Backups need to be reliable and I just can’t rely on a community of volunteers or the availability of family to help.

So yeah I pay for S3 and/or a VPS. I consider it one of the few things worth it to pay a larger hosting company for.

Yeah the golden age of streaming has long passed. Now it’s an expensive, ad-ridden fragmented mess of data harvesting.

Alternatively what you’re describing sounds like SponsorBlock but for podcasts. You probably wouldn’t have to rehost the actual audio files to accomplish this, just have a podcast client/addon that allows user submissions for ad segments and a database somewhere that can host the metadata for ad breaks.

Biggest issue is probably that you’re probably building or forking an existing podcast app to do it, and some podcasts dynamically insert ads so it’s possible that peoples downloaded files could have different ad segments/times.

Expecting other people to build the online communities you want to use is how we got the corporate social media bait and switch in the first place.

DuckDNS is great… but they have had some pretty major outages recently. No complaints, I know it’s an extremely valuable free service but it’s worth mentioning.

Cloudflare has an api for easy dynamic dns. I use oznu/docker-cloudflare-ddns to manage this, it’s super easy:

docker run \
  -e API_KEY=xxxxxxx \
  -e ZONE=example.com \
  -e SUBDOMAIN=subdomain \
  oznu/cloudflare-ddns

Then I just make a CNAME for each of my public facing services to point to ‘subdomain.example.com’ and use a reverse proxy to get incoming traffic to the right service.

765 movies (~4.5 TB)

161 tv series (~7.2 TB)

About a year ago 6TB storage was no longer cutting it since I was constantly having to hunt for media to delete or downgrade quality in order to make more room. I bought five 14TB drives and put them in a big zfs pool so I don’t have to do that anymore.

Yes, resolution is not the only factor. Bitrate is equally if not more important.

People get mad when I call it West Georgia.

They want to make VPNs illegal too.

They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.

Mark Zuckerberg

That’s been my problem. It’s overpriced for just a single camera considering I already manage a big storage pool that my other services can use. But do I want to lock myself into buying other Ubiquity IP cams down the road?

Don’t the Ubiquity doorbells require a ‘dream machine’ storage appliance for recording video? I didn’t think there was a way to use your own storage anymore which has been my main hesitation in getting one.

deleted by creator

You’re likely thinking of Empress who has a number of personality issues… transphobia definitely being one of them.

I use ZFS for this exact reason. I didn’t want to be stuck using a specific controller or have problems if I needed to migrate my storage to another server. It’s a lot more flexible than a hardware RAID too and has some nice benefits like snapshotting.

I’ve been running .19 on my instance for a while now and recently upgraded to .19.3 and haven’t had any crashing on Sync.

Are you using s3 for storage or block storage? S3 is pretty cheap but I’m wondering if Cloudfront would still help me with the load on the ec2 instance when federation traffic is slamming it.

Are you using cloudfront?

I don’t think Steam’s business model works well for Movies/TV. Besides delivering the game files after your initial purchase Steam also continues to host and deliver update files for games over time, as well as lots of extras like syncing game saves, the workshop for mods, etc. I like having a centralized service that offers these features and acts a launcher for games because it’s very convenient. These features are a huge value add that makes the service very attractive over piracy.

But for Movies/TV the main thing I want is the ability to watch the content, at a high quality, on whatever device I want, whenever I want to watch it. Theoretically this shouldn’t be to hard, but with the way all the rights work it’s effectively impossible for any streaming service to offer this. Content gets removed all the time, it’s spread across a ton of different services that all offer a different experience. In a vain attempt to thwart pirates it’s a pain in the ass to watch content offline so it’s unreliable at best.

The only way to get the experience I want with Movies/TV is to pirate the content.