I would build a cheap PC based on a G series Intel CPU. The G7400 is cheap and will handle anything you want to transcode, plus won’t get bottlenecked with IO and other processes you might want to run later like the Arr stack. You probably don’t need more than 8GB of RAM. This will give you lots of flexibility to choose the right OS which suits you, which software you want, upgrades, and especially HDDs down the road (if you get a case with HDD slots). I started small and ended up with 15 disks over the years.

Unraid ($250) is one option but it’s expensive and buggy. TrueNAS is a very popular ZFS based solution which is free. Windows is also a surprisingly good option. It’s your lowest effort option by far. You can replicate Unraid functionality with SnapRAID and DrivePool ($50).

ChatGPT can be surprisingly useful when tackling the endless bugs and weird and unexpected differences on each Linux distro. I think you’re missing out. It shaves off 30-40% of the time it takes me to arrive at the right solution. It’s obviously not omniscient, but it provides a lot of ideas which I had not considered. Usually one of those paths works.

The Finals is an absolute mess with cheaters right now. People are pissed in the forums. They’re leaving the game as fast as they can attract new players. Player numbers have been flat since March, and are significantly down since launch. I don’t know if a game like this is sustainable with only 18,000 weekly players but I guess we’ll find out.

Remote viewing in Jellyfin requires significantly more work from me as the server admin, but it is just as easy for the remote viewing clients. I don’t have to do any first-time setup for them. I recommend an app or two for the media type they’re using, and all they need is URL, login, password.

Thanks for your suggestion. I spent some time investigating this to see how feasible it would be. I have my own domain and static IP, so setup on my end would be pretty straight forward. Users would need to enter my domain:port on first login, but I could walk them through that. I’m going to give it a shot and see how practical it is. If the performance is better, as you say, then it probably trumps those features you mention. With the exception of subtitles for me and the family. We use subs most of the time and need on-demand selection. Automated subs are very hit or miss.

It’s also disappointing to hear the Jellyfin app doesn’t support downloads but I guess if Streamyfin is available on all the platforms then I could just use that.

I tried Finamp and the UI is very not good on iOS. It also lacks a lot of features compared to Plexamp.

Plex is still MUCH easier to share with my friends and family. I’ll be sticking with Plex until the UX on Jellyfin is comparable. Also Plexamp is the best music app I have ever used. It’s unbelievably good. Also Plex has more features like the ability to download and select new subtitles on the fly, and consistent skip intro functionality across all apps on all devices.

With Radarr, Sonarr, and Plex, I get a better TV and movie service than anything I could pay for. I can afford to pay, and I would, but they won’t offer anything reasonable. I ditched Netflix years ago when they removed the rating system to promote their low quality schlock. They kept removing content. Content would auto-play. Discovery broke as they kept trying to make me watch things I didn’t want to watch. If they make their products worse, and keep charging me more every year, they shouldn’t be surprised when I leave.

Yeah, those “kill switches” are marketed as being effective but they are imperfect. Same issues with Private Internet Access. They’re probably good enough for most people for browsing the internet, but when torrenting, it takes just one TCP packet to give you away.

Plexamp is mind blowingly good. Great UX. Perfect reliability. No discovery/ads up in your face. Just you listening to your music how you like it. Streaming is ROCK SOLID. Downloads work flawlessly. It just relies on proper metadata in Plex.

FYI you can definitely watch while your network is offline. You just net to tell it that you’re happy with that (it’s not activated by default for security reasons).

• In your Plex server settings, go to Network, enable “Show Advanced”.

• Near the bottom, find the textbox that says List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth

• In this field, enter the local IP address of any Plex client(s) you want to keep using if your internet (or the Plex cloud) is down.

• A example: 192.168.0.50

• Save the setting, done.

#Important thing to be aware of:

What this setting does is tell your local Plex server to simply give any Plex client that connects from that specific IP full admin access to your Plex server, ignoring any account restrictions. This means that if you have things in place to restrict access to some libraries (kids blocked from 18+ movies etc) those restrictions will have no effect. Also if you have the option set to allow file deletion, then any client from that IP could also delete items. And they could of course change any settings in your Plex server. So your kids can watch anything on your server, if you have a guest in your network and they browse to the Plex web interface, they can mess with things.

Because of that I would recommend to limit the amount of IP’s you enter in that field to the absolute bare minimum. For example, only whitelist the “main living room device” plus one device you to admin the server, such as a laptop.

If you want to whitelist multiple devices, this is a example:

192.168.0.50,192.168.0.77,192.168.0.80

If you want to whitelist a entire network, these would be examples:

192.168.0.0/24 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255)

192.168.0.0/16 (this means 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255)

And of course those involved network devices should use static IPs in your home network.

Ditto. There is a crowd on Lemmy who seem to get angry whenever people are happy to pay for software and I do not understand it. Surely we want developers to be paid for their hard work? Don’t we want them to able to comfortably live?

Well that doesn’t look right but I’m not a boat physicist so I’ll just accept it at face value.

Ironically, I think Fediverse suffers from a high amount of tech expertise and not enough project managers, lol.

I 1,000% agree. FOSS projects are dominated by skilled developers who have to work under the direction of managers in their day jobs and FUCKING HATE IT. They dream about breaking the shackles of idiotic managers who are suppressing their talent and creativity, so they work on FOSS projects. Only to learn that developers without clear direction is like herding angry cats at a Metallica concert. The end result is a patchwork of features each developer would personally like, but normal people hate.

I am probably biased here because I am one of those managers. The reason we don’t work on FOSS projects is because 1) they don’t want us working on them, and 2) we fucking hate our jobs as-is, and don’t want to spend one more minute than necessary herding angry cats.

Lots of people have opinions, not many people want to organize their thoughts into, eg. an effective advertising campaign, a github pull request, or basically anything other than meaningless musing.

This is the nature of free work. Any donation of time is sparse and intermittent. People have bills to pay. The best and brightest want to be paid well for their time. This requires a business model of some kind, and monetising that work. This is antithetical to FOSS projects, and is the reason they will almost always be inferior to projects with large budgets with teams of UX designers. /obligatory COME AT ME BRO

I’ve had exactly the same experience. Lemmy has been far more hostile than I ever experienced on Reddit. Any opinions which aren’t far left are called “Nazi,” and users are very quick to justify violence against “Nazis.”

That’s coherent. Unfortunately most people who use it today literally mean “someone who disagrees with me.” It really muddies the water because it’s often accompanied by threats of violence. The net effect is raising the temperature in the room on both sides, because it’s effectively dehumanising others who have perfectly valid political disagreements, and calling for their death.

The “tolerance paradox” is a handy tool with which to justify violence by those on both sides. If I’m just fighting intolerance, then my actions are justified. It’s a common rally cry used by authoritarians to stamp out diversity and democracy. To really hammer the point home, the Nazis were the first to employ it. By blaming their issues on the “intolerance” of foreign states, they justified a global war. It is obviously the inspiration for Popper’s 1945 work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Russia is currently using this fallacy to justify the war in Ukraine, claiming that the West is “intolerant” of Russia, and they need to defend themselves against this intolerance.

Here is a full quote from Popper on the subject if anyone is interested.

I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.

But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

Popper’s argument is laid bare here. Tolerate up to the point of violence. That is, if one physically attacks us, we no longer have the burden of tolerance. Popper is commonly misquoted and intentionally misused to justify violence, suppresion, and censorship against disagreement, and that is clearly not his argument.

disagree, if political discourse can’t survive public debate, then it isn’t a very good political ideology.

They made it clear they’re talking about spaces and topics not about politics. People who feel entitled and compelled to make everything a political culture war are insufferable. Made worse when they call everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi. The word has lost all meaning now.

Docker isn’t hard if you use a compose file. It’s easy to read syntax.

This is giving me “yaml isn’t hard to use if you use a compose file!” It is, actually. It’s easy for you because you understand the technology. The vast majority of people do not.

One does not need an internet connection for offline use. Check this if you’re having issues.

One does not need to pay for multiple user accounts. As per this update, they are actually removing the one-time fee for non family member mobile apps. Now it’s all free, provided the server owner has a Plex Pass.

Plex has been supporting hardware transcoding since 2017.

To be clear, I’m not saying Jellyfin is bad. I think it’s great to have competition and I understand plenty of people like it.

I feel like I’m getting more than what I paid for. I understand it was a legal contractual exchange. I’m merely commenting on the value I’ve received relative to what I paid. Especially given the continued improvements over time.