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Ask HN: What is your streaming setup like?

28 points by g4zj ↗ HN
With the modern era of streaming services beginning to resemble cable TV in many regards, what has been your approach to maintaining access to your favorite movies and TV shows?

I've been a Netflix subscriber for ages, using Plex to stream everything else, and like many, I'm considering dropping my Netflix subscription.

While I've never been a fan of Hulu, the new season of Futurama debuts in just a few days, and so I've been rethinking my approach a bit and thought I'd ask HN for some input on the subject.

61 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
https://jellyfin.org/

I also play Blu-Rays and DVD on an XBOX One. I also picked up a VHS player for $12 at

https://ithacareuse.org/

which sells tapes for 50 cents.

junething
Oh hey, I picked up a cooking pot at Ithaca Reuse back in sophomore year; it was something like 3 bucks and it was a piece of crap, but it did the job.
avgDev
Plex and usenet(using SONARR and RADARR) is the way for me.

I had subscriptions for sports but I sometimes get better quality from illegal streams. Other times I VPN into Poland and just stream from national TV if they have coverage.

devoutsalsa
The couple times I trie Plex, the audio was never correctly synced with the video. I never did figure out why. Maybe I had a crappy TV?
avgDev
I self host plex on a NAS synology box. What is your setup like?
devoutsalsa
I had used a Roku, and another cheap $100 PC of some type. I think I also tried it on a PS4. This was like 6 years ago.
avgDev
I think you need more horsepower for plex, and that was probably your issue.
Dig1t
For you Plex people, where do you actually host your content?

I have tried to go down this route before but don't know where the best place is to actually store stuff. Do you have a home server? Or pay for cloud storage somewhere? If you do the cloud thing how do you integrate it with Plex?

xeromal
My seedbox is also my plex server. I've used it for many years.
skadamat
Always on Mac mini / raspberry pi type setup works pretty well for these situations. It's not perfect, but often good enough for the occasional remote stream!
tenacious_tuna
I'm merrily running down the selfhosting/homelab rabbithole, so I have an Unraid server running on cast-off enterprise gear I picked up from my previous role. Storage is easily expandable as my needs change, it has straightforward docker support (which is great for, y'know, selfhosting).

I'm sitting somewhere around 20 TB used of 34 available, split between media libraries, backups from my homelab cluster (which I've been very lazy about setting up, so I could reduce the footprint), and network storage for my workstation and my wife's desktop.

xabi
unRaid server with ~100TB raw space.
OnACoffeeBreak
I run Plex on an Nvidia Shield and host the media on a USB drive attached to the Shield. I thought about going the Synology NAS route, but wasn't ready to pay that much.
MattPalmer1086
I just have a pi 4 with 2 usb drives attached. All my stuff is already transcoded well (I don't do 4k), so it doesn't really need to do much other than serve the files up. Works fine for me.
xeromal
IPTorrents, Couchpotato, SONARR, Plex, JACKETT
wronglebowski
Most of these are solved problems on the "server" end, but make sure however you play your content is beefy enough.

Can't speak for Jellyfin, but Plex effectively can't "Cast" in a meaningful way. Invest in an Apple TV and it can play every media format, quality, etc. Trying to cheap out using an old smart TV app or a fire stick and you'll end up in transcoding hell.

martythemaniak
I pay for various services and watch whatever is on them, because it is simple, easy and $50 gets you an astoundingly overwhelming amount of content that you could barely scratch the surface of. Also, $50 today is $25 in when adjusted for inflation since the 90s and this is much, much cheaper than the cable+video rental amounts a typical family would pay back then. I will occasionally hunt down some torrent of something if I really want to watch it.
delecti
I've mostly given up on thrift. We have Netflix, Disney+/Hulu, HBO ("Max") (shared with friends), Youtube Premium, and Amazon Prime. In the past I've also used Plex a bit, but I make enough money that it's just not worth the effort to maintain when all of the above apps stream so seamlessly through our Chromecast.
chrismeller
This has ended up being my approach as well. Yes, I object to spending $20/m on the surface, but it ends up being far less than the time I'd spend trying to do it all myself. It also lets my wife pick whatever ridiculous show she wants to watch without me being the gatekeeper who has to get it for her.
chrbr
Yep, when I realized I was going deep down the money rabbit-hole of fine-tuning my homelab to grab and serve this stuff is when I just switched back to streaming. Monetarily it'll probably be a wash in the long run for me.
Firmwarrior
I wish I could take this approach.. wife's from a foreign country and wants to watch programming from home and local stuff with subtitles, which is basically completely unsupported on all these fucking DRM services

I end up having to pay for like 6 services across two countries and run a VPN server to be able to watch them

xabi
plex + unRaid server + appleTV
blantonl
I have homes in 3 different cities, so YoutubeTV is my goto streaming service. That replaced what was 3 different DirecTV setups which became outrageously expensive.

AppleTV for all theater releases and some special shows.

Netflix for their content

HBO Max is bundled with my AT&T account.

This just about covers everything our family could possibly consume or be interested in mediawise.

aydio
I'm on a bunch of private torrent trackers where retention is excellent. Jackett is interfacing with those trackers and exposes a unified "Torznab" endpoint that Sonarr and Radarr use to autograb whatever I'm interested in. Those in turn send their match to qBittorrent and get notified when a download is finished, and hardlink (very important to save time and hard disk space) the result to a destination folder in a nicely organized fashion. That folder is observed by Jellyfin, which matches the name with The Movie DB to show cover images of shows and movies.

I used to perform a manual search and pick the right release for me. Nowadays, my filters are good enough that I just add whatever is supposed to be released in the foreseeable future, and the setup is doing the rest.

I'm also archiving whatever I'm watching long term on a local 4x18TB RAID-5 NAS

It's crazy how well this software collection works in unison.

loganmarchione
How do you get invites into private trackers? Any you recommend?
aydio
The canonical way to "work your way up" nowadays is to get into RED. Once you get to a certain user class, you'll find that there's a path to lots of categories. Getting into trackers takes a bit of dedication, but it pays off and does not require your ongoing attention once you're set.
0x0000000
Usually one of the following ways:

1) know someone who is already on the inside, who has earned enough reputation to get some invites, or

2) Idle in some IRC channel for anywhere from a few days to a few months, and then pass some quiz/interview to make sure you know the basics of torrent etiquette and such

ashconnor
Adding an email address to your HN profile would be a good start.
Thristle
This is exactly my setup. It is SHOCKING how well it works
massysett
It differs from cable in one key respect: it’s easy to cancel and restart. No truck rolls, no equipment, no techs, no phone calls. Get Hulu, watch your Futurama, cancel Hulu.
mynegation
Netflix, Prime Video, Apple TV+. Nothing else. If TV show is not on these, I simply do not watch it, I waste enough time on TV as it is. I have no TV set or cable subscriptions.

I rent a movie I want to watch from Apple TV+ once or twice per month.

yardie
Most of my streaming comes bundled. Through T-Mobile I no longer pay for AppleTV+, Netflix, nor Paramount+. I start and stop subscriptions all the time when my favourite shows aren't streaming.

Using a dedicated fileserver running Docker and PMS is one of a dozen containers. It sits atop a pair of 10TB USB HDDs whose primary function is local backups. This media library is comprised of my ripped DVD and Blu-ray collection. While the physical disks are in storage my media collection has stayed with me across oceans :-)

This strike is going to be interesting. I remember the dearth of shows during the last writers strike. You had shows that just stopped midseason and never came back. Others simply finished on a cliffhanger. Media companies used reality shows to fill in for missing content.

orev
You have to pick your battles, and pay for stuff you want more of. All the different apps are annoying, and it’s possible to come up with alternative solutions, but it undermines your own long term benefits.

This crowd is probably the biggest target for SciFi, and also the one that can pirate stuff the most. So if you want more Star Trek Strange New Worlds, you need to pay for the app so they know it’s worth making more. If you pirate it, all the good will in the world isn’t going to pay for production of the next season. The fact that so much SicFi seems to have good reception but gets cancelled anyway seems to point to this audience being too tech savvy for their own good.

Pay for the apps, pay for the content. If you want to sign up, binge, then cancel, that will at least give them some stats on the type of shows that will get you to subscribe again.

mynegation
I know I should be a prime audience for Sci-Fi shows but I could not find a single one that I can bear, outside of Expanse. Everything is a soap opera, just in some sci-fi setting. Arguably, so is Expanse, but out of all shows it feels the most believable (I could totally see its events happening in few hundred years), I like the dark slant and the idea that if and when we meet non-human intelligence, it is going to be beyond our comprehension (and totally not like humans in some ridiculous makeup).
hoosieree
I hear you about the Expanse. The books are a blast and I'm hoping Amazon finishes the series because they are good adaptations. My dream series to watch (are you reading this HBO?) would be set in the Dune universe, with Denis Villeneuve doing prequel series covering the creation of the Bene Gesserit, discovery of Ecaz, etc.
midoridensha
As much as I liked the Dune books, if you're looking for "realistic sci-fi", Dune just isn't it, it's purely fantasy. One of the main premises the whole story rests upon is the idea of genetic memory, which isn't real. Lord of the Rings is more realistic than this. And that's just one point; there's a bunch of other stuff in Dune that really makes no sense in our universe.
orev
You’re objecting to what I might call “pop sci-fi”, and while I wish there was more “hard sci-fi”, those are just doomed from the start. Big effects budgets just aren’t compatible with the very low expected audience for stuff like that. Hard sci-fi will (almost) always be relegated to low budget indie films (and those may have a better chance on streaming compared to cable tv).

The few notable exceptions include: Solaris, Contact, and Arrival.

At a certain point, you have to be realistic about how closely a big budget production will cater to one’s very specific tastes.

narag
The fact that so much SicFi seems to have good reception but gets cancelled anyway seems to point to this audience being too tech savvy for their own good.

That already happened when the series where only on tv, so sorry, I don't buy it.

I was subscribed to five platforms. After noticing what they did to my favourite content, I cancelled them all. I still have Amazon because it was a yearly subscription.

I'd love to buy (not "rent") electronic hd versions, but apparently it's only possible to buy boxes of DVD/Blue-ray that consistently are reviewed as bad presentation and need special hardware with DRM.

the_snooze
>If you want to sign up, binge, then cancel, that will at least give them some stats on the type of shows that will get you to subscribe again.

This is my approach. There's no point in maintaining a subscription if I don't actively use it, so I treat these services as just 1-month content passes.

RamblingCTO
AppleTV and plex w/ a seedbox. I would've loved to pay for hulu or hbo max, but no dice in Germany.
benjaminwootton
I have a handful of NVidia Shields. They are great little devices and go some way to integrating the front ends of the apps. They allowed me to decomm Chromecasts and Firesticks.

I subscribe to Netflix which is of questionable value.

I also subscribe to Disney+ which I don’t think we even use anymore.

I get Apple TV bundled when I buy iPhones and Prime Video with the Prime subscription.

I have Plex which I use for IPTV.

And then YouTube Premium which probably gets most use.

The fragmentation is annoying, but the whole setup is less than $50 a month (if I assume zero cost for the bundled stuff) and covers me across 2 properties.

Now I’ve written it down it sounds like a lot to say that we barely even watch TV!

matt_s
A service or two are a mainstay, the rest are added when a show happens to be worth subscribing and then cancel immediately after watching it. I've found Youtube content and mediocre quality Netflix creations fills in gaps with "I wanna watch a _____ show" types of needs.

For example I used to like watching stuff on cable where builders would have a project car to refurbish or things like that. There is a ton of content like that for free on youtube these days. As I've aged I've grown tired of formulaic shows, this isn't some holier-than-thou attitude I just don't find them entertaining anymore and it takes a bit more to hold my attention.

WirelessGigabit
Bazarr, Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr, qBittorrent behind a VPN as I can't upload due to having a shitty local ISP.

Tiny NUC to run it all in containers, and a Synology w/ 40TB.

I get a popup when a new episode is downloaded. Movies are requested via Overseerr.

atomicnumber3
Plex and Jellyfin run in parralel as the serving frontend. Plex gets the most attention though, both from us as maintainers/curators and from family member users. (My rule for access is "blood or rings" - you either share blood with me or you're within 1 "marriage hop" of me).

They read off a big ZFS array that's currently 2 x 2 stripe-of-mirrored-pairs that I plan to expand by adding additional mirrored pairs. Each pair is one WD Gold and one WD red pro (mainly trying to make sure I'm not going to get drives from the same bad batch since I generally buy them together.)

I also have Loki set up for log aggregation which helps sometimes when plex does something weird.

haunter
From the traditional streaming services I only have Prime Video because it comes with Twitch Prime.

Other than that I'm on a well-sourced private tracker + https://nyaa.si/ for anime.

throwaway17824
I subscribe to a "Plex share": I pay some guy a few bucks a month for access to his streaming setup with thousands of pirated shows and movies.

Plex being Plex, sometimes it's flaky. But I get to just show up and watch stuff like it's any other streaming service.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. I don't mind paying for streaming, and I have in the past.

I just want everything in one place.

mdbmdb
Torrent -> NAS -> Plex -> My TV
squalo
"My friend" pays for a couple of debrid services and an internet connection. She uses Kodi/Stremio/iptv players to watch anything she wants. Currently these run on an old ubuntu laptop with an hdmi cable hooked up to the tv because Nvidia shields are too $$$ and firesticks SUCK. Not fancy but it does the job.
stronglikedan
I mostly get everything free as benefits from other services, but for what I don't, I just pay a month, watch everything I want, and pause the subscription. I don't have to watch anything right away, so for those weekly release shows, I just wait until the entire season has been released, and then I have a month to watch it all.