Wonder how long it will be before the big streaming companies start losing too many customers and have to do a hard reset like the music industry did
Plex is great, I have it running on a 2015 Windows 10 Laptop and it works across a bunch of devices and houses.
I knew this thread would come one day! I’ve mentioned my setup a couple of times in the “who’s leaving Spotify?” thread but here goes again.
I’ve been on Plex since around 2022. Having always had a load of digital files hanging around on hard drives, this was the perfect way to play them.
I use an old 2012 MiniMac and have a 13TB hard drive attached to it. It sits under my TV and when the Plex app runs it wakes it up, so it doesn’t have to be on the whole time. HD is still nowhere near full either!
I have Plex pass so I can use Plexamp on my phone and I basically have my own version of Spotify now with only the stuff I like (plus loads of old, old stuff that isn’t on streaming) and you can do cool things like create auto playlists e.g. tracks tagged as indie that I haven’t heard in the past 6 months is a constantly changing list. Think it’s about £3.49 a month.
I’ve noticed that the auto-matching of media files is now much better than it was. Very quick to match up and about 99% right - e.g. I wasn’t happy when my collection of early 80s Crackerjack got tagged as some modern American sitcom.
Is that just a regular USB attached to the Mac Mini? Have always gone the NAS route as it was miles cheaper than buying a small Mac/PC with equivalent storage. Never thought to just attach an external drive.
Why waste £20 a month on Netflix and Disney+ when you can simply spend £100s on tech that none of your household understand how to use because you change it every 6 months?
It’s really not, allegedly I’ve got Radarr & Sonarr setup with Plex on a Synology NAS with nzb360 on my phone for ease-of-adding-things and it’s so easy it’s ridiculous. There are setup guides out there which give you literal “click here, type this in” level instructions too. Allegedly I also use Bazarr for subtitles and Prowlarr to manage the indexers.
For anyone needing to reencode from something to something else (or burn/rip), I’ve been using Shutter Encoder recently - it’s incredible, free, and seems massively fast to do stuff even on a 2018 macbook.
yeah, with jellyfin you can either name the file in a way it will automatically pick up the metadata, or you can just go into an items options an click identify and paste in the IMDB code which is easy to get from the url of the IMDB page
there are different library types for films, tv, music that impose different behaviour that makes sense for the type but here is what films looks like (if you ignore the blockbuster theme I added)
i’ve started doing this is well, have 13 of the shows from that last screen shot. glad I am not the only one who decided it was very important to have every episode of rockos modern life
Genuinely can’t tell if this post is a pisstake
will I ever watch them? No. But is it nice to have them? Yes. Just in case.
A lot of interesting posts in this thread
Yes! But I also think it’s important. I am so grateful for people who decide that “Yes, I will encode a 1992 Vic and Bob TV pilot and make it available for download”. Absolute heroes. Otherwise, this stuff is just lost forever!
might as well info dump everything I have learned about home servers in case any one is interested
things I have installed/learned/recommend
- Pi hole. Network wide ad blocking and malware domain blocking, set up your router to go via it and even blocks ads in mobile apps
- Homer. Nice simple dashboard to access your apps GitHub - bastienwirtz/homer: A very simple static homepage for your server.
- Nextcloud. instead of iCloud of google drive nextcloud - LinuxServer.io
- Syncthing, when you need to sync files between different devices and they need to be in specific places. I use this to sync save states and roms between my numerous emulators.
- Webtop. I linux desktop you can access via your browser webtop - LinuxServer.io
- Kavita. Ebook and comics reader. Can connect to Kobo if you install Koreader and connect vis OPDS Kavita Wiki
- Romm. Manage roms and emulate them in browser
- tailscale. If you want to access from outside your network and dont want to expose to the internet proper. It is vpn that is only used for your apps https://tailscale.com (means I can connect my Kobo to Kavita, or retro handheld emulators to Romm from anywhere)
- nginx proxy manager. If instead of IP address and port you want to use text urls https://nginxproxymanager.com
- Cloudflare tunnel. If you want to connect from outside your network from a machine you cant install tailscale or another vpn app on, it can only be accessed via cloud flare and you can put whatever authentication rules you want. most simply one being a one time password that will only be sent to people on an approved list
- Open audible, to free your audible purchases https://openaudible.org
- Libro FM to buy audiobooks without DRM https://libro.fm
- wget wizard. if you want to download stuff from internet archive that is too big to zip up as one download and you cant be bothered to download every file Wget Wizard - WhatIsMyBrowser.com (creates a script you can run)
- get player. which gets stuff from player, they claim it is it legal if you have a tv licence and stick to the permitted retaining periods, GitHub - get-iplayer/get_iplayer: A utility for downloading TV and radio programmes from BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds
- If you are going to rip your dvds and blu rays, get a drive now, most of the companies have stopped making them. get one that it is possible to install libre drive on as that is the only way to rip UHD discs LibreDrive (Possible with patched firmware, patched version available) - www.makemkv.com
- appflowy like my beloved notion except self hosted https://appflowy.com
@badeline @CHAIRMAN_LMAO I think we should DM and compare lists and maybe trade
Haha as a joke DW @NotACop
exactly, so many things I know I will never watch but like the idea of having them.
I have seen people on youtube that have used raspberry pi to set up a fake real time tv, you create fake channels and fake schedules (or come up with a logic for it to generate it), so when you change ‘channels’ shows will be half way through, some even add in old adverts.
slightly sad, but think it is inevitable I will go down that route. try and track down all the old BBC2 thingys, create dream schedule line ups. might even set it to randomly delay episodes of buffy because a football match has overrun.
Wow, yes. Hadn’t really thought about that. My library of TV shows is pretty limited to be honest, but I bought all of the Young Ones on DVD off eBay so I could rip them. They arrived, and I realised my laptop didn’t have a drive. Had to dig out an ancient MacBook from the loft to do it.
I wonder what pirates of the future will do? Guess they’ll have to stick with WEB-DL with the rest of us, or just hope their drives never die.
Well I love that


