I have a hard time conceiving of what it could be.
Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show".
One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.
I've used both, and wound up using Jellyfin mostly because it also does movies/TV and I mostly listen to music from external apps, so a music specific server wouldn't be adding much benefit.
Personally I switched Navidrome since I found the clients to be better and the scanner to be lighter, but there's a few things I miss: casting was nice, as well as centralizing my media on one everything-app.
I use Navidrome with Feishin as a client on PC and Symfonium on my phone. Symfonium allows me to cast in the same way as Spotify.
Symfonium is paid but appears to be one of the rare apps that is still thoughtfully created by somebody who actually uses it. The developer deserves the support.
I haven't spent much time trying Jellyfin but I really like having my music information in a central location (Navidrome) and being able to stream to a variety of different clients based on my device. It works well for me so far.
I like Jellyfin and have it set up for movie, tvseries, youtube channel hosting for family members.
As a music server it has a few shortcomings (that can be fixed with contributed code - ATM this one is waaay down my TODO list so anyone that wants to step up - go for it, please) ..
It currently has non existent support of FullAlbum.flac with 'standard' TrackIndex.Cue track timing lists.
I ripped a lot of my early albums and CD's as single lossless FLAC (and APE and another format) files with track timings courtesy of either hand entry or the exactCD (?) database - there are many such rips out there is full album rips where popular for a good run of time.
Jellyfin sees these as single files, not as an album of tracks, and plays them as such with no track selection, next track, or resume.
Addressing this is on the github issues list.
Foobar2K and other music players have no issues with these files.
I have my music loaded into plex and use plexamp but because it’s a nas, I also map it into an owntunes docker container so I get local playback via the HomePods in the house.
You can, it’s just suboptimal in my experience and incurs troubleshooting time. I’ve been meaning to put a bounty on S3 compatible support via a fork (maintainers are not interested and believe posix file system is preferable), just haven’t had the time. Hopefully soon!
Desired pipeline is “Ingest->MusicBrainz->Object Storage (music bucket, write once read many)->Serve to various clients from middleware server (Jellyfin).”
I've been working on a custom media server that does streaming, block-based storage on top of S3, with the local disk being used as a cache.
I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.
The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.
For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.
Egress isn't that bad. It would be like paying for 1~2 streaming subscriptions if you watched several gigabytes of fresh content per day every day (i.e., zero cache hits).
Is that wise though? I mean I understand the desire to use cheap off-site storage, but S3 clouds can be expensive when requesting files a lot, streaming data, lots of read/write operations.
(Disclaimer: this relates to the commercial project I run, but it is directly answering the parent)
It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.
Plexamp is awesome and i miss it a bit as a Jellyfin user... But i don't trust the plex codebase. My suspicions were firmed up when Lastpass got hacked literally through Plex.
The LastPass breach was indeed linked to a vulnerability in Plex Media Server. Attackers exploited an unpatched version of Plex on a LastPass DevOps engineer’s personal computer, enabling them to install keylogger malware. This allowed them to capture the engineer’s master password after multi-factor authentication, granting access to sensitive corporate vaults.
Notably, the Plex vulnerability had been patched in May 2020—approximately 75 versions prior to the breach. The compromise occurred because the engineer hadn’t updated their Plex software. While the flaw was in Plex, the breach underscores the critical importance of timely software updates and robust security practices.
https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
Just link the article if you have nothing more to say. If you absolutely insist on posting AI-generated stuff be extremely clear that it is AI-generated instead of hiding that it has been ghostwritten by a LLM.
In short: other posters want to hear from you, not from an AI. AI written posts aren't actually valuable (we can all dump stuff into the AI just fine). If you don't have much to say, it's fine to just share a link to the source you found.
Afaik it's not terribly good to the artists. One of my favorite bands left the platform; I'm not there yet but if it happens en masse (or at least enough to effect me noticeably) then I'm out too.
Streaming services could price themselves out of the market in an attempt to generate the income needed to pay artists fairly. (Google/Apple could temporarily draw money from coffers and outcompete Spotify temporarily)
Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts
Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income
Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people
If you listen on high-end equipment the audio quality is noticeably worse than many other solutions and depending on your music taste, Spotify often removes content or doesn't have it in the first place.
For $15 a month I get access to (as far as my tastes are concerned) all the music ever recorded, instantly accessible from anywhere in the world on any device I own.
I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
i was cool with it for a long time, id buy annual memberships every year(non renewing). price hikes came, that annual is a lot more daunting as a one time purchase (especially at that particular moment in time for me). i was spending a lot of time in the car attempting to use the app. it quite literally felt like a short trip was 1 song sandwiched between equal parts ads. so a trip to the grocery was kinda like 2 mins ads, song(dont you dare try to skip that song or youll get an ad, or be out of next songs as its shuffle only), maybe another song, then 2 more minutes of ads.
ive now been in a place where that membership isnt that daunting. but im good, im not gonna have my music library held prisoner from me unless i cough up a monthly fee. its quite literally unusable if you arent paying. it also seems like they intentionally make their browser based version kinda trash... to make using it to block ads a less viable option(its been a while, not sure how true this currently is).
the jellyfin option is actually what ive settled on as well, ive been a bit lazy about setting up more functionality than just for my LAN, but i will get around to it. for now i just kinda plop junk on my phone and play it through vlc, which is certainly a lazy solution but its still feels freeing.
There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can legally have immediate access to tens of millions of titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning" part but I understand some people would prefer it.
ive often thought about a happy middle ground product that would make me consider coming back to spotify... a version of the subscription model, somewhat similar to ebook stuff, where if you are subscribed you can choose X amount of songs that month to "own" forever.
so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
I use bandcamp intermittently and have often wished that they offered a "subscription" feature like this, whereby they take a certain amount of money from me a month to put into my "bandcamp wallet" or whatever, that I can then use to buy music. I mean to spend a certain amount on music in bandcamp per month but life gets in the way and it falls off the radar. A model like this would definitely keep me more engaged
Yes it is. If it's not available for you then blame the fucktard lawyers who made the call that it should not be available wherever you are for some dumbfuck reason. Spotify is not responsible for this, they just comply with the aforementioned fucktard lawyers.
Their point is at a higher level than a single artist's inclusion. What you're advocating is for artists to give up their rights (whether primarily or indirectly negotiated). "Just do what the lawyers say."
I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
I fully support artists to decide what they want to do with their music, but artists who sign contracts with labels and music companies do give up their rights, like it or not, that's how it works. And yes, Spotify enforces contracts and geographical licensing deals that dumbfuck lawyers invent because reasons. What would you want them to do, break IP laws?
Was happy for a time, then I realized I only listen to the same playlists (generated playlists don't work for me as I need some time to appreciate new music). Now I use YouTube/SoundCloud to check out artists' releases, and then get the whole album if it's interesting.
I have a decently sized library with my favorite albums and that's been sufficient for some time now. Every once in a while, I track new releases and explore new genres, then add the few that picked my interest to my library.
Intentionally is great for enjoying art (and YouTube is more than enough for mood music)
I've never understood the conspiratorial use of that slogan because it's unironically correct. Ownership is economically a cost and a risk and you're generally better off if you can utilize something without owning it or distribute ownership.
I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.
It's not conspiratorial. It's an accurate and widely broadcasted business model by several companies. Why do you feel something that is present and real should be denigrated as conspiratorial?
Yes, "Spotify Alternative" does seem to miss that Spotify / Apple Music+ / etc are legal and somewhat ethical ways to get access to a huge amount of music that would be expensive to purchase and a huge pain to torrent.
E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.
On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")
Spotify prices are quite reasonable, especially when you consider what has happened to video streaming services like Netflix. Plus Spotify has a large portion of all music ever, and mostly has close to 100% of new music that is being released.
Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).
I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.
Nothing. It's pretty cheap, and saves all the hassle these people are going through to self host. I'd guess for most people here paying for music streaming service isn't really a problem. Buying all the music would likely be more costly, though seems a bunch just want to pirate music and make out that they are "saving money". Music discovery would be more problematic.
I got a smartwatch with a cell connection, some good earbuds and started going to the gym, then I learned that their watch app is complete garbage. It refuses to play the music I want, either playing something else or nothing at all. It will play it out loud on my phones speaker in the locker instead of through my earbuds. It refuses to download the playlists I want. It refuses to stream the music.
None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.
Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
My strategy for syncing my music library with my phone is that I have four smart playlists:
- songs rated 5 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 8 months¹
- songs rated 4 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 16 months
- songs rated 3 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 32 months
- the 20GB of least-played music
(there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent approximation).
This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from a week to years.
⸻
1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.
This reminds me of my smart playlist on Apple Music.
It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.
Love that you've got archival stuff and Christmas music filtered out - feels like everyone with a big library has a few odd folders that shouldn’t be in regular rotation
I have Navidrome with the "play:Sub" app on iOS (because it works with carplay) for a few obscure albums and it works ok, but I still pay for Spotify because it's convenient and it has most of the music I want.
When we start getting the same splintering that we have with video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(
I finally decided to self-host last week and boy I did not know how much that domain has progressed. I have setup a domain, a VPS with Cloudron and cloud backup in less than two hours. I was absolutely blown away. I no longer use notion and store all my files and photos on the VPS, it has been wonderful. The bonus is how good I feel about my for not relying on the big players.
- Wasabi for backups (Cloudron supports every cloud storage possible and Wasabi is not the cheapest, I just wanted to try it) - $7/m
- Hostinger VPS with 50GB of storage - $5/m
I will probably add more apps to Cloudron at which point I will have to pay $15/m. But I think it is worth it - you can install every possible app with one click and have single sign-on. I offered to split the service with some friends too which would make the economics even better.
I'm using Cloudron for 1.5 years and currently trying Yunohost and Coolify to try alternatives. But I gave up on Yunohost which felt too buggy and required too much workarounds and troubleshooting.
I feel Coolify might be best for my needs but it's really for devs.
Cloudron spoiled me so much everything else looks half baked.
Storage costs are the weak link in this sort of setup. Productivity apps can be fine, but as soon as you start trying to host a music or video it can be expensive.
I have not looked at different offerings for block storage but object storage has been very cheap. Say the Wasabi account gives me a terrabyte for $7/m with egress included. I am not sure whether it is possible to setup the self-hosting solutions to use that rather than VPS block storage though.
I wanted a WinAmp style playlist that would work on the iPhone but couldn’t find anything I like from the App Store so I wrote my own in JavaScript that executes with a media player in the browser with advanced filtering.
Seconded! And the Subsonic-compatible API means that I have Android/iOS clients (playing music through the browser on mobile devices isn’t great). The web interface works well on any desktop.
Do you use a local client that accepts caching/offline playback of the content ?
I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.
Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.
This won't help you if you're looking for Android apps, but for anyone else interested using iOS, play:Sub works with Navidrome and has pretty good local cache support: you can explicitly download stuff locally and there's a configurable maximum size.
Every couple of years, I buy a used Sansa Clip+ from ebay to replace the previous one that suffered physical damage. I transfer over the 128GB/256GB sd card. Voila - entire music collection in the size of a box of matches, no need for data connections, or a working phone, or fumbling with a screen when I'm working out.
I self-host a couple of things including an Emby server to watch movies. Self-hosting a music library seems interesting. But I discover and listen to music far more than I watch movies.
This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?
I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.
I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?
I think the unstated assumption is that the reader has an existing music library. Where that library came from is an excercise left to the reader. I use bittorrent, which I admit is a little morally smelly, but I justify it by buying vinyl albums of any artists I listen a lot to. It'd take a lot of Spotify listens to match the money to the artist of buying a single album from the band website. Lots of vinyl comes with digital downloads too. When I'm at home, physical media is fucking rad. I mean, I can unplug the turntable, spin it by hand, and hear the music directly from the needle. No software, no gadgets. It's so primal, like the artist is whispering to me. I hadn't realized how much I lost switching to Pandora until I switched back to physical media.
Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.
I can't justify the time to go torrent music every time I want to try something new. I don't have a "small list" of artists, I listen to tons of artists and if I immortalized it with a torrented library, how would I ever find new music?
There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.
The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.
Somehow we did it before spotify :). Browse forums. See what people are talking about. Follow local venues and see who is coming to town. Read about different artists. Different producers. Different record companies. Fall down the rabbit hole. You don’t need an algorithm to tell you what to listen to. Take the reigns. It’s a hobby right? Lean in.
I do not know what you are listening to, but for my kind od music I have few webpages that I can visit for new and old releases. I can filter for example by genre and see few yt videos with to see if this is something I would like. Then you can download it or buy it. This is a lot od work but I would never discover few bands 'the spotify way'. Like i.e. Austrian Death Machine.
I don't usually recommend software that isn't open source, but MusicBee is really great for organizing tunes. You can build really deep auto playlists based on any tag you like, you can do bulk updates across lots of fields, you can have it reorganize files into folders around any of the tags, including with fallbacks for missing tags, there's configurations to download metadata from online, all kinds of stuff. Plus it's a super customizable music player too.
> Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.
I've never used Spotify so can't compare to that, but Bandcamp is like a much better version of the local record store. You can follow artists and record labels you like, which will give you email notifications whenever they release something. You can browse new and old music by all kinds of esoteric tags and subgenres. Every week or so you get an email of some new releases in your favorite genres. You can download in multiple formats, personally I download FLAC for backup and 320 for listening. It's easy to search for tracks or artists you discovered elsewhere, it's easy to listen to and scrub through tracks... Just great. If you're a gamer, it's like the Steam of music.
My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.
I am a heavy user of bandcamp, but I find their notifications...lacking. I ended up taking their emails, categorizing them, and putting them in RSS [1]. This has cleaned up my notifications and makes it much easier to follow artists and to easily separate new releases vs news/merch/...
Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.
So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.
I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.
I really want to use Jellyfin for music, but unfortunately it separates albums based on directories and not by reading the metadata, so if you have an album separated into "Disc 1", "Disc 2", etc, each disc shows up as a separate album.
I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin, so I basically can't use it.
My problem stays the same — finding all my music that is on Spotify from elsewhere. It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case) and even after I buy I am not sure what were the T&C from that particular place I bought - whether I really own it, I don’t, a bit but not fully - etc. Finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare and an extra bad nightmare if we are talking about some 2K - 0.6K songs (because I have 600 from before I started streaming). I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda.
This is a vendor lock-in more than anything. As someone who listens to mostly dubstep and EDM and built my playlist off of Spotify, I can't move to Spotify because they don't have half my playlists
You can rip them from tidal quite easily. Youtube also has lots of music to rip but in shitty quality. That being said, music piracy has declined quite a bit since spotify. I'd suggest getting into a private music tracker if you really want to.
wrote a python tool to do daily scrapes from a russian music tracker site and sync all the titles onto a mariadb database. led me to discover all sorts of music which I would otherwise not able to stumble up on across all my 4 paid music subscriptions (Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music). Some that I could not find on these music services, now live on my private Roon server. Mostly ancient multichannel formats, DSD/SACD and vinyl rips. And some precious private live recordings from concerts long gone, as in decades ago.
You could of course use your technical ability to work around that limitation or figure out other ways to pirate the music you like. I just wanted to add another helpful option for self hosters. But thank you for mentioning that Tidal is unavailable in your hitherto unmentioned country, your contribution to this discussion is valuable and appreciated.
> I wish there was an easy way for this - plug and play kinda
I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.
They said "finding from Linux ISO sites is a nightmare" and I took that to be a euphemism for piracy sites. They just find navigating and using those sites to be annoying, which is totally fair if you don't have software doing it for you.
> Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify
No, it's really not like saying that. I was responding to a post lamenting the difficulty of acquiring the files for the music they've already discovered on Spotify, and I brought up a music file acquisition system that pulls from what they've discovered on Spotify. That's different than comparing a local player to a discovery system.
I try to do that. Sadly this is sometimes very hard. I often fine myself in situation when I can't buy album I like. It is nowhere to be found. Sometimes I can't even pirate it because this so niche.
If you feel bad, buy a single song of each artist afterwards and you have given them vastly more money than listening to them on Spotify will ever generate.
It’s sad but true. What I like to do is use the credits I earn from choosing slower Amazon deliveries to purchase single songs on Amazon music. Sometimes I don’t even download the song.
You can give them even more by skipping the silly part of buying a song you'll never listen to on the platform which takes majority of that money, and just transfer them $1 by paypal or whatever they like to use.
I know you are hyperbolic, but finding the band on Facebook and sending a quick message takes a minute max? Especially for your "favorite band". I always deter people from buying CDs of local bands, the band will see a tiny fraction of that price in their pockets. Just walk up to the bandleader after concert and give them $5.
I ran my own seedbox for close to 12 years on a VPS. My choice was either never upgrading the OS (which was always an Ubuntu server) or setting up everything all over again. There were few more things like a VPN, a note app at one point, 2fa setup and so on. Finally I stopped and this Nov the VPN will expire and I am planning to let it go really.
I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.
Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.
I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like your problems with your VPS and VPN come from having someone else hosting those services for you and restricting how you can use them instead of just doing them yourself. Things are indeed much more permanent (at least as much as you want them to be) when you actually do them yourself instead of rent them from someone.
> Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere
I would if I had one, but I mostly just googled the official installation instructions for any random component I wanted. No overall tutorials. Service-wise, I'm using Jellyseerr to discover content and take requests from friends/family, Radarr for sourcing movies, Sonarr for sourcing TV shows, Lidarr for sourcing music, Prowlarr for centralizing the configuration of the other *arrs, Sabnzbd as a usenet download client, rtorrent as a bittorrent client, and Jellyfin for consuming my library. You probably don't need all of those depending on what you're after, but you can just look up the instructions for only the components you want. And if you want to get content from usenet or private torrent trackers, you'll need the relevant accounts.
> what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this?
Whatever you want honestly. You can run most of this on a toaster so long as you don't have unrealistic performance expectations for it. Obviously if you're planning to download 10TB worth of content, you're going to need at least that much disk space, and if you're planning to download it faster than HDDs can spin, you might need some SSDs. But most of these things are just downloaders and file managers and don't really need much more than network bandwidth to source the content and disk IO to put the content somewhere. Maybe 8GB of memory for some of the more bloated services (my whole server idles at ~5GB used, and it runs a lot of other junk) and to do really large indexer merges when searching for content, and however much hardware you need to meet your transcoding requirements if you're playing through Jellyfin or similar. You can stream source material without transcoding and consume basically no CPU from it, or you can enable transcoding with a decent enough CPU or pretty much any supported GPU. All up to you and your needs.
I'd recommend starting with pretty minimal hardware and adding more as you need it. My storage has quadrupled since I started doing this and at some point I tossed in an old GPU for transcoding.
No, I had and have full control of the VPS. But whenever I upgrade it becomes a mess. I am sure I am missing something and I can backup data and then set everything again, reconnect all the wires and pipes but after a few times I just gave up completely. Hell even security updates in LTS break things up. I did try exploring and learn how to maintain it well and what not but eventually I gave up and it was a big reason why I get fatigued even at the thought of self-hosting something.
Thanks for your input on this. Next time I get into it I will definitely look at it and you are right about needing resources as much is my usage need. I just meant to ask what are the bare minimums sort of.
The one thing that bothers me about Lidarr is that it is album based, not song based. Before streaming services, I managed my local music library with albums as well, but my habits have changed. I basically only listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist on Spotify, and really only have a select few albums that I listen to on the whole.
I tried syncing Lidarr with my Spotify account, but 95% of the downloads then where songs that I didn't care for.
I don’t think there are more than 4-5 albums in my Spotify library where I like more than one songs of it. Or even artists (though there might be more music from single artists). I also just listen by playlists and often just my “Liked” or “all songs”.
Actually most of them are dead and no their families are not getting anything either I am pretty sure. Heck almost 80% of my songs I won’t be able to buy from anywhere at all.
Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!
And like you said, even when you do buy tracks, the T&C are murky. Some platforms basically treat it like a long-term lease rather than true ownership. Honestly, what we need is a modern, ethical "one-click" export + purchase system that lets you grab your current library in lossless format and actually own it.
> It costs a lot to buy those music files and that too if they are available (which isn’t always the case)
Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.
For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.
I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.
My use case is that I sometimes like to use my subscription music on an offline MP3 player. So I keep my YTM subscription and am using https://github.com/ryanprop/ytm-dumper to download its files and put them on my MP3 player.
This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.
I struggled with Jellyfin for years, never got it to work right, particularly the XBOX clients. Switched to Plex for the win. I like the recommender that comes with Plex Pass and listen to music off my home server on my phone in the car and when walking in the woods.
I used Plex for years but ditched it when they got caught sending all your watch activity to their company for whatever. My privacy is worth the pain. I'm running Jellyfin, but it's not a smooth system at all.
I bought an XBOX One as opposed to a PS4 because I'd heard the Plex client was perfect on XBOX -- personally I like game consoles as media players because they play discs and I'd rather have an overpowered rather than underpowered machine.
I ditched Plex when they came out with a FAST [1] service which was thoroughly pizzled [2] for me. I switched to Jellyfin which I struggled with in so many ways, the terrible XBOX client which was a degraded version of the web client was the worse but Jellyfin's poor metadata handling was part of it.
Last summer I spent a lot of time in a room in our rental house where I tried (and failed) to gentle a feral cat and wound up watching a lot of Tubi and came to the conclusion that FAST wasn't so bad and gave Plex another chance when I rebuilt my home server and I can say I'm highly satisfied.
Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.
Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.
Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.
Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.
I don't know.
I was dumb enough to move my entire photo library into Lightroom cloud back when they released that.
It's a nightmare.
It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.
I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.
It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.
As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
>Self-hosting stuff is awesome if you have the skills.
>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.
For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
You know if we could this open source self hosted stuff with a layer of Patreon on top people would pay something to all the people. If one could make it non-intrusive it could become a decent alternative to paying all these artists. I think Kanopy.com comes pretty close, its funded by tax payer dollars and is available via your local library.
Is it though? If it were nothing artists might be in a better negotiating position to demand something. But now instead of demanding payment, they are asking for a raise instead.
Sure, but they also got a cut from all of those dvds I bought before streaming services was a thing or the new dvds/blu-rays I am picking up now.
I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.
I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
Weird thought, but doesn't some of the stuff the blockchain people do potentially apply here? I'm not talking building a new coin or any of that crap. But rather more about just handling the transactions of plays and a distributed anonymized ledger. Artists can formulate a contract, users pay in and their pay gets distributed proportionally. I'm sure you could add zkps to help protect privacy. Could you get away with "proof of listen"? Could you stream via other users torrent style to move away from a central hub? Hosting and high upload speeds give you discounts. Maybe there's something in this (bad) idea?
I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich
Yes so this is the future you're speaking of. A complete separation between client and server, and none of the current bs enshitified monopolies. Just need to wait a few years tm.
I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.
In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.
Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).
And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.
What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?
I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.
This reflects a lot of what I've been through as well. My subscriptions exploded when AU got a lot of different streaming platforms, and I think when paramount+ came out and took Star Trek off of another one I drew the line. I realised I still owned all the physical media, so time to make backups. Previous to that I moved off Gmail, that was by far the hardest, and still somewhat ongoing after 8+ years.
The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.
I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.
The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!
>The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.
The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.
The Yattee client for Invidious works great on iOS, or the Vinegar/Baking Soda browser extensions that replace the YouTube player with a basic (ad-free) HTML5 player work also.
DNS blockers aren't good enough to block all ads. Especially YouTube. Plus, many browsers will ignore DNS without configuration and same for phone apps. While this can be fine for me it's not for everyone else in my family nor guests. And that's before we talk about Apple...
I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block ads on my friends computer when they get into my network without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including ones I own.
And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right? You can recompile the app and others to get more control
I don't. Sure, I can root my TV and certainly there's exploits for that. But honestly that example isn't the problem and is much more easily solved by treating my TV as a monitor.
We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.
YouTube is a bit of a problem. I feel like it costs about double of what it should be, but I also think that content creators should be paid, and I absolutely hate ads.
I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.
yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.
Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)
Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.
Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)
Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.
This is great. If you ever wrote about your entire setup I'd love to read it. Got a few new ideas from your post. To anyone reading, the most helpful tool for setting up my homelab is the community helper-scripts (formerly tteck, RIP). Those have saved me soooo much time, and showed me best practices in setup, and the list of scripts give you a good idea of tools that are commonly used.
I have drafts for it but maybe I shouldn't have made this comment under my anonymous account lol.
I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.
What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.
There are good options. Borg, rsync.net with zfs send/recv. Storage boxes from Hetzner
Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're willing to spend for what tradeoff
Storage box from hetzner is great. Hetzner is a good company, I'm glad that I'm doing business with them. The service is good, cheap, reliable, and... Un-american which means it would probably stay good and won't enshitify.
Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.
i use hetzner too, and I like their current services. But I think we all do good in never assuming or relying on ANY company being our friends. Be vigilant
I keep important data on a zpool that's mirrored across 2 drives, I snapshot it nightly, zfs send/receive the snapshot a drive on a different machine, and run a borgmatic/borg backup to borgbase 3 times a week. I also run a scrub on it quarterly.
> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant
If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
An N100 minipc or second-hand Dell Optiplex doesn't cost too much more than a rasp-Pi ($100-200), has a lot more power, and will only pull about 10W idle.
My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
yep yep n100s are great. I just use my gaming desktop as server, uses more money in power but it'd be on for hours a day anyway and i already own it, so i'm not concerned.
Is 10W idle the lowest one can reasonably get a small home server? As a comparison, that's about as much as my fridge draws on average. Also, a mechanism to maximize the time spent at idle would be useful. Basically all the optimisations done for phones.
Looking at a WD spec sheet, it's more like 6-7W during read/write, and 3-4W during idle (1W sleep). Assume your use spread however you want, but that would be a max average of 5W usage per drive, so another 5-20W depending on your storage needs.
Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.
Unraid makes a lot of the home lab stuff pretty easy. There's a very active community, good docs, frequent updates. It costs a little, but it's one time and worth it, and can grow as you have time and money to add stuff to it.
You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services
Yes, mostly storage. But why? Storage == ZFS. ZFS cli is well documented and works extremely well. Don't use unraid or truenas or any other fancy UI. I know the appeal from the beginners but it's not worth it
You might be amazed to find there's a lot of good reasons the storage world moved away from the RAID4 model Unraid relies on. They're proprietary too, which isn't great if you care about recoverability or never being in a position where they can withdraw your license.
Having parity on a one or more separate disks is one of the hallmarks of RAID4, and as such the comparison conceptually makes sense even if it's not literally RAID4. The actual state of their data protection is actually worse due to data not being striped across the data drives, reducing I/O, causing balancing issues, limiting large file sizes, and increasing risk of data loss if the wrong drive is killed at the wrong time. Modern software RAID not only solves all these problems, but also automatically heals bit rot and often includes compression support for both space savings and increased throughput. Unraid stalwartly refuses to grant these protections and enhancements to its users in the name of "simplicity", which I as a storage engineer must balk at.
Put your data at unnecessary risk if you want. I will shed no tears for you.
I am not surprised he doesn't know. Most of the unraid users are completely clueless and are UI junkies with no understanding of what the underlying services they use
The sum of your arguments are basically "unraid doesn't do a particular thing I like using Cli tools" then make a bunch of self contradictory claims of what those things are. Then you double down in your made up arguments. This is just bad faith trolling behavior unwelcome here on HN.
Nowhere did I mention CLI tools, nor are they in any way relevant. Very curious what "contradictions" you're referring to, and why you think flagging is an appropriate response.
What do you do for backups? I'm just setting up an Emby instance with a 4 TB hard drive attached, but I'm worried it'll fail and take everything with it.
Some things are popular in the moment and very hard to come by 10-20 years later if they aren’t pretty popular. TV shows especially.
I’ve been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking out flea markets for good deals.
With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two after being made. I want to make sure I still have access to the original versions.
I do often wish I was one of those people who didn’t care, and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but it’s not in the cards for me.
This, if you have some favorites or just movies that remind you of your youth, don't wait, go get them on dvd now. It gets harder and more expensive the longer you wait.
I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially the really old ones that were made before I was born.
My initial though was to not bother with backup, I still have the DVDs/Blu-rays if the HDD dies, but with the amount of time it takes to load in I changed my mind on that.
It's the other way around if anything. If you ripped it yourself, you still have the original media and can rip it again. If you sailed the seven seas, it may or may not be around if you go to look for it in the future.
Another one I realized - content is often edited in later versions. Two examples in my collection are the theatrical vs current versions of the Star Wars trilogy, and Top Gear, which had the original licensed music replaced by worse generic music in newer releases.
This is a major issue for me for both video and music streaming platforms.
Do you know what version of the Abyss you are going to get? Is it that theatrical version that cut out a major plot point or the director's cut that includes it? What about Blade Runner? Do you want the original theatrical version or the super duper pointless extended Director's Cut? You don't get a choice with streaming, and you often don't even know what version it'll be.
I find this is even worse with music. Take the Beatles. Their songs have been remastered many times. Some of the remasters are good, and some of them ruin the music for me. But what version are you going to get? And, you may be listening to a good version today, but due to label negotiations, have it swapped out with a different version tomorrow.
I take a lot of pride in curating my personal media collection. I know these issues aren't important to everyone (and some people who might care are just unaware), but they are incredibly important to me.
In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt) and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.
I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy.
zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.
Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin.
When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.
I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.
I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.
I have my collection in Dropbox, then sync that onto my home server with rclone once a day, which exposes it to Plex. Then I use the Plexamp app (music-only Plex app) to listen across all my devices
With all the SWE in the mix, why not just roll your own media player...? It's not THAT hard. Same for movie player btw (and one solution can do both ofc).
HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.
That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.
It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.
I have got 26 docker containers running on it.
Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb.
The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.
I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.
And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.
But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.
This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
I'm doing the same, I have family plans with my friends for pretty much anything so I don't think I ever reached such high monthly costs though.
I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.
I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
Where do you get media from? Piracy is an option, but if you want to do it semi-legally I guess you’d need to rip blu-rays, but that seems like it'd be more expensive than streaming services, and you’d have to wait for everything to be released on blu-ray (if it even does)
I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.
I recently bought a mini pc too and gave the self-host shenanigans a roll. It was definitely worth it.
Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was able to self-host and make my services available only through the vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!
I’ve been doing this since 2005 with just my NAS and mediamonkey or foobar2000. Additionally, Sonos can index the NAS directly over SMB, although they have not really put much effort into fixing bugs in their implementation it still works well enough. Any upnp/dlna streamer that runs on your NAS (plex, twonky, etc…) should be able to handle other situations.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 381 ms ] threadFor Jeff: https://archive.is/waAv5 (who also stars in the article)
I do not mind the jankiness, since I can work around a lot of it with the API.
I do not even mind too much the Love Exposure bug:
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/10494
Most users report it is the film whose artwork is used (definitely always was for me). One user mentions they get the art from "Love Exposure: The TV Show".
One of these days I am going to spin up a VM and try and work through a report case.
Symfonium is paid but appears to be one of the rare apps that is still thoughtfully created by somebody who actually uses it. The developer deserves the support.
[0]: https://symfonium.app/
Any comparable options for iOS? Not everyone in my household is on Android unfortunately
Edit: seeing play:sub mentioned maybe I'll have to check that one out
As a music server it has a few shortcomings (that can be fixed with contributed code - ATM this one is waaay down my TODO list so anyone that wants to step up - go for it, please) ..
It currently has non existent support of FullAlbum.flac with 'standard' TrackIndex.Cue track timing lists.
I ripped a lot of my early albums and CD's as single lossless FLAC (and APE and another format) files with track timings courtesy of either hand entry or the exactCD (?) database - there are many such rips out there is full album rips where popular for a good run of time.
Jellyfin sees these as single files, not as an album of tracks, and plays them as such with no track selection, next track, or resume.
Addressing this is on the github issues list.
Foobar2K and other music players have no issues with these files.
Desired pipeline is “Ingest->MusicBrainz->Object Storage (music bucket, write once read many)->Serve to various clients from middleware server (Jellyfin).”
I implemented an override of Stream in C# that can be passed directly to an HttpContext file response. This gives me range-based response support on top of cached S3 media blocks for free. The front-end uses ffmpeg to do a quick transcode on uploads to guarantee fast start of mp4 content in my html video elements.
The cool thing with having a reasonable sized cache is that you can switch to glacier infrequent access tier (i.e., the one intended for quarterly reporting) and save a lot of money on storage. The other fun bit is that it is shared across all clients on the LAN, so if someone watches a show before you, you'll just read it from local during your run through.
For me, I don't need a lot of fancy bullshit in a media solution. An un-styled web player that just works on my MacBook is pretty much the only client support I care about. My media library currently shows up as a monolithic <table> without any pagination. Time to first frame on an uncached video click is well under a second on a 1gbps fiber connection using 32 megabyte block size to US-EAST-1 from Texas.
What does this buy you? It seems like an object storage system would provide everything you need on its own.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
It's not self hosted, more a middle-ground between rented Spotify and self hosted data sovereignty, but this is what we do at https://asti.ga . You store your music in some Internet-accessible storage, such as any S3 compatible endpoint, and Astiga connects and streams your library (and provides offline etc etc). AMA.
I settled on Plex + Plexamp instead. I'm mostly satisfied, but there are some rough edges like Chromecast and web playback.
Notably, the Plex vulnerability had been patched in May 2020—approximately 75 versions prior to the breach. The compromise occurred because the engineer hadn’t updated their Plex software. While the flaw was in Plex, the breach underscores the critical importance of timely software updates and robust security practices. https://www.wired.com/story/lastpass-engineer-breach-securit...
Why is this bad?
I will, im just wondering, would only the link to the source article been better/acceptable here?
I dont' get the hate for AI replies if they're on topic and generated by a human tbh, but ill respect it since its not first time seeing this i guess
In short: other posters want to hear from you, not from an AI. AI written posts aren't actually valuable (we can all dump stuff into the AI just fine). If you don't have much to say, it's fine to just share a link to the source you found.
Or artists could sell the music directly at a fair price (no streaming service but vinyl or downloads). Or more people could go to concerts
Either way, consumers need to pay more before all good artists can make ends meet. The (comparatively) pocket change that many of them get from streaming won't be enough even if Spotify turns into a non-profit and improves payout from 70% of their income to 99.9% of their income
Most consumers seem to disagree, judging by the reactions to Spotify's recent price increase in the netherlands (even though the increase was lower than inflation or median income growth). With the money simply not being on the table unless you get lucky and get massively popular, there is no realistic alternative, but some options feel more fair than others. I could totally see myself doing music as a hobby and seeing what I can sell on Bandcamp rather than supporting Google and having them/Youtube stream my music to people
I recall a commercial from the 90s that sort of poked fun at this exact idea, as being laughably farfetched and "sci-fi".
You're damn right I'm happy.
ive now been in a place where that membership isnt that daunting. but im good, im not gonna have my music library held prisoner from me unless i cough up a monthly fee. its quite literally unusable if you arent paying. it also seems like they intentionally make their browser based version kinda trash... to make using it to block ads a less viable option(its been a while, not sure how true this currently is).
the jellyfin option is actually what ive settled on as well, ive been a bit lazy about setting up more functionality than just for my LAN, but i will get around to it. for now i just kinda plop junk on my phone and play it through vlc, which is certainly a lazy solution but its still feels freeing.
If you own, you don't pay subscription and can use that money to buy. And in tenuous circumstances you have control.
If you subscribe, you don't pay money to buy massive library. But in tenuous circumstances you don't have control.
Everybody rates the risk of tenuous circumstances differently and so that affects the decision outcome.
There's absolutely no way in hell I'm going back to hoarding stupid ass CDs or MP3/FLAC files when I can legally have immediate access to tens of millions of titles. I have absolutely zero interest in the "owning" part but I understand some people would prefer it.
so if you decide you cant pay their monthly fee, you still have full access to your library of songs that you chose to own over the years, and are not subjected to the feeling of being a prisoner to their subscription model if you decide you cant afford it for x amount of time.
this feeling of being a prisoner is the absolute main driver of why i prefer non spotify solutions. i love the actual product otherwise. if i had not experienced the non subscribed version of what my account feels like, i think i would still happily be paying for spotify today.
I didn't think Spotify had fanboy/fangirl followings, but based on your and others' comments, I stand corrected. What do I know!
I have a decently sized library with my favorite albums and that's been sufficient for some time now. Every once in a while, I track new releases and explore new genres, then add the few that picked my interest to my library.
Intentionally is great for enjoying art (and YouTube is more than enough for mood music)
I'm much better off using free software than having copies of proprietary software on my shelf and the train is much cheaper than the car insurance.
E.g. lately I have been listening to more classical, and the musicianship between different performances of the same piece varies widely. It is very nice to be able to quickly explore a few different albums before I find the one I like (also to study the differences). In the Olden Days I would hogged the headphones at the music store... or, more likely, not make my own decision and purchase based on reviews and name recognition.
On the other hand, I of course never actually purchase albums anymore. ("somewhat ethical")
Hosting my own, even though it appeals a lot to me on principle, just would be either too costly to maintain legally (buying new music) or too cumbersome illegally (torrenting any music I want to listen to).
I guess if someone is really into music, they will spend a lot of time on finding new music, and will be inclined to spend more money on the hobby too. But for casual listeners like me, it's far too convenient to simple select a song on Spotify and click "play radio" and get an unending playlist of new songs.
None of that is a problem with the Apple Music app, so it's 100% a Spotify problem.
Also, Music sometimes disappears from my playlists.
- songs rated 5 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 8 months¹
- songs rated 4 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 16 months
- songs rated 3 stars which I haven’t listened to for at least 32 months
- the 20GB of least-played music
(there are some other strictures as well, like eliminating Christmas music and some music files I have in my library more for archival purposes than anything else, but this is a decent approximation).
This gives me a reasonably fresh selection of music and at least at the moment, with my daily sync habit, when I listen to a song it goes out of rotation for a while which could be anywhere from a week to years.
⸻
1. This was originally 6/12/24 months, but I ended up boosting that time frame as storage grew tight on my phone.
It's called "long time no see" and it includes any songs I've listened to more than 10 times but haven't listened to in the last year. I've been using the same music library for nearly two decades now, so it works really well for me. It's like a constantly rotating nostalgia playlist.
When we start getting the same splintering that we have with video (too many subscriptions to count), I'll dust off my old eyepatch and start sailing the seven seas... :(
How much storage, are you backing up your data elsewhere?
And what did it cost you, apart from time?
- Domain name - $3/year
- Cloudron free tier with two apps - free
- Wasabi for backups (Cloudron supports every cloud storage possible and Wasabi is not the cheapest, I just wanted to try it) - $7/m
- Hostinger VPS with 50GB of storage - $5/m
I will probably add more apps to Cloudron at which point I will have to pay $15/m. But I think it is worth it - you can install every possible app with one click and have single sign-on. I offered to split the service with some friends too which would make the economics even better.
I'm looking through the android clients and none seem to fully embrace keeping the most played tracks on device ("offline mode"). Tempo[0] has in on the wip list, while StreamMusic straight removed in it the latest update[1], so as of now it looks like a pretty tough feature to get.
Listening to music in remote places is nice, and that was the main reason for paying for Spotify for me.
[0] https://github.com/CappielloAntonio/tempo#readme [1] https://music.aqzscn.cn/docs/versions/latest/
Seriously though, seconded, but also install Rockbox: https://www.rockbox.org/
[0] https://nuclearplayer.com/
This article tells me how good Jellyfin is, but the music collection process is not here. Do you download them manually? Do you buy records?
I grew up downloading music into my PC and then transferring them to my SD card which I used in my phone. Once I had a Spotify, it was just... easier. I can discover music faster with the "song radio" feature in Spotify. I can find and listen to an album as soon as I come across it.
I'd absolutely love to have a better media player and "frontend" than Spotify but I haven't solved the collection part of it. What can be done there?
Given an existing collection - Is there an easy way to auto sort & tag everything? e.g. Merge the artists 'Guns N Roses' and 'Guns and Roses' into the most correct one.
I can't justify the time to do it manually and feel like if I just wait long enough a turn-key AI solution will pop up.
There're recommendations in these comments that can solve the automating and downloading part of it but they still don't solve the discovery part of it.
The only way I see is - use Spotify to discover; sync your library using said software to collect and play later.
MusicBrainz Picard ... one album at a time until you get the hang of it.
MP3Tag for manual cleanups and out of normal oddities, etc.
I've recently started using Beets[1] to organize my music collection. It's a command line application that IMHO is not entirely intuitive to use at first. But once you get the hang of it, it works incredibly well.
[1]: https://beets.io/
My only complaint is that when I buy a bunch of songs my credit card gets charged a bunch of times (one for each artist/label) which has triggered fraud warning in the past, but I guess they do that to avoid the hassle of routing money to each artist in their own currency... It seems mildly customer unfriendly to me but in a world where people charge a can of coke to their credit card maybe not all that weird any more.
I avoid this by buying the virtual gift cards and redeeming them on my own account
Also, I find bandcamp's wishlist manager to be severely lacking. I use the wishlist as a queue of things I need to check out or have already checked out (and may not have liked). But, it isn't really meant for having 1000s of albums in there.
So, I wrote a wishlist manager [2][3], which lets you organize, comment, rate, and listen to your wishlist.
I spend a quite a bit on bandcamp, especially since many of the bands I listen to are only available on bandcamp (no streaming services!). While I am glad it hasn't been enshittified by the acquisitions, I do think there could be a few small UX improvements.
[1] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email...
[2] https://flathub.org/apps/net.line72.campcounselor
[3] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/
I really don't want to restructure my library just for Jellyfin, so I basically can't use it.
Musicbrainz Picard is great for normalizing metadata for music files/albums, maybe give that a shot.
I can click a button in Lidarr to auth with Spotify and automatically search usenet for every album of every artist I follow on spotify, download them all, and make them available in Jellyfin. It'll even monitor the spotify account and import new additions. Getting the whole stack set up is pretty much the exact opposite of plug and play, but once you have it all installed it's amazing how much becomes smooth sailing. 2K songs is nothing for this kind of stack.
You got me there
> Kinda like saying Winamp is alternative to Spotify
No, it's really not like saying that. I was responding to a post lamenting the difficulty of acquiring the files for the music they've already discovered on Spotify, and I brought up a music file acquisition system that pulls from what they've discovered on Spotify. That's different than comparing a local player to a discovery system.
I see where you are coming from but all that experience really tired me out. People say once you do it, it’s forever but is it? I appreciate it that some people can do it — no I really do — but maybe it’s not for everybody.
Then there are managed solutions — oh, I am sure there would be, there were and are for seedboxes as well but the good managed seedboxes sometimes would cost as much or half of my annual VPS cost in a month, yes 1:12 or so. Now I believe there’s nothing wrong with pricing a managed solution high but not all can afford it or are willing to afford it.
I really appreciate it though. Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere and what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this? That would be very kind.
> Would you mind sharing a tutorial if you’ve saved one somewhere
I would if I had one, but I mostly just googled the official installation instructions for any random component I wanted. No overall tutorials. Service-wise, I'm using Jellyseerr to discover content and take requests from friends/family, Radarr for sourcing movies, Sonarr for sourcing TV shows, Lidarr for sourcing music, Prowlarr for centralizing the configuration of the other *arrs, Sabnzbd as a usenet download client, rtorrent as a bittorrent client, and Jellyfin for consuming my library. You probably don't need all of those depending on what you're after, but you can just look up the instructions for only the components you want. And if you want to get content from usenet or private torrent trackers, you'll need the relevant accounts.
> what disk, CPU, and memory I am looking at for this?
Whatever you want honestly. You can run most of this on a toaster so long as you don't have unrealistic performance expectations for it. Obviously if you're planning to download 10TB worth of content, you're going to need at least that much disk space, and if you're planning to download it faster than HDDs can spin, you might need some SSDs. But most of these things are just downloaders and file managers and don't really need much more than network bandwidth to source the content and disk IO to put the content somewhere. Maybe 8GB of memory for some of the more bloated services (my whole server idles at ~5GB used, and it runs a lot of other junk) and to do really large indexer merges when searching for content, and however much hardware you need to meet your transcoding requirements if you're playing through Jellyfin or similar. You can stream source material without transcoding and consume basically no CPU from it, or you can enable transcoding with a decent enough CPU or pretty much any supported GPU. All up to you and your needs.
I'd recommend starting with pretty minimal hardware and adding more as you need it. My storage has quadrupled since I started doing this and at some point I tossed in an old GPU for transcoding.
Thanks for your input on this. Next time I get into it I will definitely look at it and you are right about needing resources as much is my usage need. I just meant to ask what are the bare minimums sort of.
I tried syncing Lidarr with my Spotify account, but 95% of the downloads then where songs that I didn't care for.
And the artists and everyone who worked on it thank you very much for paying for an album/song instead of just paying a streaming subscription fee.
Fun fact: I bought an MP3 from a record label site in my country and the file was from songs.pk. Yup!
There you go - artists thanking me :)
Virtually all music, particularly modern music, is made available for free on YouTube. You can download it and it's yours.
For example, here's the official release of Taylor Swift's album "Evermore" for YouTube ("Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxrMpCMdYwk&list=OLAK5uy_m-v... . You should be able to pass the playlist to yt-dlp and automatically extract all the audio tracks.
I don't really want wholesale quantities of music, so I do this manually, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's tooling around for it.
This might work for your use case too, though if you're just using it to grab content, the artists won't get royalties..., then again that seems to be the same for Linux ISO sites.
I ditched Plex when they came out with a FAST [1] service which was thoroughly pizzled [2] for me. I switched to Jellyfin which I struggled with in so many ways, the terrible XBOX client which was a degraded version of the web client was the worse but Jellyfin's poor metadata handling was part of it.
Last summer I spent a lot of time in a room in our rental house where I tried (and failed) to gentle a feral cat and wound up watching a lot of Tubi and came to the conclusion that FAST wasn't so bad and gave Plex another chance when I rebuilt my home server and I can say I'm highly satisfied.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ad-supported_streaming_te...
[2] https://scatter.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/thoroughly-pizzled-...
I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions. The subscriptions really had gotten out of hand, it had gotten to about $200 (AUD) a month.
Quick napkin math is that I have cancelled about ~$150 a month worth of subscriptions so far. The $500 office desktop I got for a home server is struggling at this point, but it's already paid for itself, so I will likely upgrade it to something much better later this year.
Currently I am in the process of replacing all the movie streaming services with Emby.
Spotify and Adobe lightroom is still on the todo list.
I will likely end up with Youtube, Fastmail and Borgbase being my remaining subscriptions once I am done.
It's a nightmare.
It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.
I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.
It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.
As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.
>I have been on a mission for the last 2 years to replace as many subscriptions as possible with self-hosted solutions.
I have been doing the same for quite some time now but it's only recently I realized all these subscriptions services are just making rich richer. We should encourage self hosting as much as possible. I mean why should we pay huge corporations more money just for storage?
For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.
I mostly watch movies I have already seen before, but with the fragmentation and constant moving around that's happening with steaming services I would frequently end up using 3+ different ones every month. The constant cancel/renew cycle was a real hassle and very error prone, I would often forget one or two.
I only watch about 20 new movies a year, so even without hunting for bargains I will easily save a lot of money. But I will be looking for bargains, because why not.
I also visit my local library almost every week. They have a surprisingly excellent movie and tv catalog!
I have now cancelled all my movie and music streaming services!
I'm really just spitballing here. Seems really difficult to pull off, but what would such a system look like if we didn't design it for profit extraction and instead designed it to cut out all the middlemen? To really just make it as easy as possible for artists to connect to listeners. If we designed it without a desire to get rich
In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.
Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).
And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.
What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?
I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.
The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.
Now I self host:
- Own Mastodon instance - Photos (Synology) - Videos (Synology) - Audio (Synology) - Storage (Minio) - Code/Build (Forejo) - Security (Synology)
My NAS is blocked from the internet, while web facing stuff is on a separate server (old dell workstation). And now have added a PI hole to another older dell box. My partner's laptop will be moving to Linux and will also be a Windows free household. I used Windows since 3.1, I liked it up until around Windows 7. I'm glad I've moved to Linux, but disappointed to see what has happened to Windows in general.
I want to self host more services for family, but the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.
The tags #homelab and #selfhost are pretty decent to follow on Mastodon btw!
Do you host this with docker? It is usually the pain-free approach
Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.
The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.
If anyone has a solution I'd love to learn.
For android there is New Pipe and some forks.
I prefer to pay my yt loved channels than ser a fucking add
I already use Firefox on /my computer/. We were talking about a pihole or some /network/ solution. How do I block ads on my friends computer when they get into my network without touching their computer? How do I block ads on my TV? You'd have to do something like deep packet inspection. Devices I fully control I can trivially solve this but there are plenty of devices I don't, including ones I own.
And for Android, you know you can use revanced, right? You can recompile the app and others to get more control
We were talking DNS blockers. The context matters. I already use ublock but I can't do ublock on my pihole. I can't do it on an iPhone (I can use orion browser but YouTube quality is low). I can't do it on my TV. I can't do it on my friends computer that visits my house. And so on. I appreciate you trying to help but you're misunderstanding the problem and honestly I don't know how someone could be on HN and not know about ublock.
yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.
Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)
Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.
Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)
Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.
There's a bunch of other little tool...
I'm a firm believer that tools should be made to be usable by both technical and nontechnical people. Usually we do one or the other but it's a false dichotomy. "For the noobs" pushes for sane defaults, reduced complexity, and fixing bugs. It's also an entry point to become a power user, especially as being a power user in one domain doesn't mean you're automatically in another. "For the power users" gives flexibility, helps fix bugs (faster and higher coverage), as well as is critical for feature development (unless you naively believe you can know everything your diverse users need and have an infinite budget), and evangelize your product. The magic of success requires having both but I think we pretend it is one or the other. It needs to work well and be pretty.
Hard to make a particular recommendation as backing up to the cloud is a popular option but depends on your upload speed and rate of data change. And depends how much you're willing to spend for what tradeoff
Use Hetzner! I'm not affiliated just a happy customer.
So I effectively have multiple layers of backups.
If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays
My optiplex shows as 8.191 kwh last month -> 11w average.
There are plenty of old laptops that would be a great replacement, mine draws 8W at idle with 2x2TB SSDs: https://www.kassner.com.br/en/2023/05/16/reusing-old-hardwar...
I’m interested in the next generation: arm64 machines with 2xM.2 slots could do wonders as an idler.
OP was trying to replace streaming services, so he gonna need storage. Assuimg he had 3 hdd for raid 5, that is another 15*3 = 45w
There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.
Unraid is mostly used for storage management, the docker and vm parts are definitely side bits to the system.
The both of you,stop making things up.
Having parity on a one or more separate disks is one of the hallmarks of RAID4, and as such the comparison conceptually makes sense even if it's not literally RAID4. The actual state of their data protection is actually worse due to data not being striped across the data drives, reducing I/O, causing balancing issues, limiting large file sizes, and increasing risk of data loss if the wrong drive is killed at the wrong time. Modern software RAID not only solves all these problems, but also automatically heals bit rot and often includes compression support for both space savings and increased throughput. Unraid stalwartly refuses to grant these protections and enhancements to its users in the name of "simplicity", which I as a storage engineer must balk at.
Put your data at unnecessary risk if you want. I will shed no tears for you.
I'm flagging you both.
With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2.
I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.
You can use it to sync local snapshots or to a destination that does snapshots for example
Borg/restic are more complete solutions
With my usage I'm paying about $25 annually using S3. But if I ever need to full restore I'll be paying around $100 in data transfer fees.
I’ve been considering buying some of those giant DVD lots that come up on Craigslist from time to time, or checking out flea markets for good deals.
With the way things are heading, one of my fears is I will get old and lose access to some of the shows are movies I loved in my youth. Licensing with streaming services are so fickle, and some others are removed or edited if they around found to be politically incorrect a decade or two after being made. I want to make sure I still have access to the original versions.
I do often wish I was one of those people who didn’t care, and could be happy with an iPad as my main computer, but it’s not in the cards for me.
I have been hunting down the movies that I was watching when growing up and it's been a real mission, especially the really old ones that were made before I was born.
Anything I want to keep I'll make a specific decision and move it to my RAID1 drive which is backed up off-site.
Do you know what version of the Abyss you are going to get? Is it that theatrical version that cut out a major plot point or the director's cut that includes it? What about Blade Runner? Do you want the original theatrical version or the super duper pointless extended Director's Cut? You don't get a choice with streaming, and you often don't even know what version it'll be.
I find this is even worse with music. Take the Beatles. Their songs have been remastered many times. Some of the remasters are good, and some of them ruin the music for me. But what version are you going to get? And, you may be listening to a good version today, but due to label negotiations, have it swapped out with a different version tomorrow.
I take a lot of pride in curating my personal media collection. I know these issues aren't important to everyone (and some people who might care are just unaware), but they are incredibly important to me.
I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.
When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.
I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.
I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.
HTML spec for media is pretty amazing these days, no real excuses outside of time.
I have a ~10 years old desktop as my server (intel skylake and 24GB of RAM). I host about 20 services and the server is not loaded at all.
The services are the usual ones, nothing heavy such as LLMs, though
I upgraded my NAS to a recent Asustor a year ago and it changed my life. JellyFin for video works perfectly everywhere in my home, on any device, and it can also be accessed remotely, securely, with Tailscale, so if I'm in a hotel somewhere with my iPad it still works.
And my library is curated by me; it has classic movies and other movies I like, and zero fluff or random shows that I would never watch in a million years.
But self hosting doesn't stop here. Using Docker (via Portainer) I can publish any app in minutes, on either Apache or Nginx, securely with a Cloudflare tunnel (free) without ever exposing my home IP to the world.
This of course isn't as resilient as a proper server with a proper provider, but it's so much simpler and so much cheaper that for hobby projects it's largely good enough.
I started my home server for self hosting Immich, not only for the cost but because I like to have my images close to me.
I also recently replaced Lightroom with ON1, it's definitely not the same quality but, as hobbyist, it didn't make much sense to pay that much for me anymore. It was by far the most expensive subscription I had.
Using traefik + tailscale + dns challenge with CloudFlare, I was able to self-host and make my services available only through the vpn without loosing HTTPS on all the subdomains. It's lovely!
I'm willing to learn but please try to be less condescending :)
I have a few hobby sites that handle music and always wondered For those curious: https://carlos-a-diez.com/music/