Bittorrule

O woe us, what are we gonna do!

Very cool, thanks for the explanation!

Maybe this is just me but using a torrent through a CLI is something I have not explored at all, I just transfer files back and forth. Seems very useful

In addition to the UI others have mentioned, I host mine behind a VPN so all my friends can use it over the Internet, too. It gets a decent amount of traffic every week.

I have many multiple tb drives to sell them. As many as they want.

“Jellyfin and put it in”

“Just in case I need it” is the principle of hoarding.

a large media library achieves a similar thing a subscription to on-demand streaming achieves: pick a film to watch, and you can immediately press play. there’s also a curation aspect. whenever one friend speaks highly of a film, i grab it. then once i have a larger group of friends over for movie night, we just peruse the library until we find something everyone’s in the right mood for. whatever we select from that library, i can be confident it’ll be received well: it’s already been vetted.

i mean it’s not that different from the original value proposition for Netflix, only it survives even after they turn off the money faucet.

fuck yeah

I LOVE SELF HOSTING

Plex n coitus

because it is convenient to access the movies from a smartphone or laptop from anywhere in the house without dealing with the headaches of windows file explorer shitting itself upon seeing a folder with 3000 files in it

Are you just giving them a shared login or do you set them all up individually?

refurbished drives are great for storing easily replaceable data

composite video waveforms are about a treabyte per vhs tape, I don’t think Jellyfin supports playing them but thats an extremely “normal” amount of video content for everyone to have created

Not OP, but each friend gets a different login so that their watch stats don’t get convoluted (Jellyfin does this thing where it allows you to pick up where you left off)

Neat, navigable UI. Pulls posters, metadata, etc. Can generate “trickplay” images so you’ve thumbnails when scrolling the progress bar. You can sync playback across connected clients (I mostly use that feature for multi-room music playback). Restrictions by account and/or tags so the little ones don’t end up watching Ichi the Killer, Saló, your complete Cronenberg collection, or that library you created populated by a script routinely checking the e621 API for the latest animation uploads.

Runs in browser and on clients for Windows, Linux, Android, probably iOS too but homie don’t Apple. Took every bit of space but I even sideloaded it onto my old Samsung Tizen TV (wouldn’t actually recommend, little slow, build an HTPC or just nab an Nvidia Shield).

If you can get by without any/all of that, nothing wrong just browsing directories and playing media with your local player on a single device. In my case I’d need to set up overly complicated network shares and then configure every single device I want to have access. I’d need to change how I organize my libraries, then probably spend a little time writing an ansible playbook (that’d only really be worth it when adding new devices in the future) but… no thanks.

There must be a word that rhymes better with Plex…

And that Linus Torvalds poster? I’d be on my knees in an instant. To propose of course.

How did you get started with hosting your setup?

All individual logins. It just requires making an account through the UI, which is pretty quick.

Mostly, I’ve been fed up with music streaming platforms recently, and found that Jellyfin also supports my other media cases. I started with Navidrome, but had a computer running Mint already, so I just ran both side-by-side and find I liked Jellyfin better. They both took like 15 minutes to set up; getting my local VPN running and convincing people to use it was by far the hardest part of the setup.

That all said, I’m a software engineer in my day job, so I had a pretty good idea about how to navigate everything.