we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
we live in hell
I don’t even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they’re saying…hey do you want a worse experience?
Until Plex gets unbearable as well. They have been getting a lot shittier lately.
Other server software are available of course. The concept stays the same though. Very much recommend doing this. I’m halfway there, running Plex on my desktop PC and watching on my TV and other devices at home. Very comfortable setup. But I wish I had a small computer like a Pi or something, and a NAS to hold my drives. That way my desktop PC could rest.
Personally I was a fan of buying something like a Dell optiplex as my my NAS and Pihole but I do wish I had a better enclosure for the drives as any truly good one seems to be hundreds of dollars and mildly defeats the idea of self hosting being cheaper.
I just use an old crappy hand-me-down mid-tower gaming case I stuffed some drives into. As long as you can keep them cool, dusted, and away from vibrations (with HDDs), plenty of (used?)cases will have enough HDD slots to get you started.
Also old rackmount servers on ebay have plenty of slots I hear, but rackmount fans are waaaaay louder.
Room is my main issue. Living in an apartment I can’t have large boxes/computers just standing anywhere. So it has to be very small and quiet. 😅 Pi should be perfect. Maybe mount it underneath my desk where my desktop PC is or something. 👍
Right on, that makes sense!
If you’re not planning on storing absolutely tons of data at first, you can also squeeze a lot into so-called “1 liter PCs”. Traditional platform, a little more power and room than a Pi, and you can neatly tuck them away!
I hear they float around eBay quite readily these days.
Sadly haven’t been hearing the very best things about the Pi 5, but earlier ones can do well as little servers.
I’ve been learning a lot from the self hosted podcast lately haha. Also one of the hosts runs this site (which I happened to find first) that can be pretty helpful!
https://perfectmediaserver.com/
I remember some folks on reddit saying USB isn’t the most reliable connection for long-term drives, but I’m not 100% sure what that was about. Maybe the connectors wear out?
Perhaps someone who knows more can enlighten me.
Best of luck! I hope you have a lot of fun. 😁
Late reply…
Thank you for all the tips!
I’m curious: what things have you specifically heard about the Pi 5, if you don’t mind sharing?
Sure thing!
What I’ve heard about the Pi 5 specifically is that they dropped hardware acceleration support for video encoding. Which is kinda weird, but admittedly I’m a bit out of the Pi loop to really weigh in.
I believe I heard this on the “Self Hosted Podcast” a while back. (Edit: oh I mentioned them already lol)
I imagine that might hurt for someone trying to use it for streaming Jellyfin or something like that 🤔.
I found a forum link here:
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2139082#p2139126
There’s always Kodi! You don’t have to update your media server software.
Nah, I’ll just switch to Jellyfin.
They hit my threshold of shittiness some years back and I’ve been enjoying Jellyfin ever since. It’s a much better alternative for most!
The shark’s in the tank and they’re putting their waterskis on
Plex is a great example of how proprietary software will inevitably become exploitative, and only purely Free Software systems can ever be trustworthy in the long term.