Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?
Sooo… where’s the self-hosted material coming from if Bluray’s aren’t being produced any more?
If the high seas dries up, are we up shit creek and have to stream?
Webrips. That’s how we get movies and shows today without waiting for physical media being released
Yeah, piracy is the last bastion of privately controlled media files
Doesn’t seem like it’s going away though
No illusions on my part. RAID5 NAS with periodic disk archive backups.
- Books
- Audiobooks
- Retro game ROMs
- FLAC music collection
- Movies, TV, and anime series
Got what I need locally and intend to keep it that way. I’m sick of sites like Amazon with “Buy Now” buttons that are really “rent now via restrictive terms and only via devices we approve until we decide you no longer need access.”
maybe I’ve been living under a rock but I don’t get all this emphasis on hosting. What’s wrong with having a file on your device that you just play when you want to
That is the smallest scale of self hosting. The server and the client are the same device. It is also the most insecure way as you probably don’t have any backups and very limited storage space.
Actually self hosting is the next step when you decide you want 5+ TB of data and have it automatically create backups. Digital storage media degrade pretty quickly and if you just have your movies on a hard drive in your computer, after 5-10 years you might start to lose quality or some files completely.
start to lose quality
Wait… That’s a thing? You can lose video quality off a video file on a HD over time?
Yup, bitrot is a thing. Got a few video files from around 2000 only one player can still open and even then there are lots of artifacts. Moving the files periodically helps to reduce risk. Better is to use a file system\software that prevents that. I’m using snapraid on my server now and do regular scrubs.
Not like the whole video goes from 1080p to 720p or something but single bits of the drive will fails over time. If that bit is part of your video file, one pixel of one frame will be the wrong color/black. If multiple bits close to each other fail you might get a video stutter. If even more fail your video player will not play the video at all (or just stop playing at the place of the errors).
Oh yeah I was aware that it won’t change from 1080 to 720 :p.
But I thought the movie would just be corrupted an unplayable not lose quality bits !
corrupt files will have glitches in the best case, but more likely have noticeable decoding errors, and completely unplayable files in the worst case (some parts of a video file are essential for processing the rest). that could also happen if the file system metadata gets corrupted, and the OS cannot piece together the file extents or the whole directory anymore.
modern data storage relies on reliable storage medium. to protect yourself against bit rot the only thing you can do is to keep backups on different storage devices. but what does it worth if you don’t notice (in time) there’s corruption. you need some way to detect it. a catalogue of some sort, like a checksum file for a whole directory tree, automatically extended with new files, ran in checking mode on schedule, and notifeably notifying you about issues. it can be a custom made solution for traditional file systems like ext4, ntfs, xfs, the FATs, etc, or a filesystem that has that function built-in like zfs or btrfs. the latter two don’t implement the notification and the schedule part, but they do the majority of the work. also if you want to notice not just corruption but erroneous deletion or modification too, you should also use their snapshot functionality. you can diff them to see if there’s any unexpected changes.
You do have the file on a device… On a server, and you can play it on any client you like
Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.
If you don’t need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.
For me, it’s a matter of restoring the convenience and UX that you’ve given up by leaving the big providers.
Personally fed up with the greedy streaming companies. Price hikes, movies and series disappearing, lower quality because you don’t pay for the premium deluxe 2.0 subscription, and the most annoying of all: advertisements, even though you do pay $$ for premium deluxe ultra 3.0 pro max subscription.
Selfhost 🙌🏻😊- music is always available, same with movies. Perfect!
…well, almost perfect. It really is quite expensive, but also very fun and rewarding getting it to work.
The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.
Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring: -Bigger drives -Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to) -Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy) -Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps) -Etc.
Now, for the streaming alternative: Netflix Standard: $18/mo Spotify: $12/mo Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.
Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.
My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.
laughs in
piratedata archivistIf something isn’t worth waiting just a bit of time to torrent it, as opposed to just instantly streaming it?
Good rule of thumb: It’s slop, you don’t actually care for it, it’s just white noise.
Alternatively, your setup is kinda slow and you’re kinda lazy (not used pejoratively).
I can’t hear you over my 10TB storage disk of movies.
Imagine not having a double digit bay NAS with triple digit number of Tebibytes.
Well…I preferred double parity for my 4-bay NAS :p
Oh nowadays you can get 26tb drives pretty affordably, so a 4 bay NAS could be getting you 50TiB now.
Of course most people don’t need all that though… including me honestly but hey, that data isn’t going to collect itself.
Bought it about 1 year ago from overtime work hours (as compensation).
So there were budgetary constraints. Plus I was looking for drives that were quiet and wouldnt rattle my brain out (it runs in the same room I sleep in).
So far it’s quiet enough to sleep while in light use but I had to schedule stuff while I am usually at work to not disturb my rest too much.Edit:
Of course most people don’t need all that though… including me honestly but hey, that data isn’t going to collect itself.
No, no. You do need that ;D
Personally I have 4x16TB but I have allocated only 46% (12.96/28.07TiB) for use.
And that’s currently enough for me.
Rookie.
k
pretty sure that’s meant in a light hearted fashion
Might be.
But I’d rather use a meme phrase in that case like “Those are (absolute) rookie numbers”.Not taken in bad blood but also not really funny (to me).
They’re going up again?
I dropped all of those. I just have a couple services now.
CBC Gem (mostly to support CanCon and local media), one streamer, and I migrated to Qobuz for music.
I’m the spring I’ll go to yard sales for dvds/blu rays. They’re like a dollar there, which is reasonable.
A ton of content I liked is now owned by fascists and Larry Ellison, so I don’t even want to buy new media anymore.
Do you know what ORACLE stands for?
I wonder of Palantir is connected to Oracle. Likely so.
No
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
The price of ownership is maintenance.
Prices keep rising because people will pay ANY price to avoid personal responsibility.
I guess I’m a unicorn in that Netflix or equal has no draw for me. I’m not a movie watcher. I’m more interested in how they made it vs the actual movie content itself. I don’t even watch TV of any kind. I have no Spotify or equal, music streaming platform. I just can’t take the incessant ads every couple songs, and it’s the same flipping ad over and over. Instead, I listen to my music collection which is fairly large, most of it from my days of running a licensed internet radio station back in the pre-Napster days, and read. Not much into fiction or novels etc. Give me history, news, anything to do with computers, etc. I mean, the internet is a vast repository of data, and I have yet to surf to the end of it. At no other time in human history have we had the sum total of the world’s knowledge, maybe not wisdom, but knowledge, resting in the palm of our hand or sitting on a desktop. The great libraries of Alexandria would look like my magazine rack in comparison. I just find that reading helps me digest the information better, and in the case of news, it allows me to cross reference, highlight, search, compare ad nauseam, in search of the truth trifecta, which you’ll never get on your TV screen.
I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.
+1 for PBS streaming. It’s a great value and highly underrated.
Thanks for reminding me. I still have shows I need to download.
Self-Hosting? What happened to saving things onto a hard drive?
Self-hosting is saving to a hard drive. The difference is how it’s accessed. If you save it to a (presumably portable?) hard drive, you can only access it from the hard drive. “Self-hosting” allows it to be stored on a hard drive, inside a server, which is then accessible from anywhere, on any device, at any time.
that’s self-hosted.
Self hosting essentially stores all of your data on your hard drive, but it also allows access to that via local network (while at home) and over internet via secured tunnel (e.g. Wireguard tunnel, Tailscale) while away from home.
Nah, federation is a valid alternative to self hosting
You’re going to “own” digital content through…federation? How does that work?
In what way? You don’t own anything on the fediverse. The people who run the various instances do.
Maybe they even have a TOS that says you own it, but then what? its still up to them to continue to host it, and they have no contract with you.
Unless you are self hosting your own instance, and only count what is on that, you own no more than with larger social media sites.
To be clear, I think that federations certainly are better than monolithic sources for a variety of reasons for real people, but they aren’t a solution for ownership.
disagree. legally a government can forcefully take down a community but it’s far more difficult to police a physical ring of pirates.
pirating in the late 90s early 2000s was mostly done through physical interaction. you could download content from places like Napster, limewire, etc, but the volume of which content spread the fastest was at LAN parties.
I filled up a brand new 250gb drive after one LAN party in 2002. I still have all that content 23 years later.
point is, if we could harness the power of a “trust” content sharing would run rampant.
So we should do LAN parties again then!
completely agree.
The only streaming services that make sense to me are the niche ones that focus on original content.
Wrestling streaming services like njpw world, trillerTV, or wrestle universe, specialised libraries like Shudder.
Generalised shit for mainstream content is not worth the money.
