Can you please share more about what you mean? I am getting to the point of looking for alternatives to these streaming services including getting a NAS to start a home media server, but I want to...
Can you please share more about what you mean? I am getting to the point of looking for alternatives to these streaming services including getting a NAS to start a home media server, but I want to make sure I cover all of my bases first.
You would be looking for an article, guide, or YouTube video that describes setting up: Plex or Jellyfin Sonarr, Radarr, Prowlarr Sabnzbd There are many well written ones out there.
You would be looking for an article, guide, or YouTube video that describes setting up:
I'm waiting for the time they decide that the lifetime of my lifetime sub is over. Certainly wouldn't be the first 'lifetime' sub I've had that a company has just torn up.
I'm waiting for the time they decide that the lifetime of my lifetime sub is over. Certainly wouldn't be the first 'lifetime' sub I've had that a company has just torn up.
PocketCasts is pretty much the only company I've dealt with who tried to cancel everyone's "lifetime" membership and then backed down over the backlash. I got my lifetime pass on sale and it was...
PocketCasts is pretty much the only company I've dealt with who tried to cancel everyone's "lifetime" membership and then backed down over the backlash.
I got my lifetime pass on sale and it was for sure money well spent but I've been dual-running Plex and Jellyfin for months now. Pretty much the only reason I'm still running Plex is so my remote users can easily access my content.
I'm interested to hear about how you dual-run. I'm in the same boat with a lifetime Plex pass. I was happy with it for years but it's starting to concern me lately and I'd like to ease into...
I'm interested to hear about how you dual-run. I'm in the same boat with a lifetime Plex pass. I was happy with it for years but it's starting to concern me lately and I'd like to ease into Jellyfin if possible.
I run both. Just booted up another docker for jellyfin on the server one day, Plex and jellyfin don't conflict. Great way to ease in. My TV doesn't have an official app but instead some hacky web...
I run both. Just booted up another docker for jellyfin on the server one day, Plex and jellyfin don't conflict. Great way to ease in. My TV doesn't have an official app but instead some hacky web browser access. So the Plex interface is smoother on TV. But Jellyfin has better file compatibility since I'm without Pass (no hardware transcode without it). Passing the GPU interface to Jellyfin's docker was pretty simple.
Could you be more specific about "shady and weird"? Jellyfin is FOSS, Plex is closed source and for-profit. When I side-by-side tried them some time ago, all the differences felt aligned to those...
Could you be more specific about "shady and weird"?
Jellyfin is FOSS, Plex is closed source and for-profit. When I side-by-side tried them some time ago, all the differences felt aligned to those two points. Plex had some features Jellyfin did not, which I appreciated -- Easy support for my OTA antenna (EPG), intro/credits detection, and I couldn't quite get Jellyfin to work with my P400. The Jellyfin app for LG WebOS (at the time, at least) was very clunky and difficult to use, as well. While the ability to more heavily customize Jellyfin was nice, but didn't really add anything I appreciated. The biggest advantage I saw was fully local auth.
The addition of Plex's *oh look we're also a streaming service now* was annoying at launch, but after turning off/unpinning those features, I haven't seen or thought about it any more. The two data breaches I've been around for I felt like were handled less poorly than I've seen others. The biggest issue I've had is tech support for a paid product, the forums are very hit or miss, more often miss. To their credit though, I've had much less technical issues with Plex in the last year than I have in years past.
Possibly a reference to this story? I also have a preference for open source solutions where possible myself. Even when a privately-owned service is currently fine for my needs, there's no...
I also have a preference for open source solutions where possible myself. Even when a privately-owned service is currently fine for my needs, there's no guarantee that it won't be enshittified down the line.
Ah, yes, the restriction on remote access unless you have a Plex Pass. I picked up a lifetime pass roughly six years ago, as one of the unaffected, I forgot this was a decision they made from the...
Ah, yes, the restriction on remote access unless you have a Plex Pass. I picked up a lifetime pass roughly six years ago, as one of the unaffected, I forgot this was a decision they made from the time they announced it to now rolling it out. But that was definitely a shitty decision they made that I was hoping they'd revert on. Were I affected, it would definitely be a reason to look at switching to JellyFin.
Plex uses dark patterns to funnel you into their FAST options before your own server, even after unpinning them and what not. My family keeps stumbling on these instead of our actual content, even...
Plex uses dark patterns to funnel you into their FAST options before your own server, even after unpinning them and what not. My family keeps stumbling on these instead of our actual content, even when they search something we have.
They require the pass for hardware transcoding on the server, an absurd limitation in my book. For my setup, it basically caps Plex to ~2Mbps and x264, anything higher or with a newer encoding goes through Jellyfin (without issue too).
Moving features behind Pass instead of making Pass more appealing has also been rubbing folks the wrong way. I was about to pay for Pass before they walled off remote access, and then I noticed the hardware transcoding issue after the announcement, solidifying my decision to not give them money and instead find an alternative.
This is going to be pretty high level and simplified (ex. I'm not going to differentiate between indexers and trackers), but the two most popular distribution networks are torrents and usenet....
This is going to be pretty high level and simplified (ex. I'm not going to differentiate between indexers and trackers), but the two most popular distribution networks are torrents and usenet. Alongside those the two most popular ways to interact with them are a client on machine in your control (ex. local NAS or cloud seedbox) or through a debrid service.
Both torrents and usenet have similar-ish mechanisms for people to find content: indexers. Indexers are the generic term I'm using for things like The Pirate Bay where all they really host are databases that make it easy to look up what are effectively just addresses to content held elsewhere. What exactly these addresses look like can vary a bit, but a few examples are magnet links, torrent files, and nzb files. Indexers are basically just search engines for files someone else has to host.
Then you use some sort of client, be it one on your machine or a debrid service, to effectively resolve the address to a file. This can mean downloading it, seeding it, or sometimes just dynamically streaming it. There's also another piece with usenet: providers. This is a huge simplification, but imagine that with torrents part of your payment for being in the network is seeding but with usenet you instead pay money to some cloud-like entities to host and download directly from them. Supposedly usenet downloads tend to be significantly faster than torrent downloads, which does seem logical to me because torrents download from a distributed wherever versus usenet's paid professional hosting.
Now, you may be wondering where the Black Friday deals could be relevant: it is common for all of indexers, providers, and debrid providers to have deals. This matters a lot because while some indexers are free there is supposedly a quality increase in private indexers. Private indexers can be invite only, paid, or both. I think that most of the high quality torrent indexers are invite only and free. I think that most of the high quality usenet indexers are paid. I'm pretty sure that all of the usenet providers cost money to cover their hosting.
On top of all of that is then how you use it. The two methods that I understand to be most popular right now are *arr stack and direct media player integration. *arr stack is software you run and maintain yourself usually in conjunction with a seedbox of some kind and then you can put a media player on top of the associated files (ex. Jellyfin reads a media folder full of downloaded content). Direct media player integration is more like Stremio or Kodi plugins that are more tooled around direct streaming without a prebuilt library, commonly with a debrid provider. In general I'd say the *arr stack is more powerful and flexible, but with the drawback of being higher effort and maybe a bit less conducive to instantly accessing content you didn't prepare ahead of time. I'm aware that there is tooling that blurs the the definitions I used there, but I'm talking more about the most common use cases.
I'll also note that the stack used influences both what's needed and legal risk. I'm not a lawyer so take this all with a huge grain of salt, but it seems like the least risk is to not be in control machines that are seeding since seeding can be considered distribution rather than just consumption. Additionally, some components may be combined depending on your stack, such as there being usenet debrid services that include the providers so that you don't need to deal with portion of the stack. There are other considerations as well, such as that private torrent indexers eject users whose seed ratio is too low and I've seen it claimed that sometimes getting enough seed ratio can be annoying game of seeding stuff you don't want, which is presumably why Facebook was seeding a ton of porn while they were torrenting books.
As said though, very simplified and people could definitely nitpick where exactly I drew the lines and how I defined things. I also left out a ton of stuff, like when a VPN is recommended or that usenet is actually not for sharing these kinds of files at all. Usenet is actually closer an RSS network with pirating files stapled on top, including complaints that the current state of usenet has kind of bastardized its purpose.
And as a late disclaimer: this information comes more from research than personal experience so may contain some details that are incorrect, especially as they relate to private indexers. Many of the relevant communities are publicly visible, but since private indexers are private most of my knowledge about them comes from secondary forums. I don't plan to openly disclose my level of practical experience or what suggestions I would actually make, but I suppose I could answer more in DMs since I do have opinions I could share on what's likely to work best given descriptions of the desired goals, level of effort, and price.
Unless you're purposefully looking to save and host the media files yourself I'd recommend something like a Stremio setup instead. Saves you the money of buying a NAS capable of doing transcoding...
Unless you're purposefully looking to save and host the media files yourself I'd recommend something like a Stremio setup instead. Saves you the money of buying a NAS capable of doing transcoding and having to buy large storage disks.
I've moved away from managing my Plex NAS because you're always fixing something that doesn't quite work. Stremio just streams stuff everywhere and the setup is easy, not quite turnkey-easy but close.
If you have an old-ish PC lying around, you can get a cheaper NAS without all the bells and whistles. I have an older desktop powering my Jellyfin setup and it works pretty well. I got a Ubiquiti...
If you have an old-ish PC lying around, you can get a cheaper NAS without all the bells and whistles. I have an older desktop powering my Jellyfin setup and it works pretty well. I got a Ubiquiti NAS and I’ve been thrilled with it. I wanted something that was actually… network attached storage and not another fully fledged computer setup built for media transcoding and all that. If you already have some hardware lying around it doesn’t have to be super expensive to self host.
Edit: I also missed your point about fixing stuff that doesn’t work. That used to be me too, so I get it. Once I dockerized everything, the time I’ve spent managing my stuff has approached zero. Managing that stuff is not for everyone. Sometimes it’s easier to have someone else worry about it
Even with Docker I felt like I was constantly taking containers offline to update them. Automating updates using things like watchtower helped, but then it'd update the wrong container and I'd...
Even with Docker I felt like I was constantly taking containers offline to update them. Automating updates using things like watchtower helped, but then it'd update the wrong container and I'd have to fix that and reconfigure watchtower to stop updating everything all the time.
With that fixed, watchtower occasionally threw out the db or mounted folder of the container causing me to lose my setup on a couple of them until I rebuilt it.
Then this connection failed, that image was deprecated, these changed names, I messed up some configuration and needed to redo it all, Plex no longer remotely worked, my NAS needs updates, the NAS update broke functionality, certs expired, Plex did a thing and transcoding no longer worked for remote streams, Plex updating this broke that, and so on and so forth.
I had fun doing it for a couple of years but at this point I'm no longer interested in tinkering with it too much and I can imagine others may not want to have the tech burden at all. Services like Stremio takes that entire management out of my hands.
Cool, so now when I'm traveling and don't want to log into Netflix on whatever TV at the location I'm staying at (or maybe they don't have a Netflix app), I'll just not watch Netflix. Pretty soon...
Cool, so now when I'm traveling and don't want to log into Netflix on whatever TV at the location I'm staying at (or maybe they don't have a Netflix app), I'll just not watch Netflix. Pretty soon I won't be able to watch Netflix anywhere so I'll just cancel my subscription due to lack of use.
I know some hotel brands have the ability on their TVs to allow streaming service sign-in. And it'll log you out and erase your details once your stay is done if you forget to do it yourself....
I know some hotel brands have the ability on their TVs to allow streaming service sign-in. And it'll log you out and erase your details once your stay is done if you forget to do it yourself. Which makes me wonder if there's some kinda data harvesting partnership going on between Netflix and the hotel brand where casting from a personal device obviously doesn't allow the hotel to harvest that data.
Well jokes on them. I always travel with a laptop, a travel router, and an HDMI cable. There's only been a handful of hotels where I couldn't just plug in from my laptop because the TV or media box thing was locked down, or it was basically impossible to get access to the cables behind the TV. And if all else fails, I'll just use my laptop. Nbd for me. But most hotel TVs I've seen and used are essentially wide-open devices.
(Yes I'm aware that Netflix has also started restricting or limiting viewing on devices that aren't at "home." Which is what the travel router is for. Still BS.)
My LPT is plugging in an iPad or phone with a USB-C to HDMI cable. It just screen mirrors, and doesn't use the AirPlay/Chromecast APIs, so it's opaque to the application. I do that when travelling...
My LPT is plugging in an iPad or phone with a USB-C to HDMI cable. It just screen mirrors, and doesn't use the AirPlay/Chromecast APIs, so it's opaque to the application.
I do that when travelling sometimes, and also for things like live-streamed concerts or video from sites that don't have TV apps (e.g. Critical Role's Beacon).
I might have to get myself one of those... I'm a big onebagger, so travel pretty light. But a single cable wouldn't be the worst thing to add to my bag.
I might have to get myself one of those...
I'm a big onebagger, so travel pretty light. But a single cable wouldn't be the worst thing to add to my bag.
I'm not going to post a moral defense of piracy. I will say that I don't really respect most corporations, will do what I want, and am lucky to live in a country with mostly unenforceable piracy laws.
I'm not going to post a moral defense of piracy. I will say that I don't really respect most corporations, will do what I want, and am lucky to live in a country with mostly unenforceable piracy laws.
I'll post a quick one. There are many, but I've not written as this way before. The entertainment industry, particularly at the publisher/corp level, has destroyed the commons of public domain by...
I'll post a quick one. There are many, but I've not written as this way before.
The entertainment industry, particularly at the publisher/corp level, has destroyed the commons of public domain by transforming a short-duration copyright (typically less than 30 years) to a multi-gerational monstrosity. They're destroying our rights of ownership and fair use via heavyhanded legal bludgeons. I guess it's great that my 96 year old grandma can finally enjoy her favorite childhood book for free in 4 years.
They stole from us, I'll steal from them. I'll fund small creators best I can, but will also feel 0 shame about pirating a movie I watched on TV in 1994 to show my kids one time.
I'm still no a fan of piracy, but as an animation fan they've sure made it as impossible as hell to access any of the shows i used to watch on there. Can't believe it only took one CEO to...
I'm still no a fan of piracy, but as an animation fan they've sure made it as impossible as hell to access any of the shows i used to watch on there. Can't believe it only took one CEO to eviscerate half my childhood.
I've had to kinda relearn how to be a pirate. After college and Steam, I'd mostly gone full legal in terms of music, games and shows. After Netflix changes, gaming price increases and the like,...
I've had to kinda relearn how to be a pirate. After college and Steam, I'd mostly gone full legal in terms of music, games and shows. After Netflix changes, gaming price increases and the like, I've mostly gone back to full piracy, which is easier than I thought it'd be. I'll buy games from indies, or from studios I respect. I bought Slay the Princess a few weeks ago and it was brilliant. But, an Activision Blizzard game? Or a port of a game I bought in the 90s? Nah, I'm taking that.
Ports are such a mixed bag. Sometimes they're mildly updated and have a lot of under the hood changes to run on modern hardware. Other times, they're barely functional, hastily thrown together...
Or a port of a game I bought in the 90s? Nah, I'm taking that.
Ports are such a mixed bag. Sometimes they're mildly updated and have a lot of under the hood changes to run on modern hardware. Other times, they're barely functional, hastily thrown together cash grabs.
Yup, I kinda make a judgement call on those. I haven't pirated the Star Ocean 2 and Super Mario RPG remakes because they look like they have a ton of effort out into them. The Star Ocean 3 PS4...
Yup, I kinda make a judgement call on those. I haven't pirated the Star Ocean 2 and Super Mario RPG remakes because they look like they have a ton of effort out into them. The Star Ocean 3 PS4 port? Not a single difference, aside from extra crashes. No guilt whatsoever in pirating that.
Of course this literally happens on the week I go on vacation. Jokes on them though, they don’t actually have anything I want to watch. And yet I pay them anyways….
Of course this literally happens on the week I go on vacation.
Jokes on them though, they don’t actually have anything I want to watch.
Noticed it was gone this weekend, thought it was just me. Not sure if this is a depreciated API or cracking down on the household limitations, but it will be missed.
Noticed it was gone this weekend, thought it was just me. Not sure if this is a depreciated API or cracking down on the household limitations, but it will be missed.
So now all of my older Chromecast devices can't be used for Netflix, cool cool cool Edit: just read the article, only tiers below 17.99 a month will have access removed. Also it says something...
So now all of my older Chromecast devices can't be used for Netflix, cool cool cool
Edit: just read the article, only tiers below 17.99 a month will have access removed. Also it says something about older Chromecast not losing this function...but we will see. I'm good at this point but this sucks.
Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
lots of great black friday deals out for usenet, too. :)
Can you please share more about what you mean? I am getting to the point of looking for alternatives to these streaming services including getting a NAS to start a home media server, but I want to make sure I cover all of my bases first.
You would be looking for an article, guide, or YouTube video that describes setting up:
There are many well written ones out there.
I will say that Plex is starting to be pretty shady and weird, so I'd recommend Jellyfin at this point.
I'm waiting for the time they decide that the lifetime of my lifetime sub is over. Certainly wouldn't be the first 'lifetime' sub I've had that a company has just torn up.
PocketCasts is pretty much the only company I've dealt with who tried to cancel everyone's "lifetime" membership and then backed down over the backlash.
I got my lifetime pass on sale and it was for sure money well spent but I've been dual-running Plex and Jellyfin for months now. Pretty much the only reason I'm still running Plex is so my remote users can easily access my content.
I'm interested to hear about how you dual-run. I'm in the same boat with a lifetime Plex pass. I was happy with it for years but it's starting to concern me lately and I'd like to ease into Jellyfin if possible.
I run both. Just booted up another docker for jellyfin on the server one day, Plex and jellyfin don't conflict. Great way to ease in. My TV doesn't have an official app but instead some hacky web browser access. So the Plex interface is smoother on TV. But Jellyfin has better file compatibility since I'm without Pass (no hardware transcode without it). Passing the GPU interface to Jellyfin's docker was pretty simple.
Could you be more specific about "shady and weird"?
Jellyfin is FOSS, Plex is closed source and for-profit. When I side-by-side tried them some time ago, all the differences felt aligned to those two points. Plex had some features Jellyfin did not, which I appreciated -- Easy support for my OTA antenna (EPG), intro/credits detection, and I couldn't quite get Jellyfin to work with my P400. The Jellyfin app for LG WebOS (at the time, at least) was very clunky and difficult to use, as well. While the ability to more heavily customize Jellyfin was nice, but didn't really add anything I appreciated. The biggest advantage I saw was fully local auth.
The addition of Plex's *oh look we're also a streaming service now* was annoying at launch, but after turning off/unpinning those features, I haven't seen or thought about it any more. The two data breaches I've been around for I felt like were handled less poorly than I've seen others. The biggest issue I've had is tech support for a paid product, the forums are very hit or miss, more often miss. To their credit though, I've had much less technical issues with Plex in the last year than I have in years past.
Possibly a reference to this story?
I also have a preference for open source solutions where possible myself. Even when a privately-owned service is currently fine for my needs, there's no guarantee that it won't be enshittified down the line.
Ah, yes, the restriction on remote access unless you have a Plex Pass. I picked up a lifetime pass roughly six years ago, as one of the unaffected, I forgot this was a decision they made from the time they announced it to now rolling it out. But that was definitely a shitty decision they made that I was hoping they'd revert on. Were I affected, it would definitely be a reason to look at switching to JellyFin.
Plex uses dark patterns to funnel you into their FAST options before your own server, even after unpinning them and what not. My family keeps stumbling on these instead of our actual content, even when they search something we have.
They require the pass for hardware transcoding on the server, an absurd limitation in my book. For my setup, it basically caps Plex to ~2Mbps and x264, anything higher or with a newer encoding goes through Jellyfin (without issue too).
Moving features behind Pass instead of making Pass more appealing has also been rubbing folks the wrong way. I was about to pay for Pass before they walled off remote access, and then I noticed the hardware transcoding issue after the announcement, solidifying my decision to not give them money and instead find an alternative.
This is going to be pretty high level and simplified (ex. I'm not going to differentiate between indexers and trackers), but the two most popular distribution networks are torrents and usenet. Alongside those the two most popular ways to interact with them are a client on machine in your control (ex. local NAS or cloud seedbox) or through a debrid service.
Both torrents and usenet have similar-ish mechanisms for people to find content: indexers. Indexers are the generic term I'm using for things like The Pirate Bay where all they really host are databases that make it easy to look up what are effectively just addresses to content held elsewhere. What exactly these addresses look like can vary a bit, but a few examples are magnet links, torrent files, and nzb files. Indexers are basically just search engines for files someone else has to host.
Then you use some sort of client, be it one on your machine or a debrid service, to effectively resolve the address to a file. This can mean downloading it, seeding it, or sometimes just dynamically streaming it. There's also another piece with usenet: providers. This is a huge simplification, but imagine that with torrents part of your payment for being in the network is seeding but with usenet you instead pay money to some cloud-like entities to host and download directly from them. Supposedly usenet downloads tend to be significantly faster than torrent downloads, which does seem logical to me because torrents download from a distributed wherever versus usenet's paid professional hosting.
Now, you may be wondering where the Black Friday deals could be relevant: it is common for all of indexers, providers, and debrid providers to have deals. This matters a lot because while some indexers are free there is supposedly a quality increase in private indexers. Private indexers can be invite only, paid, or both. I think that most of the high quality torrent indexers are invite only and free. I think that most of the high quality usenet indexers are paid. I'm pretty sure that all of the usenet providers cost money to cover their hosting.
On top of all of that is then how you use it. The two methods that I understand to be most popular right now are *arr stack and direct media player integration. *arr stack is software you run and maintain yourself usually in conjunction with a seedbox of some kind and then you can put a media player on top of the associated files (ex. Jellyfin reads a media folder full of downloaded content). Direct media player integration is more like Stremio or Kodi plugins that are more tooled around direct streaming without a prebuilt library, commonly with a debrid provider. In general I'd say the *arr stack is more powerful and flexible, but with the drawback of being higher effort and maybe a bit less conducive to instantly accessing content you didn't prepare ahead of time. I'm aware that there is tooling that blurs the the definitions I used there, but I'm talking more about the most common use cases.
I'll also note that the stack used influences both what's needed and legal risk. I'm not a lawyer so take this all with a huge grain of salt, but it seems like the least risk is to not be in control machines that are seeding since seeding can be considered distribution rather than just consumption. Additionally, some components may be combined depending on your stack, such as there being usenet debrid services that include the providers so that you don't need to deal with portion of the stack. There are other considerations as well, such as that private torrent indexers eject users whose seed ratio is too low and I've seen it claimed that sometimes getting enough seed ratio can be annoying game of seeding stuff you don't want, which is presumably why Facebook was seeding a ton of porn while they were torrenting books.
As said though, very simplified and people could definitely nitpick where exactly I drew the lines and how I defined things. I also left out a ton of stuff, like when a VPN is recommended or that usenet is actually not for sharing these kinds of files at all. Usenet is actually closer an RSS network with pirating files stapled on top, including complaints that the current state of usenet has kind of bastardized its purpose.
And as a late disclaimer: this information comes more from research than personal experience so may contain some details that are incorrect, especially as they relate to private indexers. Many of the relevant communities are publicly visible, but since private indexers are private most of my knowledge about them comes from secondary forums. I don't plan to openly disclose my level of practical experience or what suggestions I would actually make, but I suppose I could answer more in DMs since I do have opinions I could share on what's likely to work best given descriptions of the desired goals, level of effort, and price.
Unless you're purposefully looking to save and host the media files yourself I'd recommend something like a Stremio setup instead. Saves you the money of buying a NAS capable of doing transcoding and having to buy large storage disks.
I've moved away from managing my Plex NAS because you're always fixing something that doesn't quite work. Stremio just streams stuff everywhere and the setup is easy, not quite turnkey-easy but close.
If you have an old-ish PC lying around, you can get a cheaper NAS without all the bells and whistles. I have an older desktop powering my Jellyfin setup and it works pretty well. I got a Ubiquiti NAS and I’ve been thrilled with it. I wanted something that was actually… network attached storage and not another fully fledged computer setup built for media transcoding and all that. If you already have some hardware lying around it doesn’t have to be super expensive to self host.
Edit: I also missed your point about fixing stuff that doesn’t work. That used to be me too, so I get it. Once I dockerized everything, the time I’ve spent managing my stuff has approached zero. Managing that stuff is not for everyone. Sometimes it’s easier to have someone else worry about it
Even with Docker I felt like I was constantly taking containers offline to update them. Automating updates using things like watchtower helped, but then it'd update the wrong container and I'd have to fix that and reconfigure watchtower to stop updating everything all the time.
With that fixed, watchtower occasionally threw out the db or mounted folder of the container causing me to lose my setup on a couple of them until I rebuilt it.
Then this connection failed, that image was deprecated, these changed names, I messed up some configuration and needed to redo it all, Plex no longer remotely worked, my NAS needs updates, the NAS update broke functionality, certs expired, Plex did a thing and transcoding no longer worked for remote streams, Plex updating this broke that, and so on and so forth.
I had fun doing it for a couple of years but at this point I'm no longer interested in tinkering with it too much and I can imagine others may not want to have the tech burden at all. Services like Stremio takes that entire management out of my hands.
You can also use Usenet on Stremio. But Real-Debrid is better. It is much easier than Plex (which I had).
You will consume the media you pay for in exactly the ways in which we let you. You own nothing.
Cool, so now when I'm traveling and don't want to log into Netflix on whatever TV at the location I'm staying at (or maybe they don't have a Netflix app), I'll just not watch Netflix. Pretty soon I won't be able to watch Netflix anywhere so I'll just cancel my subscription due to lack of use.
I know some hotel brands have the ability on their TVs to allow streaming service sign-in. And it'll log you out and erase your details once your stay is done if you forget to do it yourself. Which makes me wonder if there's some kinda data harvesting partnership going on between Netflix and the hotel brand where casting from a personal device obviously doesn't allow the hotel to harvest that data.
Well jokes on them. I always travel with a laptop, a travel router, and an HDMI cable. There's only been a handful of hotels where I couldn't just plug in from my laptop because the TV or media box thing was locked down, or it was basically impossible to get access to the cables behind the TV. And if all else fails, I'll just use my laptop. Nbd for me. But most hotel TVs I've seen and used are essentially wide-open devices.
(Yes I'm aware that Netflix has also started restricting or limiting viewing on devices that aren't at "home." Which is what the travel router is for. Still BS.)
My LPT is plugging in an iPad or phone with a USB-C to HDMI cable. It just screen mirrors, and doesn't use the AirPlay/Chromecast APIs, so it's opaque to the application.
I do that when travelling sometimes, and also for things like live-streamed concerts or video from sites that don't have TV apps (e.g. Critical Role's Beacon).
I'm sure it still requires HDCP, so not exactly opaque. It's at least trying to verify the chain of connections.
I might have to get myself one of those...
I'm a big onebagger, so travel pretty light. But a single cable wouldn't be the worst thing to add to my bag.
I'm not going to post a moral defense of piracy. I will say that I don't really respect most corporations, will do what I want, and am lucky to live in a country with mostly unenforceable piracy laws.
I'll post a quick one. There are many, but I've not written as this way before.
The entertainment industry, particularly at the publisher/corp level, has destroyed the commons of public domain by transforming a short-duration copyright (typically less than 30 years) to a multi-gerational monstrosity. They're destroying our rights of ownership and fair use via heavyhanded legal bludgeons. I guess it's great that my 96 year old grandma can finally enjoy her favorite childhood book for free in 4 years.
They stole from us, I'll steal from them. I'll fund small creators best I can, but will also feel 0 shame about pirating a movie I watched on TV in 1994 to show my kids one time.
I'm still no a fan of piracy, but as an animation fan they've sure made it as impossible as hell to access any of the shows i used to watch on there. Can't believe it only took one CEO to eviscerate half my childhood.
I've had to kinda relearn how to be a pirate. After college and Steam, I'd mostly gone full legal in terms of music, games and shows. After Netflix changes, gaming price increases and the like, I've mostly gone back to full piracy, which is easier than I thought it'd be. I'll buy games from indies, or from studios I respect. I bought Slay the Princess a few weeks ago and it was brilliant. But, an Activision Blizzard game? Or a port of a game I bought in the 90s? Nah, I'm taking that.
Ports are such a mixed bag. Sometimes they're mildly updated and have a lot of under the hood changes to run on modern hardware. Other times, they're barely functional, hastily thrown together cash grabs.
Yup, I kinda make a judgement call on those. I haven't pirated the Star Ocean 2 and Super Mario RPG remakes because they look like they have a ton of effort out into them. The Star Ocean 3 PS4 port? Not a single difference, aside from extra crashes. No guilt whatsoever in pirating that.
Of course this literally happens on the week I go on vacation.
Jokes on them though, they don’t actually have anything I want to watch.
And yet I pay them anyways….
Why keep paying them in that case? It's not getting any cheaper.
Simply because my sister and husband watch it. I might cancel after Stranger Things ends, though.
That would be poetic timing. I might do the same.
Noticed it was gone this weekend, thought it was just me. Not sure if this is a depreciated API or cracking down on the household limitations, but it will be missed.
So now all of my older Chromecast devices can't be used for Netflix, cool cool cool
Edit: just read the article, only tiers below 17.99 a month will have access removed. Also it says something about older Chromecast not losing this function...but we will see. I'm good at this point but this sucks.