point
For free users though, there are some of us who paid for Lifetime Plex Pass tier a long time ago… I do wonder if Lifetime really means forever though.
Narrator voice: “But it did not last forever…”
They made it so server owners need a plex pass to stream to anyone outside the same LAN. Or the clients need to pay $2 a month if the server owner doesn’t have one
2 dollars just for providing the tunnel service, mind you. A subscription for glorified port forwarding.
The glorified port forwarding issue is even worthless if you are a CGNAT user, and it is 2025 so I’ll assume everyone is.
Plex is completely enshittified at this point.
- You need to pay if you want to share your movies with friends
- They spy your watch list, and share what you watched with your friends by sending them emails
- They released a new half broken app
- They removed the “party” option that let you watch a movie together with friends remotely
- They’re actively trying to hide the personal streaming features in order to push people to their legally (and ad-riddled) streamed movies
So Jellyfin is now the best solution afaik
Pair it with the arrsuite and chef kisses
Previously, on Best of Netflix: price increases, flip-flopping on their account sharing stance (currently on “don’t do that”), removing shows without warning, iffy show recommendations by their algorithm, inability to watch shows offline etc.
So, if you’re not already pirating at this point I have to ask: what are you waiting for? Seriously, why are you giving these companies money?
It’s the way of all subscription based entertainment. To increase profit eventually the choice comes down higher subscription fees or introduce ads.
And once ads are there, it’s a one-way street. Until adpocalypse.
If it’s in your systems in an open format it’s yours, if it’s outside your systems or wrapped in some kind of locked format that forces you to go through somebody else’s software it’s de facto theirs.
Due to my own experience in software development with 3rd party solutions from way back, I never adhered to Streaming solutions (even though I was tempted) and always stuck to getting my entertainment in a media format I controlled (legitimately for a long as I could, not so much once even physical media started having DRM) because I was aware that it’s risky to outsource so much control over one aspect of what you do (in this case entertainment) to an entity which, frankly, sees you as nothing else that microscopic fraction of their bottomline.
(The funny bit is that if Netflix would sell me their Series in an open file format that I could download and at a reasonable price, I would have sent lots of money their way, same as I spent lots of money on DVDs and even VHS tapes back in the day. In fact all throughout that period I was doing something like that for games: as soon as I discovered GOG with their DRM-free downloadable installers, I started acquiring all my games by buying them from GOG)
In the fullness of time, my caution seems to have been proven right.
I agree and I think games are a good example, especially with the Cloud Gaming trend that is trying to apply the same model from video streaming including both the advantages (to be fair, in particular instantaneous start, in theory) but also huge disadvantages (privacy, connectivity needed, no sovereignty, price increase, etc).
Way ahead of you, Mr. Rossmann.
Already doing it
Soon they’ll just tap into your partner and make them speak ads throughout the day.
You know, you and Black Mirror are laughing, But my wife sends me links to products off TikTok all the fucking time and I’m not even on TikTok.
Divorce time
I would, but they’d probably recommend her a good lawyer.
edit: even worse, I look at the fucking stuff and go ohh fuck that’s nice! Wait, I don’t want that… but wow, and it’s cheap too…
It doesn’t matter how much you loose financially. It’s not worth it to be tied down to someone who makes you so miserable.
And its better to do it sooner than later. Or you’ll regret it later.
lol
i mean people already do this thanks in part to the hyperindividualism where people build their identity through the brands they consume.
An example, i only knew about MCU latest movie because a friend i have is walking MCU ad, he couldnt stop talking about going to watch this Thunderbolts movie. In farming on one side you have guys who are john deere extremists and in the other side you got massey ferguson fundamentalists, rarely you find someone that objectively uses both.
heck people build their identities based on the car brand they drive or the console brand they play instead and thus become walking ads for the brands.
You may want to watch the newest season of Black Mirror
Eh I wasn’t that impressed. The episodes seem so predictable now where I can basically guess it within the first couple minutes as soon as you realize what the episode’s gimmick is.
I think this season was the best one yet. Sure, some episodes have been better in the earlier seasons, but this one as a whole had a much better baseline quality than the rest.
Except the fucking star trek episode. Can’t get myself to give half a shit about that.
Is that a bad thing?
