Apple TV: No ads. Been around for over a decade.

Google TV: homescreen ads for a decade+ and even pushed onto Nvidia shield owners who originally may have bought the devices because Nvidia made a premium customized version without ads until they got tired of that and put ads in.

Apple has problems but ads aren’t a big one.

Neither big company is your friend. They both exploit workers and are both bad.

It’s just Google tends to be better at cutting edge bad like enabling genocide with their products and stuffing ads down the throats of people while Apple tries to maintain a crunchier appearance and vibe and is fine reaping 30% App Store fees on all transactions and making side loading very hard.

Apple rips you off on low storage and high costs to upgrade compared to Google/Samsung it’s definitely true.

We couldn’t see this within a year of it happening why? Why exactly?

But now that they’ve had plenty of time to edit, cut, splice, or AI together a bunch of footage of an empty hallway in front of a cell with timestamps on it suddenly we have proof that isn’t that definitive but would have been more convincing if released within months to a year of his death.

I’m calling it that this is just footage of a hallway with no view into the cell, footage that could have been edited together from footage from previous days or later days, it may or may not show guards walking up and down. At most it’ll have time-stamps hard-coded into the video stream but anyone with access to the facility could record video from that angle after the fact and add in their own hard time-stamps that match those used by the systems in place at the time. It would be possible pre-AI to do this kind of manipulation and fakery with a single experienced Hollywood film editor but AI could definitely be used to make it more convincing especially if you’re trying to insert a now dead guard into the picture.

Never cared for pocket and always disabled it as spyware. Fake spot will be missed though.

This is an ill omen however. They’re cutting back dramatically in anticipation of their Google funding being lost forever and perhaps as some suggest in anticipation of enshitifying. These were both sold originally as additional revenue streams for Mozilla.

Open invites sub. While there might be an opening or two this summer most places open at the end of the year or the first 4 weeks of the new year. Patience and planning.

Try checking that sub daily from the week of Thanksgiving through January 10th. Many openings around Christmas specifically. TL (torrent leech) will certainly open and they’re easy as long as you seed.

This only happens on OEM installs of Windows. Ridiculous but as far as I know if you disable it after first setup (OOBE) it never shows up again if you have only local accounts.

This is pointless burdening of small actors by big actors. On top of lets encrypt losing funding from the US government, it could easily collapse from strain like this. And then where are we? Back to the bad old days of very expensive certificates which will be even more-so with such a short validity period.

Big tech doesn’t care, they never cared about your small site being encrypted against NSA spying or MITM by bad actors, they want everyone in their walled gardens and for people to spend as little time as possible outside of places like Facebook. Google will de-rank sites don’t implement encryption and if the costs for that go from free to quite expensive that pushes the free parts of the web like small forums, blogs, fediverse etc even further to the margins.

Self-hosters who do things like hosting their own Jellyfin instance who require their own certs now have more renewals, more chances something breaks and if things like this push Let’s Encrypt under then that $5 porkbun domain you have for yourself and family is going to be $69 next year if you want to encrypt the traffic of all your linux isos being streamed.

Better revocation processes and standards for browsers and apps to fetch and download revocation lists in a timely manner are needed, not this.

This kind of frequency creates an incentive to set and forget automated processes and pay less attention to everything happening so when things break or security fails it’s catastrophic and not noticed.

All computing devices companies should be required to have sites as detailed as Intel’s ark site and going back in time to the very first product.

If you’re just backing up and not serving this data just get 2-3 4TB drives (new, recertified, or used) and an external dock and test the drive then back it up then test again and check SMART both times. Place one drive with a relative or trusted friend. Connect and power up each of the drives at least once annually, refresh the data with anything new at that time and check the smart stats, consider running at least a quick SMART test to ensure none are mechanically failing then back to being unplugged. Really every 3-6 months would be ideal to power on and check SMART but I wouldn’t pester a relative that often for the external one, 1-2 times a year should be fine for that.

This strategy protects you from cryptolocker malware by not leaving any of them live and accessible.

• What’s the cheapest and most flexible NAS I can make from eBay or local? What kind of processors and what motherboard features?

Cheapest or most flexible, choose one. If you want absolute cheapest but not that flexible you can buy a used office PC, a Thinkcenter or Dell optiplex are the most reliable ones though depending on the model they may accommodate anywhere from 1 to if you’re lucky 4 (though commonly only 2) drives via that many SATA ports (often half the SATA ports are 1.0/2.0 for DVD drives so you may not get full speed). Finding space inside them for more than 1 drive could also be a problem depending on form factor but mid-tower models often have room for 2 with space for a third lying on the case itself if you really want to push it.

Most flexible I suppose someone else’s old NAS build, a used case with room for at least 4 3.5" drives gives you a little room to expand.

• What separate guides should I follow to source the drives? What RAID?

You don’t need RAID, it’s not a back-up solution, RAID is for high data availability and integrity. If you really want to you can set-up a RAID 1 I suppose though know this means you’d require at minimum 4 disks for your data and one copy and 6 disks for two copies.

As to sourcing the drives, there are various companies, server parts deals is one that’s well known and decent though their presently available sizes may be larger than what you’re after. No matter whether the drive is brand new, recertified or bought used on ebay the recommendation is test, test, test. Even new drives can be bad. Run a full SMART test at least once, check the SMART data and make sure there are no failure indicators. If you want to be really thorough I’d suggest checking the SMART data when you get it, noting anything concerning, running an extended/full SMART test then after that finishes formatting the drive but unchecking quick format and doing a slower format option that writes zeros across the drive, then filling with your data, then doing another full/extended SMART test and again checking the SMART values before putting it away. Re-test and check SMART at least annually if you’re keeping the drives cold.

• What backup style should I follow? How many cold copies? How do I even handle the event of a fire?

At least two copies, ideally three, at least one copy off-site for things such as fire. If you don’t have a relative, friend, or workplace where you can stash an off-site copy your option would be basically cloud storage back-up which for 4TB wouldn’t be too costly (backblaze personal would allow this much IF you keep one copy connected to a computer that has their app and is turned on at least monthly and they’re $100 a year though note they will delete your data if you go more than 30 rolling days without syncing so if there is a disaster you have a limited time to either get another drive and download it again or contact them and pay to have a copy shipped to you before it’s deleted).

You could also I suppose invest in a fireproof safe though that doesn’t protect against burglary where they steal your safe thinking it has valuables in it. You really need a copy off-site. Other options would be a bank safe deposit box though probably more costly.

One way to get friends to help is to buy more storage space than you need, say two 8TB drives and you offer to back-up a copy of their stuff at your house so you have a copy of their stuff+yours at your house and they have the same copy at theirs. Though you could also use separate drives.

Most are redundant video files that are in old encodings or not encoded at all

All re-encoding unless it’s from lossless to lossless induces degradation. For archival purposes I’d suggest against re-encoding unless it’s to another lossless format or unless they’re in a lossless format or very high bitrate (>20MBps video for SD or 1080p HD) and you’re keeping a high bitrate in the new encoding. Also avoid hardware encoding, it’s faster but introduces more degradation and is less precise than software encoding. Removing duplicates is another matter.

MakeMKV can rip the DVDs without touching the contents. I’d suggest either an ISO or more helpfully the contents in folder layout which should be preserved under a top level folder with the name of the disc and at the bottom level .vob files.

You certainly can use Handbrake but it is re-encoding and if you have no experience it’s easy to mess up (among other things de-interlacing doesn’t always work right without tweaking so it’s typically best for archiving to not re-encode DVDs before sharing).

-If- you do chose to use Handbrake (again I wouldn’t recommend it if archiving, it takes skill and there’s a reason why to this day full DVD rips are useful to people who want a copy while someone’s best attempt at an AVI file made 15 years ago looks awful and is considered useless given the low bitrates and old codecs) I’d plead you use software not hardware encoding, choose x264 or x265 (10bit for x265) and use the slow preset at CRF, constant quality 16 and make sure de-interlacing is set right on auto, also pass through the audio in original dolby digital as well as vobsub subtitles. But it really is best to not encode and just copy.

You can share directly to the DHT swarms by just creating your own torrent and eventually people will find it assuming it’s named correctly in the format of <movie name (year)>.

Don’t duplicate other people’s work if you can help it. There are various sites for sharing this type of stuff, I don’t want to get in trouble so won’t name the one but there is one listed in the piracy community megathread, a Russian one, semi-private. I would search disc titles first to make sure what you’re doing doesn’t already exist and focus on archiving and sharing original non-re-encoded copies of those which don’t presently exist elsewhere.

Interesting project. Thanks for the link and I do appreciate it and could see some very good uses for that but it’s not quite what I meant.

Unfortunately as it notes it works as a companion for reverse proxies so it doesn’t solve the big hurdle there which is handling secure and working flow (specifically ingress) of Jellyfin traffic into a network as a turn-key solution. All this does is change the authorization mechanism but my users don’t have an issue with writing down passwords and emails. Still leaves the burden of:

• choosing and setting up the reverse proxy,
• certificates for that,
• paying for a domain so I can properly use certificates for encryption,
• making sure that works,
• chore of updating the reverse proxy, refreshing certs (and it breaking if we forget or the process fails), etc

Which is a hassle and a half for technically proficient users and the point that most other people would give up.

By contrast with Plex how many steps are there?

1. Install (going to skip media library setup as Jellyfin requires that too so it’s assumed)
2. Set up any port settings, open any relevant ports on firewall, enable remote access in setting with a tickbox
3. Set up users
4. Done, it now works and doesn’t need to be touched. It will handle connecting clients directly to the server. Users just need to install Plex client, login to their account and they have access.

By contrast this still requires the hoster set up a reverse proxy (major hassle if done securely with certificates as well as an expense for a domain which works out to probably $5 a year), to then have their users point their jellyfin at a domain-name (possibly a hard to remember one as majesticstuffbox[.]xyz is a lot cheaper than the dot com/org/net equivalents or a shorter domain that’s more to the point), auth and so on. It’s many, many, many more steps and software and configurations and chances for the hosting party to mess something up.

My point was I and many others would rather take the $5 we’d spend a year on a domain name and pay it for this kind of turn-key solution for ourselves and our users even if provided by a third party but that were Jellyfin to integrate this as an option it could provide some revenue for them and get the kinds of people who don’t want to mess with reverse proxies and certificates into their ecosystem and off Plex.

Simplewall.

Jellyfin needs to partner with someone people can pay a very low and reasonable and/or one-time fee to enable remote streaming without the fuss of setting up either dangerous port-forwarding or the complexity of reverse proxies (paying for a domain-name, the set-up itself including certificates, keeping it updated for security purposes).

And no a VPN is not a solution, the difficulty for non-technical users in setting up a VPN (if it’s even possible, on smart-tvs it’s almost always not, and I don’t think devices like AppleTV and other streaming boxes often support them) is too high and it’s an unwanted annoyance even for technical users.

I’m not talking about streaming video’s through someone else’s servers or using their bandwidth. I’m talking about the connection phase of clients and servers where Plex acts like an enhanced dynamic DNS service with authentication. They have an agent on the local media server which sends to the remote web service of the third party the IP address, the port configured for use, the account or server name, etc. When a client tries to connect they go to this remote web service with the servername/username info, the web service authenticates them then gives them the current IP address and any other information necessary. It then sends some data to the local Jellyfin server about the connecting client to enable that connection and then the local media Jellyfin server and the client talk directly and stream directly.

Importantly the cost of running this authentication and IP address tracking scheme would be minimal per Jellyfin server. You could charge $5/year for up to 20 unique remote clients and come out ahead with a slight profit which could be put back into Jellyfin development and things like their own hosting costs for code, etc. Even better if they offer lifetime for this at $60-$80 they’d get a decent chunk of cash up-front to use for development (with reasonable use restrictions per account so someone hosting stuff in Hetzner or whatever and serving 300 people with 400 devices will need to pay more because they’re clearly doing this for profit and can afford to throw some more money at Jellyfin).

Until Jellyfin offers something that JUST WORKS like that it’s not going to be a replacement for Plex, whatever other improvements they offer to users it’s still a burden for the server runner to set up remote streaming in a way that isn’t either incredibly dangerous (port forwarding) OR either involves paying money to third parties AND/OR the trouble of running your own reverse proxy and/or involves walking users through complicated set-up process for each device that you have to repeat if you change anything major like your domain name when using a VPN.

They previously sold out email addresses to an anti-piracy law firm which proceeded to extort penalty settlements from the holders of the accounts. This is why their upload bots were banned on leet x.

De-telecine: default De-interlace detection: default De-interlace: decomb

Video encoding: x265 10bit (don’t use NVENC, Intel, or AMD hardware encode)

Preset: slow

Quality rate factor: 16

The above should be suitable for most DVDs and yields good results of 1/4 to 1/2 the size going from MPEG2 to HEVC.

Are you planning on re-encoding anyways? For DVDs Handbrake can read and re-encode them directly so there’s no need for an intermediate.

If you’re not planning on re-encoding or we’re talking BluRays then makemkv is the most used and allows creating disc images, file extraction to drive, or file extraction to drive in MKV container.

Of course. The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos gave Google a huge neon sign that said this is the one thing that will shut them down, the line they won’t cross. Google has targeted the big front end instances with rate limits and blocks and this is the next step.

Our only hope really is that the current YT-DLP team hands the reins over to people in countries that don’t give a shit about copyright and they put back in the ability to download and decrypt DRM protected video.

can they be added to the search function in qbittorrent?

Nearly all can. All the one’s you’d want anyways work with Jackett. They don’t work via direct plugins but just run Jackett, follow its instructions and connect it to qBittorrent and you’re good to go searching just the same as before. Some annoying ones occasionally require setting up another software like Flaresolver but for the most part the big easy to get into ones that open their doors annually work without that.

While there will likely be some openings throughout the year the fact is most trackers open in the period from Thanksgiving/late November through early January. TL opens then basically every year, a number of more exclusive trackers do open signups then, some for only 24 hours so get an RSS feed of that and remember to sign up IMMEDIATELY as soon as you see a post as the post on reddit may have been made 22 hours into a 24 hour open window, you just don’t know. TL though at least tends to stay open for several days. So if you have no luck before then, wait until that time of the year and then check daily or even twice daily if you can, once before bed, once earlier when you get up or lunch or after work, whatever.

If by mainstream channels you mean major streaming services then there is no perfectly private option. But I would recommend an AppleTV as the closest thing (it also doesn’t have ads which I really appreciate).

Other than that your options are devices that can’t access major streaming services at greater than 720p and are hackily put together on multiple levels but are fine for streaming local media you host yourself or more expensive than ATV devices and modding them with alternative launchers.

at least 12GB of RAM,

Doesn’t exist and frankly not necessary. At present nothing needs this much RAM and I say this as a power user who runs a local media server and is familiar with concepts such as running Plex with remote transcoding on devices such as the Shield. The only things that come close to this much RAM might be recent generation gaming consoles like Xbox or Playstation but they don’t run Android and aren’t built for streaming, remote controls are third party accessories.

Other problems: I’m unaware of any devices even without the high RAM request that exist that fulfill all of those asks. Particularly 4k 120hz seems to be something no one has any interest in putting in a streaming box despite plenty of them having HDMI 2.1. I checked and even Apple TV 4K’s do not support 120hz despite having the right hardware for it.

Fact is commercial streaming services which these devices exist to cater to have no interest in 120fps/hz content, even 60fps with dolby vision is kind of more bandwidth than they like using and they upcharge premiums for it.

Basically your choices are (all these assume giving up the RAM ask):

• Run two devices, one for local streaming of things like games and 120fps content, one for watching streaming services that’s Android TV certified and will get you 4k content from them (at only 60fps). Cost is probably going to be north of $300. You can with this option get a mini-PC and kind of hack together a game streaming solution and if you want you can put 12GB of RAM in it but you won’t need them.
• Buy something that ticks most of the boxes but either give up the ability to stream 4K content from commercial services (because no Android TV certification) OR give up the 120fps demand. If you’re willing to give up the 120hz you might look into the Dune-HD premier 4k pro which has full Android TV support and certification for 4K streaming from all the major services, does 4k 60fps, has very impressive specs for a streaming device (top of the line) and is $200 and you can add an SSD to increase the storage from acceptable 32GB to well over a TB if desired. Otherwise if you’re willing to give up 4K from commercial streaming services and get only 1080p from them they have a few 8K devices that do have support for 120fps but the price doubles and if you want 4k on the major streaming services you’ll need another device.

Other options if you’re willing to give up the 120hz demand would be the Nvidia Shield Pro. As to a remote that controls everything, I believe the Dune-HD remotes do have that capability but honestly your wants are really specific and high end. Most people would use two boxes if they HAD to have all you’ve asked for.

You might also consider waiting to see if Valve does release a streaming device like they’ve teased. If Valve does something like that it might finally be the golden one that has 120hz support though you’re still not going to get 12GB of RAM. But you’re looking at waiting a year at least I think even if that does materialize and it may not.

What they told you is misleading.

Transcoding and burning in subtitles for Plex and similar only happens in some cases if your streaming device doesn’t support image based subtitles. Plex themselves could fix this on a lot more devices but don’t.

10 years ago it was the case that there were a LOT of issues with anything but text subtitles. These days it depends. If you’re running it directly off a smart tv (bad experience anyways, not recommended) it’s likely to be an issue. If you’re using an Android streaming device or Apple TV or gaming console there’s a good chance the subs just work.

Truth is lots of things can force transcoding with Plex including using certain audio formats in certain media containers. Most of these days picture subs work. If you can get text subs it’s not a bad thing but I wouldn’t go through the hassle of doing flawed OCR unless you can confirm it’s an issue you’re experiencing with your setup.