There’s nothing wrong with that, but self hosting opens up so much more flexibility, much like cloud hosted services we’re used to. Jellyfin is like a personal Netflix where you can watch your movies on any device at any time. The convenience is obvious. For mose cloud hosted services, there’s an alternative that can be self hosted.
chunes@lemmy.world 1 day ago
maybe I’ve been living under a rock but I don’t get all this emphasis on hosting. What’s wrong with having a file on your device that you just play when you want to
Joelk111@lemmy.world 1 day ago
damo_omad@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You do have the file on a device… On a server, and you can play it on any client you like
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Mainly just multi-device access.
Allero@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Self-hosting allows you to have all your files on all your devices, like many have used to with the streaming services. Also, some smart TVs specifically require to connect to some server to grab movies from.
If you don’t need any of that, regular hard drive will suit you best.
howrar@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
For me, it’s a matter of restoring the convenience and UX that you’ve given up by leaving the big providers.
groet@feddit.org 1 day ago
That is the smallest scale of self hosting. The server and the client are the same device. It is also the most insecure way as you probably don’t have any backups and very limited storage space.
Actually self hosting is the next step when you decide you want 5+ TB of data and have it automatically create backups. Digital storage media degrade pretty quickly and if you just have your movies on a hard drive in your computer, after 5-10 years you might start to lose quality or some files completely.
Auli@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
What a lie use zfs or btrfs it solves those. I’ve been using zfs for probably close to 10 years and have never had a flip yet. And yes I scrub my pool.
Jason2357@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
While true, neither backups nor checksums are exclusive to hosting anything.
N0x0n@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Wait… That’s a thing? You can lose video quality off a video file on a HD over time?
groet@feddit.org 1 day ago
Not like the whole video goes from 1080p to 720p or something but single bits of the drive will fails over time. If that bit is part of your video file, one pixel of one frame will be the wrong color/black. If multiple bits close to each other fail you might get a video stutter. If even more fail your video player will not play the video at all (or just stop playing at the place of the errors).
N0x0n@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Oh yeah I was aware that it won’t change from 1080 to 720 :p.
But I thought the movie would just be corrupted an unplayable not lose quality bits !
Onsotumenh@discuss.tchncs.de 1 day ago
Yup, bitrot is a thing. Got a few video files from around 2000 only one player can still open and even then there are lots of artifacts. Moving the files periodically helps to reduce risk. Better is to use a file system\software that prevents that. I’m using snapraid on my server and do regular scrubs.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
corrupt files will have glitches in the best case, but more likely have noticeable decoding errors, and completely unplayable files in the worst case (some parts of a video file are essential for processing the rest). that could also happen if the file system metadata gets corrupted, and the OS cannot piece together the file extents or the whole directory anymore.
modern data storage relies on reliable storage medium. to protect yourself against bit rot the only thing you can do is to keep backups on different storage devices. but what does it worth if you don’t notice (in time) there’s corruption. you need some way to detect it. a catalogue of some sort, like a checksum file for a whole directory tree, automatically extended with new files, ran in checking mode on schedule, and notifeably notifying you about issues. it can be a custom made solution for traditional file systems like ext4, ntfs, xfs, the FATs, etc, or a filesystem that has that function built-in like zfs or btrfs. the latter two don’t implement the notification and the schedule part, but they do the majority of the work. also if you want to notice not just corruption but erroneous deletion or modification too, you should also use their snapshot functionality. you can diff them to see if there’s any unexpected changes.