Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What are your most used self-hosted applications?

noted.lol

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 456 posts

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

#121

Post by aroundtown »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #86
brimble wrote: 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'd try jellyfin first to see if it fits your needs.

I went with plex years ago, because they had good app support on the various devices in my house. (Mostly roku now)

The problem with Plex is:

1. during a recent half day internet outage (during prime-time) I was unable to use plex because the app didn't have access to the internet. The network was all up and running, devices could see each other, but plex decided that even though the media was on the local network it wasn't good enough and refused to finish playing the video we were watching. (The internet went out 20 minutes in)

2. Plex the company has gone fully into adding all kinds of streaming services in order to make a buck. While you can remove these things from your menu, it is just annoying.

3. Plex doesn't always fix known issues. Over the years I've run across several issues in plex that after trying to troubleshoot find that it is a known issue Plex refuses to address. For example, I've recently had some issues with some videos dropping half or more of the frames while the audio is fine. Turns out, plex doesn't like something in the files metadata and this is the result. Plex is the only one that has the issue with the file. It plays fine locally with VLC and streams fine with other programs.

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

#124

Post by Bedon292 »

brimble wrote: post #101
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have primarily used Plex and pretty much everything you said is accurate for Plex as well. Limited transcoding based on the machine it is running on. As disc has become cheaper, I have pretty much stopped doing batch transcodes, which is great for the most part. But there are definitely negatives when you want to watch something offline, or remotely. Biggest pain point is subtitles though. Since they aren't ripped as text and then sent to a client, they have to be burned in to the video itself and transcoded on the fly. Which means losing out on 'forced' ones if it can't transcode fast enough.

Plex has definitely started to try and commercialize itself more and offer other stuff, when all I want is access to my own media. So I may look into Jellyfin more soon.

As for batch transcode jobs, I had a system that I was able to set up as essentially a black box. Drop a rip into a folder and out the other side comes a smaller one at a reasonable quality. With forced subs burned right into the actual video. Mostly based on https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

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

#125

Post by aroundtown »

smulc wrote: post #119
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing Plex requires a plex.com account to log into your own personal self-hosted server. Jellyfin definitely does not.

I was reluctant to switch from Emby to Plex for this same reason but it turns out you can run plex self-hosted without any account. I have Plex running on a server and streaming from the Plex app on an LG TV without requiring an account. https://support.plex.tv/articles/207538527-do-i-need-a-plex-... has more detail

I'll warn you that Plex will do everything possible to get you to add an account. One update (several years back) locked me out of making any changes to my server until I created an account.

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

#126

Post by wjp3 »

brimble wrote: 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…

Chiming in here to concur with your points about MS screwing up how to buy Minecraft. It's an absolute mess.

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

#127

Post by qbasic_forever »

brimble wrote: 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…

Just make sure your host workstation has automatic security updates turned on, but otherwise yeah letting docker manage all the services is totally fine.

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

#128

Post by qbasic_forever »

mekster wrote: post #108

People really should give Caddy a try. It's a nice breath of fresh air and make you figure nginx config is such a bloat. my.domain { reverse_proxy 10.0.0.2 } is all you need to get https://my.domain running with automatic Let's Encrypt.

Caddy is great but there sadly isn't anything like nginx-proxy-manager for it. The proxy manager is actually a full little identity provider and authenticating proxy--it's very slick and perfect for simple home self-hosting scenarios with a handful of users.

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

#130

Post by ridgered4 »

nwellinghoff wrote: post #59
klinquist wrote: post #52

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!

It's been awhile since I used ESXi but for awhile I was running an ESXi6 server and I'd connect to a VM on the server from my linux desktop with VMware Player (I believe you officially needed workstation to do this but there was a command line backdoor). Then in the client there was a redirect USB device option.

I do the same thing now with qemu/kvm server. I just fire up virt-manager, open the VM I want to use and pick redirect USB device from the menu. Then I can select a local USB device and send it through. I haven't used it for much besides flash drives though. It requires a couple tweaks to the VM settings and I think it needs spice tools but that's expected, VMware needed VMware tools for this as well.

Post reply on HN