Netflix kills Basic plan, making its cheapest ad-free tier $15.49

Technology@beehaw.org – 281 points – 1 years ago

Netflix kills Basic plan, making its cheapest ad-free tier $15.49

I've been putting off having a local copy of the series and movies I watch because I still can access them quickly and cheaply enough in some streaming service, I think it's time to plan ramping up my selfhosted setup.

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Literally all you need is a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere. Don’t look back.

Can you elaborate for on this for simpletons like me? I've looked at raspberry Pi's before but have no idea what I'm looking at or for because of the options.

If you don’t know anything about this stuff and don’t want to get into setting up linux software, you’re better off just getting a simple self-enclosed NAS drive like a WD MyCloud (just an example, I don’t know all the options out there now) that you connect to your LAN and then connect to it with Kodi or another player. With that you just login to it from a web browser to create your content folders, then map it as a drive in windows explorer and copy data to it over the network like any other drive. Then Kodi etc can be provided the network address for that drive and content folder. (And have a separate USB drive to make a content backup in case the NAS dies one day.)

Otherwise I use a raspberry pi 4, as it’s fast enough to be an emulator box with retroarch (etc), and a torrent seedbox for acquiring content with deluge installed (behind a VPN), and a pi-hole for blocking ads network-wide, and has 4 usb ports for content drives. For just hosting media you’d only have to make changes to the config for it to automount the usb drives every startup, and then the pi just acts like a NAS with several drives. The software for vpn, torrents and emulators (all included or free via git) can be a bit complicated to setup but once you have it correct, you can make a backup image of the microSD card that the os is on if you have to restore it later. I personally didn’t know what I was doing on linux when I first set it all up years ago, but got everything working properly just copy and pasting from guides on stackexchange etc.

Again, if all that makes your head hurt, just use a self-contained NAS drive for content.

edit: should probably add that I personally haven’t installed a vpn on the pi for torrenting, as I have a router with vpn built-in, and set the firewall rules so the pi can only access the internet through that (because it’s faster.) There’s a few ways to handle it.

I have an Odroid C4 with Jellyfin, but some content just won't play. Does Kodi work better?

On any other hardware platform I'd tell you that Jellyfin is the best of the best. With that board, it might be worth trying Kodi.

I dunno, I've always found Kodi pretty janky but it seems pretty good at playing back content on lower spec hardware.

There were definitely a few versions of releases 19.x that had buffering issues with larger 4K videos where it would just stop playback, but the latest ones for versions 20.x seem stable for me. Only issue I can think of is sometimes the touch interface on a tablet gets confused and won’t let me scroll up or down, but restarting the app clears it. No issues for me with the pc app interface using mouse pointer and scrollwheel, or the remote controlled interface on a FireTV.

(accidentally deleted first reply)

edit: after reading about jellyfin, the main drawback I can see to using that is you have to install specific server-side software for it (unless I misunderstood) while Kodi is self-contained on the client side and just reads any accessible folder locally or on the network. (Not bashing jellyfin as I’ve never installed or used it, just noting that difference.)

I haven’t had anything that kodi wouldn’t play, but I also don’t have a ton of different file types. For music and movies it hasn’t failed me yet. You just need to be able to give it a network address to the content folder on a NAS or pi, and it usually scans everything for me. Kodi connects to it from a Fire Tablet, FireTV Stick and the pc app.

And where does the content come from?

Yeah I see you harping about having to download your own material, but that is the reality of self hosting, acquiring content. And the joy of not having an algorithm recommending things. It’s not for everyone. If someone’s not capable of such things, that’s fine, then this convo isn’t for them and they should just keep using netflix.

But that's the point I'm making. It's absolutely fine that it's not as simple as using a ready-made service. And we shouldn't behave like it is, because that's just not true.

Nobody said it was. My reply was specifically to the OP, who said their plan was “ramping up my selfhosted setup.” They’ve already got experience and are on the path, so my comment was appropriate in that sense. Try to read things in context. Nobody suggested everyone’s boomer parents should jump on the bandwagon here.

Sonarr and Radarr with Ombi for requests if desired. Transmission + OpenVPN for the download side.

Or you could manually rip DVDs/Blu Rays if you can still get ahold of them for the stuff you want to watch.

So you literally need much more than a networked raspberry pi with a content hard drive, and Kodi installed anywhere.

yes, captain obvious, you literally need to acquire content for self hosting. otherwise what I mentioned is all you need to self host said media. the modern version of a dvd collection. whoa.

I'm a big fan of Overseerr versus Ombi. Overseerr has a better user interface and seems more approachable to my less technically inclined family members.