Oddly enough, the price hikes earlier last year were enough to move me to spend four times as much as an annual subscription for a NAS and 16TB of storage. I made digital backups of my media and set up my parents and sister’s family with Jellyfin accounts to access my media as needed. Now they can watch videos of our wedding and my niece’s dance recital from the comfort of their living rooms. All without worrying about arbitrary changes to TOS. And I’m learning about all kinds of horrible children’s shows. OTOH my niece and nephew are learning about cool things like Batman: The Animated Series and Tiny Toons.
I’ve only run into a couple small issues when it came to backing up my media, but I’ll get them sorted.
My media server also handles family movies, including VHS from the 80s I’ve converted and cleaned up.
Server itself is a cheap off lease dell micro I bought several years back for $125, added a $50 nvme SSD, and the igpu has been chugging along transcoding beautifully since.
Same system also runs a separate book/comic/etc service, backup DNS, a generated kid safe “channel” that is available on the media server, all my dslr photos are on there, etc, etc.
Which then for what is crucial to me gets a local and a remote backup.
At this point I’ve saved money over paying for subscriptions, and I use it for a whole lot more (so even more savings on top).
I'd like to use Jelly Fin, but it has not been a great experience for me on a Mac with an Apple TV. HDR doesn't carry over, some videos are blocked due to music licensing or something, and the library syncing doesn't always work. I'm not sure if it's a Jellyfin problem, a lack of support for Mac hardware, or just my personal incompetence with this sort of thing (very likely). I managed to get Plex to work without issue, so I'm using that even if I don't really like the UX all that much.
First off, I’m by no means even close to an expert. More of a spurt, in fact.
I tried Plex but wanted to give remote access at varying levels, which, to my understanding, requires paying for a subscription to Plex Premium or some such. Basically I wanted to be able to see my sexy home videos from anywhere, let my parents see my wedding videos and their granddaughter’s dance recital, and let my niece see her dance recital only (to painfully stretch a metaphor).
Jellyfin has it’s limits. It’s easier for my needs in part because my family has Roku, and there is a built-in app for Jellyfin on Roku devices. I have a Samsung TV and haven’t taught myself how to sideload Jellyfin into my TV. The app works great tho, so I can watch things on my phone or laptop with ease while on vacation. I probably spent a few hours teaching myself about port forwarding, VPNs, and such. I bought a Synology NAS, which simplified things quite a bit.
Anyway, I’m not at all familiar with Apple products. Nothing wrong with them, mind, I just never liked the walled garden ethos
See if the TV supports DLNA by any chance, Jellyfin does, so all you’d need would be a DLNA controller app on your phone to make one cast to the other.
Alternatively, there’s a self-hosted app called BubbleUPnP Server that can DLNA-enable (some) things without native support. I know for a fact it can do it for Google devices, maybe it can do it for Samsung too.
i dont even sub to streaming services and currently building my media server (5x 12tb drives in zfs z2) just for archival and setting up a service for some family inthe case they want to bail. aa prices fo up, people are just going to look for a diy way at some point.
I was toying with the idea of a home made server using an existing case and a mini atx, but then i ran across a 16TB NAS HDD for like $240 at microcenter and just decided to go the simple route, picked up a two bay Synology case and the rest is history
zfs is just a disk file system format (e.g like fat32, exfat, ntfs), z2 for laymen is basically double parity drives (drives are setup that 2 drive worth is used as data integrity, so in the case of a dead disk drive, data isnt lost and can be repaired. z2 offers 2 disks can die before recovery is finished (meaning requires 3 drives to die to actually lose data))
I decided I would help Disney out with their password sharing problem by canceling my Disney Plus account a few months ago. No, they never have to worry about it again.
Meh. I cancelled Netflix when they did it and I cancelled my Hulu bundle when I got the email a couple of days ago. I know I won’t make a difference, but I also won’t miss either one of them.
Just get the service for a month and drop it after catching up on the things you want. I keep it so I can watch bluey with my daughter, but I rotate most of my services.
I think the next thing they're gonna do is go after people who sub for a month and then unsub. Probably by charging a good bit more for month-to-month than paying annually.
Might miss out on a one time deal that locks your price for a year, but even if its fifteen bucks for a month to catch up on things I want to watch I’m fine switching services each month.
So my child, who is not old enough for their own account, will now no longer be able to watch Disney+ while attending school at their residential academy 400 miles away. Just like Netflix. And just like Netflix, my subscription will be canceled the moment they try to block them from logging in.
So my child, who is not old enough for their own account, will now no longer be able to watch Disney+ while attending school at their residential academy 400 miles away. Just like Netflix. And just like Netflix, my subscription will be canceled the moment they try to block them from logging in.
I’ve started cracking down on Disney+, and I’m getting flack for it. It’s all “why did you dropkick our TV”, “how did you get in here”, “we’re calling the police” bla bla bla bla. I’m just trying to help! Geez.
It worked for Netflix. It’s easy to scoff at the clearly customer-antagonistic policies these services are turning towards, inevitably accompanied by the “well, they lost me as a subscriber” flood of comments. But the unfortunate truth is the vast majority of people just shut up and pay, resulting in big net income for the corporations that enact these policies.
I’m not sure that it actually did work for Netflix. I’ve seen at least one article claiming that Netflix lost subscribers in western markets after the change, but also added large numbers of subscribers in developing markets where the subscription price was much cheaper. Netflix spun this as “we added more users last quarter.”
raising prices, adding ads and cracking down on shared accounts all have me LOOKing for a place to get a MOVIE 2 watch without messing with a DOT TOrrent file
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