4 ms·

Tell me you live alone or only with a partner in a single TV home. Multiple users, multiple locations, one setup. That's the value.

carlosjobim 3y ago
12 years ago me and my then girlfriend used to torrent a USB pen drive full of the series and movies we wanted to watch and just plug it into a Sony TV and watch. Including subtitles when we wanted. You could put that USB pen drive in your pocket to continue watching at a friends house. 20 years ago, we'd connect any PC or Mac to the TV with HDMI and watch a movie or whatever we wanted.
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  Nice, I'm sure that works great on an iPad in the car
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    How is your iPad going to connect to your media server on the road with no signal?
    - happymellon 3y ago
      I normally solve this by tethering. All these media clients support downloading too for offline usage.
      - carlosjobim 3y ago
        To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth. Setting up a server and installing clients, pirating a bunch of content to put on your server. Then using the client to download files since you won't have signal (how is the tether going to have any signal?). I guess it's fun for hackers to tinker with this stuff, but just putting the file on the device like we did 12 years ago seems much easier.
        happymellon 3y ago
        The only additional step is installing a server application, you would probably have installed VLC or something to use anyway on the client. Having a box to store your stuff, ripping or downloading to it is still the same regardless of installing a client or not. > how is the tether going to have any signal? I have a phone plan? Your decisions would be different if you have different requirements and restrictions. It's not like any of this requires expensive hardware, Intel Quicksync is on my £75 Wyse thin client acting as the server and can transcode perfectly for an iPhone/Android TV/etc. Secondly, it isn't only doing those duties. It's also hooked up to stream TV so if I remember something I want to watch later it will record, and if I'm having to wait and there is nothing to read I can watch a show. Can't do that with "putting files on a device".
        carlosjobim 3y ago
        What I mean with signal for the tether is that in the example of watching stuff on an iPad in the car, you'll probably be in places where there is no signal and then it doesn't matter if the chip is in the iPad or in your phone – you still can't get signal. But I'm probably not the intended user for these self hosted media servers. I don't watch a ton of stuff, and what I watch is generally on YouTube.
        jethro_tell 3y ago
        > To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth. I'm glad that use case works for you. However, an inability to imagine a usecase where that could be of value than shitting on people who say they have that use case isn't a great look. I meets the needs of my usecase and my family. We were using plex before but since it required central login for of network use it has been on the deprecation list for me. But the exact solution is not relevant to the need and use case that makes the quite a bit less work than other options for us. I spend quite a bit of time with my family moving between locations so, yes we have internet for that. The timing isn't always pre-planned so offline media consumption can be tough. Additionally, we may leave with a couple hours notice and spend a week or more before we come home. In which case, we'll stream media from a different location than our primary residence. Additionally, we record/watch things off our digital tv antenna to stream when we are out of range. Which gets a little tougher for a generic fileserver. So for us, it's quite a bit less trouble than it's worth. It's all the same things that setting up a local media setup involves with the addition of an authenticated streaming frontend that can be setup to work with multiple clients in multiple locations and multiple times.
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      There have been iPads with cellular modems since launch.
heartjudytenuta 3y ago
Or you could purchase inFuse, point it to a Samba server and literally walk away and be done. They even support connecting to a Jellyfin backend. Paying for commercial software that works out of the box, I know, the horror, I'm literally shaking.
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  Smb over the internet sucks. So good for multiple TVs single location.
mmh0000 3y ago
Ouch. But sadly not true. Both my non-tech wife and my four year old have figured out how to watch things. Which, is, my point. VLC, a directory browser, and ktorrent suite our needs so perfectly. Admittedly, the four year old hasn't figured out how to download torrents yet; but for my wife it was super simple to explain: "goto this website, search for desired show, only download from purple or green pirates." My setup is slightly more complicated than I let on in the first post. We have multiple TVs, each hooked to a linux laptop (lenovo T430s, because I had one and the rest were cheap on ebay.). Then there's a NAS with SMB. All media is downloaded to the NAS, any T.V. can watch any downloaded media.
- jethro_tell 3y ago
  Fair enough, still a single household solution.
fomine3 3y ago
TBH I don't want to share any shady downloaded Linux ISO videos with others

carlosjobim 3y ago

12 years ago me and my then girlfriend used to torrent a USB pen drive full of the series and movies we wanted to watch and just plug it into a Sony TV and watch. Including subtitles when we wanted. You could put that USB pen drive in your pocket to continue watching at a friends house. 20 years ago, we'd connect any PC or Mac to the TV with HDMI and watch a movie or whatever we wanted.

jethro_tell 3y ago
Nice, I'm sure that works great on an iPad in the car
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  How is your iPad going to connect to your media server on the road with no signal?
  - happymellon 3y ago
    I normally solve this by tethering. All these media clients support downloading too for offline usage.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth. Setting up a server and installing clients, pirating a bunch of content to put on your server. Then using the client to download files since you won't have signal (how is the tether going to have any signal?). I guess it's fun for hackers to tinker with this stuff, but just putting the file on the device like we did 12 years ago seems much easier.
      - happymellon 3y ago
        The only additional step is installing a server application, you would probably have installed VLC or something to use anyway on the client. Having a box to store your stuff, ripping or downloading to it is still the same regardless of installing a client or not. > how is the tether going to have any signal? I have a phone plan? Your decisions would be different if you have different requirements and restrictions. It's not like any of this requires expensive hardware, Intel Quicksync is on my £75 Wyse thin client acting as the server and can transcode perfectly for an iPhone/Android TV/etc. Secondly, it isn't only doing those duties. It's also hooked up to stream TV so if I remember something I want to watch later it will record, and if I'm having to wait and there is nothing to read I can watch a show. Can't do that with "putting files on a device".
        carlosjobim 3y ago
        What I mean with signal for the tether is that in the example of watching stuff on an iPad in the car, you'll probably be in places where there is no signal and then it doesn't matter if the chip is in the iPad or in your phone – you still can't get signal. But I'm probably not the intended user for these self hosted media servers. I don't watch a ton of stuff, and what I watch is generally on YouTube.
      - jethro_tell 3y ago
        > To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth. I'm glad that use case works for you. However, an inability to imagine a usecase where that could be of value than shitting on people who say they have that use case isn't a great look. I meets the needs of my usecase and my family. We were using plex before but since it required central login for of network use it has been on the deprecation list for me. But the exact solution is not relevant to the need and use case that makes the quite a bit less work than other options for us. I spend quite a bit of time with my family moving between locations so, yes we have internet for that. The timing isn't always pre-planned so offline media consumption can be tough. Additionally, we may leave with a couple hours notice and spend a week or more before we come home. In which case, we'll stream media from a different location than our primary residence. Additionally, we record/watch things off our digital tv antenna to stream when we are out of range. Which gets a little tougher for a generic fileserver. So for us, it's quite a bit less trouble than it's worth. It's all the same things that setting up a local media setup involves with the addition of an authenticated streaming frontend that can be setup to work with multiple clients in multiple locations and multiple times.
  - averageRoyalty 3y ago
    There have been iPads with cellular modems since launch.

heartjudytenuta 3y ago

Or you could purchase inFuse, point it to a Samba server and literally walk away and be done. They even support connecting to a Jellyfin backend. Paying for commercial software that works out of the box, I know, the horror, I'm literally shaking.

jethro_tell 3y ago
Smb over the internet sucks. So good for multiple TVs single location.

mmh0000 3y ago

Ouch. But sadly not true. Both my non-tech wife and my four year old have figured out how to watch things. Which, is, my point. VLC, a directory browser, and ktorrent suite our needs so perfectly. Admittedly, the four year old hasn't figured out how to download torrents yet; but for my wife it was super simple to explain: "goto this website, search for desired show, only download from purple or green pirates." My setup is slightly more complicated than I let on in the first post. We have multiple TVs, each hooked to a linux laptop (lenovo T430s, because I had one and the rest were cheap on ebay.). Then there's a NAS with SMB. All media is downloaded to the NAS, any T.V. can watch any downloaded media.

jethro_tell 3y ago
Fair enough, still a single household solution.

fomine3 3y ago

TBH I don't want to share any shady downloaded Linux ISO videos with others