unraid is great but on a little 4 bay mini nas with limited expandability you don’t get much advantage for the money, it’s better for larger arrays and lots of mixed disk sizes, and on systems where you can put in lots of SSDs to make a decently fast caching setup die to unraid slower non-striped array architecture.

On a 4 bay mini-NAS I’d go with the free truenas option and just make it a RaidZ1 of 4 disks.

For a beginner, OMV might be simpler, and for paid options, HexOS is probably more beginner friendly than raw TrueNas.

A free alternative to Unraid is Snapraid, but thats more of a roll-your-own solution, not an OS you can just install.

way back in the early days of Wifi (802.11B was the cutting edge magic future technology) I had a large antenna hooked up to my laptop PCMCIA wifi card and could pick up some open networks from a few neighbours away. I used to set it up and leave winmx running on my laptop to download all sorts of garbage.

My home internet at the time was up-to 512Kbps satellite downlink (usually around 200k and lots of packet loss and very high ping) with a ~56k dial up uplink which was also the failover when the satellite was too weak, so it was very asymmetrical and unreliable.

This is semi-rural Australia in 1999/2000 and was the best we could get until we got a 3G connection that usually got 1.5meg down and 500k up on a weak HSPA connection, that place didn’t get 8/1 ADSL a couple of years later around 2005/6. A couple of streets away there were already on cable and better DSL lines were available so I assume I was connecting to one of those.

Over the weak long range Wifi connection with a makeshift “cantenna” that probably wasn’t quite right I usually got around 250k symmetrical if I recall correctly, which was really nice compared to the satellite link despite the lower maximum speed.

the most I think you could do would be log IPs for malicious or litigious purposes, I don’t think you could really do anything like malware injection in this case.

lol ARJ, malware distributors are really trying arent they. I havent use ARJ since the 90’s

it’s less than $3 on GOG at the moment.

And it is easily available through other means.

I still fire up HOMM3 + HD + HOTA every now and then.

can we find a way to spoof this so that they think legit physical disk usage is going up?

jellyfin was a fork of emby anyway, its core framework is solid.

Emby has more of the plex-like polish, but it is more closed source than I would prefer to trust with my media, so I get by with Jellyfin. It works more than well enough fro my in-home media streaming and I still run plex for my remote users as I bought a plex pass way back at the start and I’m going to use it until I simply cant anymore… which seems to be rapidly approaching.

there are just as many audiobook releases done as individual chapter files as there are in chaptered m4b files. any good audiobook player should handle either just fine.

I get most of my audiobooks from soulseek at the moment, but there are a few things that are pulled from Usenet and ABB

I’ve been using it for years, it works with chaptered m4b files perfectly, but also plays separate chapter files in just about any format you throw at it seamlessly.

I run N+ in a container, gets the job done perfectly well.

95% of my media comes via Usenet for I don’t bother with a VPN there, but my torrent client and *arrs are behind a VPN.

I automated this with FileFlows.

New media automatically has Audio tracks sorted with the best track (English, most channels, highest bitrate) set to index0 and set as default and a basic stereo AAC track added for compatibility if there isn’t already one in the file. superfluous tracks are removed. Subtitles are also cleared out if there are extras too.

I also have Fileflows handle a light compression pass on files that are more than 6 months old for archival, in certain video libraries where I don’t need perfect copies stored.

Most of the files you get from private and public trackers will be same ones you can get via Usenet so it’s pretty much the same everywhere, filtering your *Arrs to prioritise certain release groups helps when you know specific shows or genres are better supplied by a certain group.

you can pirate on a kindle it’s just more annoying to do

Kobo is the go-to for bang for buck readers that don’t care where your files are from and have good format support. got my dad a libra 2 and it’s great, especially with the physical page turn buttons. the default reader opens most files just fine, but you can also put KoReader on them for more functionality without too much hassle.

Personally I use an older Boox Note 3 which is easier since it runs android, but is massive overkill to be used as just a reader, i use it as my main tablet and a notepad/sketchpad.

Jellyfin has come a hell of a long way since it first forked from Emby. sure its not as feature complete and polished as plex but it’s far from shit, and it’s free and open.

I run both side by side with several clients on each and have been a plexpass holder since 2013.

time for a re-watch. it gets better with time.

and by better I mean the existential dread is worse.

Sure, but something tells me the kinds of people who use software like Wondershare and Aiseesoft video converters arent going to be writing their own FFMPEG automations in batch files or bash scripts.

Basically everything worth using is just a wrapper for FFMPEG these days, so they all perform the same, just with different interfaces. So Handbrake will always be the go-to for the basics, but if you are looking for automation and custom processing based on rules you set out, then FileFlows is worth playing with

These are the people that complain to their ISP when their game ‘lags’ on their wireless connected computer several rooms away from the router.

can you run something like iperf3 or openspeedtest between the server and client to prove its a network throughput issue?

do you have a network switch you can add to avoid switching through your router (if it is indeed bad?)

Have you ensured you arent unknowingly using wifi at either end?

I cant say I care as much as I used to, since encoding has gotten quite good, but I have also gotten better at seeing (aka. worse at being distracted by) compression artifacts so while I am less of a perfect remux rip supremacist, I’m also more sensitive to bad encodes so its a double edged sword.

I still seek out the highest quality versions of things that I personally care about, but I don’t seek those out for absolutely everything like I used to. I recently saved 12TB running a slight compression pass on my non-4k movie library, turning (for example) a 30gb 1080p Bluray Remux into a 20gb H265 high bitrate encode, which made more room for more full fat 4K bluray files for things I care about, and the few 1080p full remuxes I want to keep for rarities and things that arent as good from the 4k releases or the ones where the 4k release was drastically different (like the LOTR 4k’s having poor dynamic range and the colours being changed for the Matrix etc), which I may encode in the future to save more space again. I know I can compress an 80gb UHD bluray file down to 60gb with zero noticeable loss, thats as far as I need to go, I don’t need to go down to 10gigs like some release groups try to do, and at that level of compression you might as well be at 1080p.

I cant go as low as a low bitrate 720p movie these days as I’m very close to a large screen so they tend to look quite poor, soft edges, banded gradients, motion artifacts, poor sound etc. but if I were on a smaller screen or watching movies on a phone like I used to, I probably wouldn’t care as much.

Another side to my choice to compress is that I have about 10 active Plex clients at the moment and previously they were mostly getting transcoded feeds (mostly from remux sources) but now most of them are getting a better quality encode (slow CPU encode VS fast GPU stream) direct to their screens, so while I’ve compressed a decent chunk of the library, my clients are getting better quality feeds from it.