This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/Senedoris on 2025-02-06 23:05:09+00:00.
"Fuck the streaming services and not being able to have my own stuff."
Fast forward a few weeks:
- Set up and configured Docker versions of Prowlarr, Radarr, Sonarr, Bazarr, Plex, Jellyfin. Set up a reverse proxy to access all of them using strong passwords, set up port forwarding for that purpose, and HTTPS access.
- Couple the above with a dockerized qBittorrent, connected and bound to ProtonVPN with port forwarding that automatically configures qBittorrent whenever it changes.
- Spend a ridiculous amount of time setting up my media library through Radarr/Sonarr, downloading massive amounts of data, and auto-importing it to Plex and Jellyfin as a backup.
- Learn way more than I probably ever wanted about all the encoding types, when transcoding is necessary, what happens behind the scenes, how to enable hardware-accelerated encoding for dockerized apps, video formats, video container formats, audio formats, audio transcoding, subtitle types and subtitle burn-in, because Direct Play is king but I want to share the love with friends and family, often in other countries with slower Internet. Learn what common devices support what common formats. Set up direct play whenever possible.
- Buy an Nvidia Shield Pro for a nice direct play experience and a Plex lifetime pass.
- Buy a 4K UHD Blu-ray player that can RIP 4K media reliably via specific firmware for buying and backing up my own media and start building a physical collection through which I can also support artists / creators I enjoy without throwing money at streaming services. Get a USB enclosure for it, install and buy makemkv to support the project.
- Figure out the Synology NAS I was using was underpowered, and even though it had an Intel CPU capable of hardware transcoding, it lagged a lot for 4K HDR content that requires tone-mapping. It's also just old and running out of space. I should go upgrade it. But before that, let's spend many more hours learning about other options—TrueNAS and ZFS and RAIDz, the newer RAIDz expansion feature, data integrity options, doing a DIY Unraid build, comparing all the options for my use case, and figuring out I do want something more flexible/less corporate-tied than my current setup. Proceed to also learn about Proxmox.
- Spend several more hours researching different Mini PC home server options with good Intel QuickSync and powerful enough for both transcoding and random homelab use.
- Spend hours researching and testing Kopia, Restic, Duplicacy, and Borg on my Linux machine in order to migrate from Synology's proprietary Hyper Backup—comparing pros and cons, reading reviews and technical implementations.
- Do some math to figure out if I want (locally encrypted) cloud storage for my media library, which will grow quite big. Compare options, figure out S3 Glacier Deep Archive could be an option, but dread ever needing to take data out of there for the high egress cost. Think instead about doing local copies and storing them elsewhere.
- Be annoyed at my Xfinity modem/router's complete infantilization of me as a user and being forced to use their stupid mobile app for things like port forwarding. Research routers. Get a router that comes with OpenWRT for lots of fun tinkering. Maybe I'll mess around and create my own simple router in the future, just for fun.
- Have my NAS enclosure die out randomly last night after I literally spent a bunch of time researching new NAS options right before (must be a sign!). Grateful for backups (hopefully disks are still good). Annoyed that NAS decisions are going to have to be made more quickly.
- Spend time researching self-hosted document archives, learn about Kiwix, decide I want to have locally available copies of everything I could ever need in case things get even wilder in the world.
- Spend a vast amount of time configuring my Arch Linux installation (btw) to a tee, figuring out some bugs, filing some bug reports, fixing some stuff. It works... perfectly. Play around with Gentoo because controoool.
- Before all of this, even months ago, export all my Google Photos data, control the entirety of it locally, delete everything I had there after making sure I had all I needed (and backed it up), run scripts to de-duplicate and organize, create a giant catalog that doesn't rely on Google in the slightest. Join the degoogle subreddit, start taking concrete steps to get away from said company, switch password manager to Bitwarden, consider hosting my own instance of it. Sad I still have to pay for Adobe Lightroom because photography is a hobby and I use it too much for editing and cataloging. Still, looking at options when I can, and making sure my catalog is still very human-accessible for when I find a better option and can get rid of them too.
But after all that, I should be good for a bit, right?... right?... I won't think of something else I want to immediately do and deep-dive into, because it's not like I discovered that controlling your own data, your own stuff, doing whatever you want, having all the power, learning about a thousand cool technologies gives me an addicting high or anything. It's not like I enjoy giving the middle finger to all these companies that like to shove their dumb subscriptions down our throats and can take anything away whenever they want. Not like it's expensive, but totally worth it for all that. Or that I gained a new hobby without realizing...
Anyway, time to read about also setting up an audio library, and upgrading my local setup, and running local fast LLM for specific purposes, and... fuck, where was the rabbit hole I saw just a bit ago?
Oh, damn.