I have network storage. That’s it.
I want to watch anime? I open the series folder from the mounted network share and watch it in VLC. I want to listen to music while on my walk? I open Solid Explorer on my phone and play the MP3. I want to read ebooks? I just open the file in whatever reader app I want.
I have 5TiB of media and I’ve never felt the need to set up any kind of hosted frontend.
What am I missing out on? Anyone else run their NAS like this?
Thanks all.
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I assume you don’t have a TV or a spouse?
VLC runs on everything.
I have a UPnP server running on my NAS and use VLC to stream anything that my Jellyfin box has issues with.
Vlc does not meet the wife approval factor.
Tell me more
nothing more to tell. my jellyfin box can’t handle newer codecs and I also have older devices that can connect to UPnP servers directly.
No TV, yes spouse. She prefers playing media from the network folder just like me.
@TheButtonJustSpins @Wolfizen lol. I’m not the original poster, but my spouse and kids just use vlc.
(we do have kodi set up for TVs, but we don’t use it very often. Mostly everyone watches stuff on laptops.)
Jellyfin, Immich, and Paperless-ngx are three of the apps I use the most but you do whatever works best for you. That’s half the advantage of self hosting. You can have a solution that’s custom tailored to your needs.
Absolutely!
What do you like about those that make your experience better?
I like front ends so I have a record of what I have and have not played, and so I can easily pickup where I left off with series and playlists, but to each their own
I see! That makes sense. Thank you :)
What do you prefer using?
Not me. I need nextcloud and jellyfin. I use nextcloud for my calendar, task, note, photos, contacts etc. Jellyfin, well, media.
I dont have gdrive, icloud, spotify stuff like that. So, i need to host it myself.
Makes sense! Thank you :)
I have much the same:
- files on the network with NFS
- Kodi on am old laptop under the TV so we can watch said files.
- Syncthing on our phones and laptops to pull films from there onto that file server.
The only difference is that I’m using a Synology 'cause I have 15TB and don’t know how to do RAID myself, let alone how to do it with an old laptop. I can’t really recommend a Synology though. It’s got too many useless add-ons and simple tools like rsync never work properly with it.
Yes. And No.
I have a home made (arch btw) NAS that stores all our files - mostly via syncthing, even from remote family.
That was it.
Then I installed Immich so that we could see the photos… so… it’s technically just a NAS, but it does now have a web application running on it…
Videos & Music are on a completely separate MythTV box which existed before the NAS - I saw no point in moving ~3TB of data to a separate box that would need to be powered when I want to watch / listen to something… my NAS powers itself up & down throughout the day to save electricity (and it was interesting to learn how to make it know when it was / wasn’t being used)
Nice! Thank you for sharing your experience. :)
How did you get your NAS to know when it was being used?
I could only assume he’s using WOL (wake on lan) then auto sleeping after a while of no activity.
I ran mine like this for years. Then a few weeks ago I installed Immich so we can browse photos directly from the NAS on our phone. That’s how it will stay. I don’t want it to turn into an application server.
I’ve basically got everything thrown into a Samba share on Linux then most media is consumed via the Infuse app for iOS, macOS.
As for music, I have some lossless/hifi that I can stream via Apple’s Music app too.
I don’t really get the whole NAS thing i must admit. Most of what I read about what people are doing is enabling slacker family and friends ? (That’s not a critisism, just an observation)
I have a TV, a HDD connected on the router and Kodi on the Nvidia Shield Pro. Any music is stored on my phone, or streamed via Netradio
I very occasionally copy media across to my phone to watch and then… it sits there and I dont watch it.
My parter uses Kodi on the TV occasioanly.
I don’t stream anything aside from some YT occasionally (DIY etc)
I get people do endless shit with their NAS, or server but I’m am retired and don’t have the time
Books are managed via Calibre on a a Kobo.
My NAS ist almost exclusively backups. Just installed TrueNAS to have a GUI for ZFS and NFS.
I used to. I once turned a laptop into a Windows media server just to host movies and music for the house. That was fun
I’m one or those as well, but instead of VLC I use NOVA player on Android devices because of the remote sync.
Said that I’m using WebDAV shares as SMB is way slower. Is it just me? Any other protocol suggestion?
No. I like my laptop to backup over the internet. I like my phone to use my nas for photos instead of Apple.
I have 5TiB of media and I’ve never felt the need to set up any kind of hosted frontend.
I’m closing in on 80 and I feel a very strong need for one :)
What are your reasons? Discovery / searching?
Yep both, especially searchig for specific episode titles which are very often not included in the filenames. Or with anime, where many shows can have half a dozend different titles.
Also to keep track of what I watched and being able to easily resume watching on a different platform.
Yep both, especially searchig for specific episode titles which are very often not included in the filenames. Or with anime, where many shows can have half a dozend different titles.
Also to keep track of what I watched and being able to easily resume watching on a different platform.
Tbh setting up all cool frontends has always mystified me but I like minimal terminal interfaces and use stuff like MPD, Yazi, etc. and it seems like a pain to manage this big thing. I think the benefit really sets in when it’s something you’re sharing with others.
Like, I’d love to have all my documents in a folder written in pure markdown via vim, but hedgedoc helps me share and collaborate with my friends. A lot of people who operate these services share them with family, so I imagine ease of use helps. Tracking can be huge for people as well, but idk I just write down my episode list or have a separate tracker app.
Speaking of, Yamtrack is really good for that.
Overall, I feel like minimal UIs really help me focus instead of getting lost, but sharing my media via Jellyfin is one of the few reasons I want to do this in the first place. I like providing access to obscure media that’s hard to get ahold of for my friends. So I’d say I’m a mix. Minimal stuff for myself, but interfaces for friend/external access.
Thanks for your experience.
It seems a common reason to set up a frontend is for family use. I suppose that is a logical extension of designing a system for its users - if someone wants to use it a certain way, they get to use it that way.
I’ve got an older AMD bulldozer platform with 16 or so tb behind it. SMB serves up all of the media to Nvidia shield platforms running Kodi. Away, I’ll wire guard in to my network to remotely access media and compute as needed. I’m a big fan of not running a bunch of integrations that would fail at a time I’m just trying to watch something and relax; IT support at home after doing it all day sucks.
