>The hardest to kick for me now is YouTube Premium.. And in AU it's like $33/month AUD, but I just can't stand ads.

Any reason you're not just running network level AdGuard and Firefox with Ublock Origin to block all ads on your home network? Even just FF+UBO would block YouTube ads.

The selfhosted subreddit is also a really good resource to use for interesting things to run.

I've been on this mission but unfortunately also trying to defend my PhD in a month. But I do have a lot more Linux experience. Here's stuff that I think will really help.

yt-dlp: a video downloaded. Originally designed for YouTube but supports a lot of sites. I suggest heavily aliasing this with options like sleep intervals, aria2, and make sure you download the user agent switcher. For YouTube you probably need to import cookies from a browser. But you'll be able to watch the videos without the ads.

Btrfs: it's a file system, like ext4 or ntfs. Has a lot of useful things like being able to create subvolumes, raid, cache drives (or volumes), quotas, snapshots, etc. Think anything that you'd do with zfs but it's been easier to use and it has a copy on write system that helps dedupe. You can also compress the file system! I use duperemover. If it finds dupes it replaces one file with a link (which btrfs natively supports). It'll hash the files so run it early and then set up a job (use a systemd timer)

Tailscale: take your network anywhere. God, tailscale is so fucking useful. You can even put it on a raspberry pi or your phones. It's nice to have it on an old phone which you can throw termux on and have a little server. I've used these to jump to another machine that has had issues where it could connect locally but not outside. You can also set up exit nodes so you can do things like push all your traffic through a vpn, make all your traffic use pihole, or just make it appear like you're somewhere else. You could use this to even make it effectively impossible for streaming services to know you're sharing an account. The data is going through whoever's house pays. If you get fancy you can set up rules to port specific traffic through specific locations but this is still a bit above my head. I just know it's possible. Unfortunately with iPhones you have less control. They can even break out of all this and you don't have full control. I need to get someone to explain more networking to me.

Systemd: it's annoying at first but damn there's so much to it that is helpful. Use systemctl edit to edit your service files. The ones that come with services like jellyfin aren't nearly as locked down as they should be (I intend to push to them in a few months). You should also use systemd mount for your drives. You need a companion automount file but your drives will go offline when not being used. This will really help with reducing energy costs. Be sure to note that there's even configs for you gpus. It also lets you control a systems resources. There's also nspawn and vmspawn. I wish these were a bit more popular because they can do everything docker can and more. Nspawn is a suped up chroot so you can really containerize things and even run different Linux flavors (I've even been play around with running an arm container on my x86 machine). Using machinectl you can enable these as services and even create triggers to spin up or down. There's also importctl so if you create an image (or someone else does) you can just pull that! Which kinda makes it easier than docker in many cases other than the fact that not many people have made images (or publicly available). Docker's big win is popularity but systemd has felt nicer in every other way (documentation sucks). There's so much more to systemd and that's why it's loved and hated. There's a reason it stuck, it just is too damn useful (don't forget to check out homectl too)

Ffmpeg: you probably know this one but it's also worth spending some time to learn it more and write some scripts. If you care more about storage I encode most stuff to av1 with nvenc. It's not archival but honestly I'm often getting 50% storage reductions and I can't tell the difference. Your source file probably wasn't archival grade anyways. Good enough for me. Hevc is also giving me good success.

There's a bunch of other little tools that help. For example, I have my main computer sitting behind my TV. If I'm working on it I'm in it via ssh. Otherwise games and movies are on the TV. I use ydotool as a keyboard and just made a shortcut on my iPhone and a trivial script on my Android so I can push commands that way and use a wireless mouse. There's kconnect but it's been more a hassle than help ime. I did the same for backing up photos on from my phones (they wake the drives first). Android can rsync but for iPhone I can't find a good free solution other than writing the hackiest shortcut you've seen (ssh in, check if file exists, if not then write. You can't rsync, the fucking thing will timeout and despite there being terminal emulators for iPhone you can't access your photos from them. I've found zero ways to link them and I'm upset). Check out things like fail2ban to jail users that do too many logins. You can also use nspawn to containerize these services, spin up and down, and between btrfs, homectl, and pam it is really easy to containerize users. You can mount their volumes on demand and get their accounts syncing across your intranet. It's kinda crazy what you can do.

My goal is to get some images so many of these things can start becoming plug and play. I'm getting close but obviously bigger priorities right now. I'd love help if anyone is interested. I'm not an expert in these domains so I'm sure I'm doing some things wrong but I'm learning a ton

What about backups? My greatest fear is self-hosting valuable stuff (like family photos) only for my NAS to fail one day and lose potentially everything.

> the experience isn't there yet without quite a lot of work.

Do you host this with docker? It is usually the pain-free approach

For "content subscriptions" (Spotify, YouTube, Netflix) keep in mind that a part of the revenue goes towards the content creators.

For anything else, I can also highly recommend using local or self-hosted software. Plenty of open source software has even exceeded proprietary alternatives in the last couple years.

I really don’t understand the argument that these subscriptions are just making the rich richer.

In the first place why would that be a problem? If a company offers a good value and service for your money, isn’t it fair to compensate them for it? Does someone need to be compensated less just because they have been successful in the past providing good value for money? That would create weird or negative incentives.

Then, what’s the negative consequence of rich people getting richer? It’s not like the economy is a zero-sum game. The proportion of poor and extremely poor people has gone downhill in the last 200 years, while population has increased 8x (we’re probably around 10% of extreme poverty compared to +90%).

And then, there’s the lack of evidence of really rich people getting richer. How much of your money going to Spotify is really going to rich people compared to employees, artists, little shareholders? Maybe the impact of the earnings of Spotify is disproportionately helping normal citizens make a living compared to the very few big shareholders that are already rich.

What’s the alternative? Spending the same amount of money exclusively on Albums that probably bring a higher cut to big music companies and do not expose you to little or unknown artists? While at the same time you spend hours every month in the maintenance of your own music service while you could have used that time to help in some community projects or just earning more money to donate to causes impacting the extremely poor?

I’m really not sure at all that a subscription service like Spotify has any negative consequence for humankind.

> Don't forget the electricity cost come with home server. A quick math will show that it's not insignificant

If you run it 24/7 on a dedicated desktop with decent idle (i.e. no high power video card, low power CPU), it likely uses ~ 50W average. That gives an estimate of 0.05kW24hr30 = 36kWh, which would be in the range of $12/month at current australian electricity prices. If you have bad idle power usage (or somehow mostly active not idle), maybe you'd be looking at twice that. But for OP who was spending $xxx/month on subscriptions, it's a pretty negligible cost. If you really want to save this too, raspPi can do a lot of home server needs nowadays

Dunno, my N100 with 1 SSD and 1 nVME (which hosts over 15 services including jellyfin) is probably not really relevant compared to my desktop PC. ~10W vs 180-350W depending on what I’m doing.

Run it on Raspberry Pi. It brings down electric consumption significantly.

And while it heats your home in the winter, it also puts more strain on your A/C in the summer.

There are also noise and light pollution issues if it's near a bedroom.

I have got 26 docker containers running on it. Looking at current utilization, it's 6% of cpu, 10GB ram out of 16gb. The issue is disk access. The thing has total shit bandwidth to storage, this was a surprise to me and a bit of a learning experience. It has an nvme ssd and a 3.5 hdd, but in the end usb drives attached to the usb 2 ports are much faster than either. It's a Lenovo, so I guess they cut costs somewhere and the usb 2 ports should have been a giveaway, but I was tricked by the nvme.

That's been sitting on my ideas list for over a decade, because I've wanted Pandora that runs locally from my collection. But I'm not sure I'll realistically ever get to it.

Why roll your own media player? The reasons not to seem obvious.

Time is pretty much the reason.

Look into Backblaze B2. Use rclone, or another backup tool that has S3 compatibility (though B2 API has some additional bells and whistles).

With rclone, you can also have a step to seamlessly encrypt the contents on the client side before sending to an external provider like B2.

I chose B2 because it is the most affordable option, but rclone supports many backends.

In general I use Borg/Borgmatic with borgbase for backup, but movies are a little big, so for now I am just using zfs send/receive to keep a copy on a usb drive updated. Once I am done getting the encoding pipeline scripted (av1/opus/vtt) and the size goes down I will likely start sending it to borgbase as well, or maybe store a copy at my mums place.

I would prefer to use a cloud backup solution that supports zfs send/receive, but they are a bit pricy. zfs.rent seems like a nice solution, but not sure using a US location is a great idea.

Is there really a point in backing up media? Unless you've ripped it yourself, I'm sure anything you have is easily obtainable again.

Not OP, but I use a PI with attached SSD as a backup server, and then save that stuff to Backblaze B2 as additional cloud backup.

Amazon S3 Deep Archive and rclone for < 4-5TB. Backblaze in a Windows VM or container for 5TB+.

You need two HDD and an online backup (opendrive)

I have a large dvd collection from before streaming was really a thing, but yeah I just get blu-rays of the movies I really like. Most of the movies I watch is ones I have already watched. I was really only watching 1-2 movies a month that were new to me with streaming, and few of them were actually new releases.

You have to be extremely dumb to even think of using unraid. It introduces a hard dependency on whatever you do and is nothing more than a glorious wrapper for managing docker services

Emby just felt more polished and focused while Jellyfin felt like it was on the path towards feature bloat. Also, I had more confidence in Emby supporting future devices I might get than Jellyfin.

When it comes to supporting multiple media types (video/audiobooks/music/etc..) I prefer using a seperate solution for each that is focused on that use case instead of an all-in-one solution.

I am using audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, so I really don't need that from my video solution.

I have configured Emby to keep the metadata in nfo files next to the videos, so I should be able to easily switch to something else if things change in the future.

It's a pretty simple setup. I run Alpine Linux with ZFS, all apps are in docker containers managed with docker-compose, Caddy for reverse proxy, borgmatic/borg for backup, and some scripts managing zfs snapshots.

Immich is pretty good for sharing photos. https://immich.app/

I don't know. I was dumb enough to move my entire photo library into Lightroom cloud back when they released that.

It's a nightmare.

It's pretty easy to export the photos, you get them down organized by date and photos with edits are there both as the original and a "-edited" version. What is missing is the library organization.

I really want to get my library organization as well, it's very valuable to me, it's what has got the details of what photos was from what event. And I don't really know how to get that down. I am thinking I will have to scrape it from the webapp or something like that.

It's been left to last as it's both one of the cheaper subscriptions and a total nightmare to get out of.

As for what app to use when it's all down, Capture One or Darktable seems reasonable with a network attached drive.

I like darktable as a Lightroom alternative.

Rawtherapee has a better UX than Lightroom in my opinion and I've never felt limited by it.

You might check out https://www.photoprism.app/

Darktable and RAWtherapee are both excellent Lightroom alternatives.