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What are your most used self-hosted applications?

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Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#101
post #53

Pihole. DNS-level ad-blocking for my network. Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix. Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-pro…

I’ve been considering setting up plex so my mom and brother could access media. Would jellyfin be better for this?

I've not used Plex, so I'm not sure. You'd need to find a way to expose it to the Internet (mine's only on my local network) but that shouldn't be too hard. Just forward the correct ports on your router.

It does have an account system, including the ability to restrict which "libraries" an account can access, which is great if you have kids. For adults, it lets you track your viewing progress/status separately, just like having multiple Netflix profiles.

One thing to account for is that it has to transcode and/or remux videos for clients that can't handle a file's native codecs, audio or video, which can put a pretty heavy load on the server. A Raspberry Pi or weaker x86 machine won't be able to do this without frequent pauses and frame-dropping, for any but very low-resolution media. Solutions to this include: 1) ensuring that your clients can all handle a huge range of codecs, so it never has to transcode (IME audio is, these days, trickier than video, especially ensuring things like Dolby Atmos are supported), 2) getting a really powerful server, in particular with a video card that Jellyfin can use for transcoding, and 3) falling back on just downloading the file and throwing it in VLC (the web interface makes it really easy to download the raw video files in a pinch, though if you have big high-quality 4K rips they'll come down at full size, which can be inconvenient on devices with limited storage, like, say, iPads).

However, I think Plex or anything else will have similar limitations, since they all have to do something like that to accommodate players & devices with limited codec support.

Jellyfin's been very stable for me, which is part of why I'm still on it. I also find the UI in most of their clients much, much more to my liking than something like Kodi. But IDK about Plex.

[EDIT] Oh, I guess you could also batch-job transcode all the files to something very widely-supported, outside of JellyFin, though likely at some cost in quality and maybe also file size. Plus it'd probably take at least an hour or two to hack together a script to do it, for a wide range of input codecs.

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#102

Perhaps only barely fitting the definition, my most used application is ESXi on a intel Mac Mini which runs VMs for Ubuntu & Windows. I lost the ability to use Windows software that interfaced with devices over USB when I got my M1 MBP - or so I thought - until I learned that you can share USB devices over the network to a VM running on ESXi. So now I have my windows ham radio programming software (uses a USB-Serial…

Can you flesh out the whole “share usb devices over the network”? What are you using to do that? Thanks!

For what it's worth, you could also use USB over IP (http://usbip.sourceforge.net/) even if your virrualisation host doesn't support it. Watch out for authentication though, because the protocol doesn't care a whole lot about security. Might be worth the effort of setting up a wireguard/ipsec tunnel to secure the traffic.

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#105
post #53

Pihole. DNS-level ad-blocking for my network. Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix. Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-pro…

Jellyfin, I must try that for the family, great! We use Minetest instead of Minecraft here. It runs ok on Raspberry Pi 400 and Android as well.

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#106
post #94
post #53

Pihole. DNS-level ad-blocking for my network. Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix. Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-pro…

AdGuard Home is great too.

Yup, I switched from PiHole to AdGuard Home because it can be installed directly on an OPNSense box.

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#107
post #53

Pihole. DNS-level ad-blocking for my network. Jellyfin. Movies/TV/Music server with a variety of clients, including a built-in web client, but also AndroidTV/Shield, Roku, Kodi, and more. It's like having a personal Netflix. Minecraft. The old Java kind. May be leaving for something open-source soon because MS has fucked up the account transitions so badly, and also make buying new copies bizarrely painful, error-pro…

I’ve been considering setting up plex so my mom and brother could access media. Would jellyfin be better for this?

Plex is not open source, really tries to force you to login, some clients cost money, and the software spies on you.

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#109
Synapse. I use Matrix chat every day. Also, my website's cactus.chat comments are on Matrix.

Navidrome - nice lightweight self-hosted music server

Miniflux - my RSS reader

PiVPN - An easy to use wireguard manager that I use every day. (Technically I interact with only wireguard, not the manager PiVPN every day)

Re: What are your most used self-hosted applications?

#110
post #25

Home assistant. Incredibly versatile and complete home automation software.

Home assistant is fantastic. The number of integrations available is unbelievable (and also somewhat scary, security wise): What I have right now: - integration with Tuya lights/electrical outlets - integration with AirThings air quality sensor - integration with EcoBee thermostat/presence sensors - integration with an LG Oven (status only as far as I can tell) - integration with Garmin ecosystem - integration with p…

I've got an msi desktop gaming PC, an LG CX OLED TV, and a Yamaha RX-A2A receiver and they never played well together. The kids always had a hard time getting them all on at once and set to the right inputs and launching steam.

So I created a Home Assistant automation that does all that, bought a Zwave button that sits on the coffee table, and now they just turn it all on with one button like it's a video game console.

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