Dad said we're getting a sourcebox!
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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I set up my home server, then realized my Internet is shit and my upload speeds can't even steam 1 4k movie, let alone several at once.
I am not excited to triple my monthly Internet bill for better upload speeds, but it will have to happen soon.
I'm more worried about my electricity bill tbh. Low-power devices aren't easily available and the second hand market is crap in my area.
IMO 4k resolution is overkill its way past the optimal between file storage and visual fidelity. Nobody has ever complained about the visual quality of my 720p or 1080p sourced stuff much in the same way most sane people wont notice the difference between FLAC and mp3 on average listening. Bhack in my day we were lucky to get 480p on a square box tv.
I would gladly spend more for better (10mbit up atm) but all the upgrades get me to like 25 up and that's it. I have no incentive to spend more for basically nothing. I hate it.
Just get a service that can download the movie from ur sever and then watch it offline.
Every time I spin one up. I spend weeks setting things and playing with it. And then never use it again until I get bored and rebuild it.
Everyone is a really, really big target
The first disclaimer in the video is the most relatable thing I've read in a while
We should have never lost the capability to have LAN parties for all games.
Just yesterday I wiped the drive and installed Linux on the 3rd old PC for the LAN setup I'm putting together, literally "for the children!"
It's an i7-920 from 2008. It has TRIPLE channel ram, baby. I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon and it was as quick and painless as usual.
I already get the warm fuzzies when I walk into the room and find my 3rd grader playing on my PC instead of their tablet or even the console. Our first LAN party is gonna be sweet.
I used to dream once that I would be able to give my future son Q4OS to grow up with and if a daughter, something like PuppyOS. Alas, I'm a single 30-something guy living in his parent's basement with no real prospects of owning my own home or getting laid—so go figure. At least somebody out there is living the dream! 🤝
You're spitting rn
Thanks for using peer tube
How beneficial is connecting via ethernet instead of wifi? My wifi mesh pods only have 1 ethernet out port, so I use it for my desktop. Not sure if I could split it or not, but I imagine if I did it'd slow down my desktop's internet connection, which I'd rather not do.
A switch won't slow anything at home.
It's super cheap and literally plug and play.
I can't be sure since technology has so many different factors, but splitting a single Ethernet out into multiple with a network switch won't really affect it much if at all. Cat5e cable/jack (common for most cables) gets 1 gigabit, so unless you have a gigabit connection and maxing out the connections already, you shouldn't notice it.
As for WiFi, even though a lot of newer technology is great, it's not going to beat Ethernet.
Good to know, thanks! I did just upgrade to a gigabit fiber connection, but you're right that I'm not usually maxing that out.
Yeah it barely makes a dip. It is one of the first things I tested when putting in a switch where I just go do the ookla speed test.
Agreed. It's time my occasional minecraft/PZomboid server got a nextcloud upgrade.
I have my own server and it's great, but the real product these streaming services sell isn't access to content—it's discoverability and recommendations. We need a better solution for that!
Tbh, I pretty much never use site recommendations. I almost always learn of shows and movies via social media and memes
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I want a future where communities self host their media and circumvent media companies like Netflix and Disney. Local film clubs, TV clubs, hobbyists, etc. can come together and host as a collective bringing down costs and making this more accessible.
Like ham radio ppl
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Hosting email just saved the day! My ex got locked out of her email account and password resets were blocked. However she still had one “home” forwarding email configured as a recovery address, so we were able to redirect it somewhere accessible and unlock her email account!
My entire life is Linux and self hosted, aside from Email. I may get to that one day too. Love my Plex server, even with the more recent baloney the company's apparently been up to.
I should be using Jellyfin but once I get home from work I don't want to tinker any more, I just wanna play a game or dick around.
Agree with the message in the video, these companies should be told to pound sand the minute they do a single anti-consumer thing.
Is there a way around the problem that plex only feeds from ex fat/nt drives but Linux has permission issues networking such a drive? I wanted to have one computer where I’m doing all the formatting and the other being the standalone plex server with them both connected. Samba is being a pain.
Curious about your problem. I'm using NFS instead of samba now, but legitimately never faced any problems doing what you're describing previously.
I set up jellyfin recently. Haven't tinkered with it any more than plex to be fair
I just have my old PC's running Linux connected directly to the tv or projector.
I use a super basic webdav server or free ^arr^ ^matey^ streaming sites.
I sometimes sftp into devices.
That's my setup.
I pay for netflix... dumped prime a couple of years ago and got given disney+ for free for 12 months. I have my own server and am on version 3.2 of it after my first dedicated one I built in 2009. I've kinda had others before then, but it was an old PC I hooked up to my old CRT tv in about 2002 which struggled to play some mpeg2 content due to the weak single core CPU it had in it.
Now it's running on an AM4 setup with a Ryzen 5 5600G, so I can use the PCIE socket that used to have a GPU in it for a SATA expansion card, so that I can triple the number of HDD's it could hold. I'm slowly going through it once a year replacing the oldest 6TB drives (without about 80,000+hrs of uptime on them) with 14TB archive drives I rip out of seagate external drives. 4 more to go... to add to the 4 already done.
I think my first dedicated server had 3TB of storage (2x 1.5TB) and I still have one of those drives in an external drive that I use occasionally to fill with movies and shows when I go away and take one of my shield tv boxes with me... but mostly I take an external 500gb ssd as it doesn't require a power supply and I rarely have enough time to watch 1TB of movies and shows whilst away.
Over the last 15yrs, it's been rebuilt a few times and upgrade many... adding extra drives, swapping out CPU's and so on. 3 ground up builds with the last one being built in 2020... Normally when I build a new system for myself, the mediaserver gets upgraded with my old parts... Hence the last one being on windows 7 and an AMD FX 8350 with DDR3 ram until mid 2020.
Currently about 70TB capacity.
My next one will have a dedicated raid setup with parity... it's the one thing I've never been able to do with such a random collection of different size drives... hence normalizing them all to the same kind of 14TB ones.
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