I got this popup ad on my TV **while watching a DVD**

_number8_@lemmy.world to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 1809 points –

we live in hell

I don't even understand the pitch? you have the disc playing, in your hands, your ownership, no buffering, no subscription required. and they're saying....hey do you want a worse experience?

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Protip: Do not connect your TV to the Internet.

I ended up giving up and just putting a Linux PC attached to my TV as a media center. I host plex on it.

This is the way (Jellyfin here)

I'm new to all this. Got any recommendations how to learn about Jellyfin?

while often outdated, there are youtube tutorials. you could buy a cheap thinkcentre or set up a virtual machine to try it out.

personally, i run truenas scale with jellyfin as an "app" on my old PC.

So here's how I'm running things: At the top level it's a Raspberry pi 5 running raspbian, then everything else (jellyfin, prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, Usenet download software, etc) is a docker container. If that sounds like how you want to do it feel free to message me and I can try to get you on your feet

I’m not who you replied to but I’ve been looking to set up something like this (I have a year old dedicated tower for hosting)

But I don’t know anything about docker, and it seems like a pretty big learn - is it required for the sonarr radarr and overseerr stuff, or just a nice to have thing?

I’m using OMV headless and have zero luck with Docker or Portainer.

Is it going to be easier to set up Docker using Raspbian with a GUI?

I used CLI for setup, the GUI is just for ease of file management and checking libraries. I recommend hotio for super easy images to just fire and forget. Links I hope will help you: https://hotio.dev/containers/jellyfin/ https://wiki.servarr.com/

Step 1. Get docker up and running (Portainer helps with other containers) Step 2. Use prowlarr to set up all the search engines you'll use on other *arr apps Step 3. Set up your libraries with Jellyfin

You’re wonderful, thank you! I’m going to leave my local OMV PI4 setup alone and when my pi5 arrives, I’ll try this!

Don't be a stranger if you get stuck, I can't promise much but I'll try to help if I can!

Thank you so much! I don’t think my Pi5 will come for another couple months, but we’ll see!

Honestly you can just run the app on your computer and tv connected devices. You don’t have to get fancy. I had trouble getting it setup to recognize and remember my library server address at first, but somehow I got it to work. I don’t like the UI though, and just use PLEX instead.

Of use jellyfin, but I have too many friends with only consoles that rely on my server. Sigh

I don't see how this is giving up though. Been doing this to close to two decades in one form of another and I wouldn't consider any other way. Except kodi instead of plexus here.

I mean, steam made it work with games, you telling me that 6-7 of these giant media companies can't get it to work for video? The giving up part is that you have to embrace piracy (again?) to get to acceptable levels of service per dollar

I still watch TV through a Laptop running Windows Media Centre. MS have given up on trying to kill it. The Microsoft remote has seen better days but is still functioning.

Until Plex gets unbearable as well. They have been getting a lot shittier lately.

Other server software are available of course. The concept stays the same though. Very much recommend doing this. I'm halfway there, running Plex on my desktop PC and watching on my TV and other devices at home. Very comfortable setup. But I wish I had a small computer like a Pi or something, and a NAS to hold my drives. That way my desktop PC could rest.

Personally I was a fan of buying something like a Dell optiplex as my my NAS and Pihole but I do wish I had a better enclosure for the drives as any truly good one seems to be hundreds of dollars and mildly defeats the idea of self hosting being cheaper.

I just use an old crappy hand-me-down mid-tower gaming case I stuffed some drives into. As long as you can keep them cool, dusted, and away from vibrations (with HDDs), plenty of (used?)cases will have enough HDD slots to get you started.

Also old rackmount servers on ebay have plenty of slots I hear, but rackmount fans are waaaaay louder.

Room is my main issue. Living in an apartment I can't have large boxes/computers just standing anywhere. So it has to be very small and quiet. 😅 Pi should be perfect. Maybe mount it underneath my desk where my desktop PC is or something. 👍

Right on, that makes sense!

If you're not planning on storing absolutely tons of data at first, you can also squeeze a lot into so-called "1 liter PCs". Traditional platform, a little more power and room than a Pi, and you can neatly tuck them away!

I hear they float around eBay quite readily these days.

Sadly haven't been hearing the very best things about the Pi 5, but earlier ones can do well as little servers.

I've been learning a lot from the self hosted podcast lately haha. Also one of the hosts runs this site (which I happened to find first) that can be pretty helpful!

https://perfectmediaserver.com/

I remember some folks on reddit saying USB isn't the most reliable connection for long-term drives, but I'm not 100% sure what that was about. Maybe the connectors wear out?

Perhaps someone who knows more can enlighten me.

Best of luck! I hope you have a lot of fun. 😁

Late reply...

Thank you for all the tips!

I'm curious: what things have you specifically heard about the Pi 5, if you don't mind sharing?

Sure thing!

What I've heard about the Pi 5 specifically is that they dropped hardware acceleration support for video encoding. Which is kinda weird, but admittedly I'm a bit out of the Pi loop to really weigh in.

I believe I heard this on the "Self Hosted Podcast" a while back. (Edit: oh I mentioned them already lol)

I imagine that might hurt for someone trying to use it for streaming Jellyfin or something like that 🤔.

I found a forum link here:

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2139082#p2139126

They hit my threshold of shittiness some years back and I’ve been enjoying Jellyfin ever since. It’s a much better alternative for most!

Plex is a great example of how proprietary software will inevitably become exploitative, and only purely Free Software systems can ever be trustworthy in the long term.

I have my Steam Deck attached to my TV. It's great for watching pirated sports streams via web browser.

I still get Roku recommendations on plex content from my Apple TV. They are doing content recognition off of the hdmi input

I use a dumb tv. Old 1080I tube tv.

Uff between ads and interlaced content?? I’d still try to find a dumb 1080p…

Interlacing only sucks on progressive TVs because they have to interpolate and scale the Missing information causing artifacting, watching interlaced content on an interlaced television is actually unnoticeable from a progressive display in my opinion, perhaps less sharp, but still.

Unhook your TV from the internet, it does not need the ability to talk to anyone on the planet just to show an HDMI input to you.

or just get a cheap-ass android box (like xiaomi or google)

Honestly, I'm just using a cheap Android TV box with stremio and smart tube. Those two apps pretty much cover everything I'd wanna watch. Those $20 Walmart ones are super easy to root/bootloader unlock too, so you can put lineageOS on it if you want

Protip: destroy your 'smart' TV.

You go ahead and destroy something that cost you hundreds of dollars. Be it a TV or cans of Bud Light, I'm not going to destroy something I already got out of some need for a moral victory.

I hate 'smart' TVs. I wish they didn't exist. But telling someone to destroy the one they already had- meaning that if they want to watch TV, they'll just have to buy another- doesn't really make much sense to me.

That sounds actually reasonable, but I'm not taking any advice from a flying squid.

Or, if you must (cringe), use anonymous credentials, have a router level VPN, and maybe even run pihole. But much better to just hook up a PC to your TV and run all of your apps off of that.

What? Am i supposed to watch tv? Hell nah

Just get a cheap PS4 or Xbox and watch all your stuff on there. We have an LG "Smart TV" that just doesn't need to be connected to the internet because our PS5 (formerly PS4) is fast and snappy, and has all the apps we could want to stream off. Plus, both have a Bluray player installed right off the bat, so we can even watch those if we're up for it.

Don't bother with sluggish performance on your Smart TV, it's just not worth it.

What's the practical difference between using a console and a smart TV? Aside from this one feature I mean, which I've never seen on mine.

The UI is better and not as slow as on smart TVs from what I've heard. Plus you can play games on the console and watch DVDs and Blurays if that's your thing. Apart from that, not much.

This is true, because smart TVs have shitty processors, and consoles do not. Consoles are made for media, smart TVs have shitty embedded software on slow hardware, comparatively.

Sony famously pushed DVDs into the mainstream and won a generation of console wars by building a pretty good DVD player into the PS2 which also happened to cost not much more than most DVD players did at the time

PS2 is STILL my only DVD player. Why fix what ain’t broken?

Consoles tend to have higher power draw than a lot of simple devices. Depends on how much you care about environmental power savings or power bills.

Who said that? There are lots of streaming devices you can connect to your display, from game consoles to streaming boxes like Apple TV, Nvidia shield, Android box or if you really want to tinker a PC connected to the TV. The point is, don't connect the TV itself to the internet as it has the most access to the whole viewing experience to drop ads on you.

Exactly. Streaming is so much better than TV. People complain about 5s skippable ads and the pripesed solution is 5 minutes of ads?

Also, so much more convenient than DVDs.