Media Server Justification\Worthiness

Level1Techs INBOX.deb
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To start, I want to say I am a long time viewer\consumer of LevelOne content and have enjoyed it very much. There are so many great content creators out there, the competition is fierce, so it is a true achievement to be among the best. This is my first time posting.

Recently, I have had an itch to build a home server with various functions in mind. A primary function of this server would be to store and present a collection of movies, shows, audiobooks, music, etc. The idea of owning one’s own media sounds appealing as does forgoing monthly fees from streaming services, but when I do the math, it seems to me the streaming services simply offer a superb product at a low cost.

As a person who is against piracy, I would need to procure all of the things I would like to watch legally. Additionally, the cost of the server, storage, power consumption, and backups would be much more than years and years and years of streaming services. I understand costs can be greatly mitigated by utilizing the used market for media, buying a responsible server with low power consumption, etc, but even when taking one’s time and waiting for deals, I just don’t see the cost benefit.

Am I looking at this this the wrong way? Do the reasons to self host one’s own media server not include cost savings?

The advantages I see are as follows:

  1. Immunity to content no longer being available
  2. Immunity to internet outages
  3. No Advertisements

Am I missing something? Should I look at self hosting a media server as more of a hobby\passion project than something that saves me in the long run?

Thanks for everyone’s input and Happy New Year.

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Yes cost savings aren’t really what it is about. It’s about control of the media mostly for me. I too insist on obtaining the media legally, and I also have no intention of ditching my streaming services. But for the handful of media that I will consume repeatedly I want to make sure it can’t just go away one day to because it gets pulled from a streaming service. Any cost savings, higher quality, or other advantages are simply side notes. They help offset/justify the cost for sure, but they are not the reason why I do it.

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I would add a couple more advantages:
4. Availability of media that is not on streaming services (or available in your region). There are some things that only released on DVD or whatever. Depending on where an individual lives, some or many things may not be available to stream. VPNs may be able to get around this at the moment, but services are getting better at blocking them (and the VPN would be an extra expense).
5. Immunity from price increases in streaming. Once you have a media collection and the server set up, your pretty much know how much it is going to cost to keep running per year, and the replacement of the server every 5-10 years. Look at the proliferation of streaming services in the past couple of years, and if you watch a wide variety of things, then likely all would have to be subscribed to. Also, I can’t imagine the cost going down overall, and I can see a future where the price massively goes up for some of them.

Also, unfortunately, there are some things like Plex which require internet access to use fully. Most self-hosting stuff works offline without issue, but it is something you would want to pay attention to if you want to be able to run offline.

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You folks are confirming my suspicions, self hosting a media server is a passion project\hedge against future silliness from streaming services.

The idea of owning rare stuff is a very good point. I find it hard to believe we will ever live in a world where one will not be able to stream something like The Sopranos, but rare stuff goes away all the time.

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For those who have no problem with piracy, that brings quite a cost saving that comes on top. For those like you and me who have problem with it, I still see different advantages :

  • Immunity against content disappearing from a service or removing the needs to subscribe to one additional service just for one or 2 pieces of content. let’s imagine a movie you want is only on one service but you already get 2 other services. Would that movie worth the 10$ a month for that extra service?
  • Possibility to have all the content you want even if not available on any streaming services : I have ran into the issue that a band (now defunct) who I loved is not on any platforms (because it pre-dates it), I have their CD. I ripped it and put on my media server so I have access to it on all my devices. It goes similar with content I bought before (i.e. iTunes and similar) and which is not available on platforms or with all DVD’s I had bought before (quite extensive collection)

To be frank, I see a media server as a complement to streaming services, and that goes along with the direction Plex is taking to integrate streaming services in their interface.

Most importantly, building a media server is a hobby project, something you do because you like to fiddle around with this type of things.

As for the cost, my home server uses about 80-90W of power, that would be with my old rule of thumb, about 80-90 USD/yr of electricity. The machine was maybe 800USD worth of parts when I built it, 10 years ago. since then, maybe a single disk to change every year in average (i.e 100-150 USD). So, that would mean same cost as maybe 2.5 Netflix subscriptions over the span of 10 years. But considering I use the server also as NAS, smart home controller, Network administration tool (PiHole, Unifi controller), password manager (VaultWarden)… that start to mitigate the cost a bit.

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I also would not say that cost savings are a big factor in this. Quite the contatry most of the time. Especially as streamimg services have exclusive shows so I find myself still using them to watch those.

What you do get is

  • Higher quality or at least a higher ceiling

Though at a cost especially for watchable content. 4k blue rays arent cheap.

  • More consistency (no lags, no random dynamic resolution changes)
  • You can mix and match content that is sharded across a multitude of steaming services (unless its a platform exclusive)
  • Permanence (ownership, nobody can take it away from you)

This is a big one for me for music as I listen to songs over and over again. And view my song collection from way back when like a picture album of old times. But I dont care so much about movies and shows, almost never rewatch anything anyways.

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Morally gray it might be, but I download YouTube that I think are worth keeping around and stick them on my server.

At any time YouTube or the creator could take it down and that bothers me :/.

My side-goal is to build out an ‘kid-safe’ playlist of videos for when my kid is old enough to consume content I deem appropriate.

YouTube :no_good_man:

My Server :white_check_mark:

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Thanks for all the input folks. I think a home server project is on my to do list this year. I recently changed jobs and am away from managing two datacenters with servers galore. I don’t touch servers anymore and I miss it.

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Would we have Netflix, prime video, apple tv if there was no Napster, kazaa, torrent, dc++, ed2k to pave the way for the business model to prove the demand is there?.. Also international licensing and what’s available and what’s pulled from which country and what has which subtitles, probably a separate discussion.

There’s the convenience factor - a single 20T drive costing around $300, will store about 300-400 UHD Blu rays, probably around a 1000DVDs.
($10k+ worth of physical media purchases) without re-encoding video. It’s a +5% overhead in cost assuming you attach that external drive to a raspberry pi. If you want to go crazy building a server with GPUs or quick sync to reencode video it’s a bit more, if you have a bigger collection it’s a bit less percentage wise.

… and then, you when not at home, your family, and close friends, might be able to play it on whatever device they have on them or they could cast it to anything in their home, without:

a) storing physical media on a bookshelf taking up space
b) renting physical media / returning via post
c) driving to get physical media (time and fuel)
d) remembering to bring physical media with them
e) attaching a bluray player device to whatever screen
f) suffering 480p or 720p because you want root on your device

Streaming services are waay cheaper, except you’re at the mercy of their offerings and if you subscribe to 5-6 big ones, you still don’t get as much coverage as you might be able to get with physical media.
If you would be paying $100+/$150+ for streaming services.

Piracy, if you want to store and share media, gives you the biggest selection at the best quality at the lowest cost.

  • in some cases you might be able to get DV and HDR10+ from a streaming service 1080p, combined with a high bitrate 4k UHD Blu-Ray which looks a lot better than what’s published
  • you might be able to get higher resolution DVDs because stuff might have been mastered for NTSC and you happen to live in a PAL country, and vice versa).
  • stuff that nobody licenses or sells or broadcasts in your country, you may still be able to get.
  • it’s “free” except it costs you hardware, time, and a bit of effort typically, it’s basically sports for nerds.

Then there’s streaming websites that stream the low bandwidth compressed to high heavens versions of everything, or have CAM rips, that are playing cat and mouse with DNS and hosting (some are ad free, some aren’t) - these are really interesting to me from a technical aspect.

edit: oh there’s more costs I glossed over. You’d need a way to back-up the physical media onto the disc, and apparently the two goto ones are either LG WH16NS40 or ASUS BW-16D1HT which then need to be flashed with LibreDrive … and if you just want to use a laptop for this, and/or not deal with a 5.25" device in a modern computer or server case that has no mounting for it, you probably need an enclosure like this: https://www.owc.com/solutions/mercury-pro-optical … so another €200 on top (it’s a sport - there are costs).
… or you could both buy the media, leave it on a shelf, and download it (to save your self the effort of flashing drives and dealing with cases)

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There’s definitely no cost saving but there are plenty of advantages, some that haven’t been mentioned are:

  1. Quality, if you’re buying physical disks and ripping them then you’re getting significantly better quality than you do from streaming. In fact if that’s your plan then you really shouldn’t be comparing the cost of the server and media to streaming services but instead things like Zappiti.

  2. You can use whatever player you want, and just no restrictions in general. This is the biggest one for me, I want to use MPC-HC with madvr and SVP and I don’t think I can do that with any streaming services other than maybe youtube. Ever tried to play a blu-ray on a PC? It sucks. Ripping them and playing them from a server is just a much better experience, not to mention easier to browse and organise. HDCP? Who even cares, I’ve heard of people having HDCP problems but that’s not even something you have to think about with your own media on your own server.

  3. Surreptitious editing of movies. If you’re in control of your own media you don’t have to worry about Soviet style revisionism and censorship creeping in to your entertainment, or at least not the stuff you already own.

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if yer not gonna be a jack sparra your basically wasting your money.
the sad truth is any media you have bought on a specific device is typically tied to it via a walled garden such as apple play or spotify.

ripping dvd’s isnt a grey area.
you will have to bypass the copy protection to put the movie on your storage.
if the movie is drm free then no problem but the copyright infringement comes when you bypass the check the disk makes to ensure its legitimate.

so if you want the server your gonna be raising your pirate flag whether you want to or not…
:wink:

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I’m not a legal expert(don’t listen to my advice), but wouldn’t ripping your own DVDs fall under format shifting? AFAIK you only need to own a valid license for your media, not multiple licenses per copy.
Again, If you have that “magical harddrive”, but only the titles you own as a hardcopy end up on there, I think you’d be fine.
(Keep in mind that to prosecute they need to know :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: )

Anyway, I’m still advocating for a thinclients. I’ve got a Dell Wyse 5070 with a Celeron J4105. Cost me <50$ + shipping(including 4GB DDR4 RAM + 16GB SSD storage).
I’ve got 16TB of USB HDDs attached, and use SMB for filesharing. I don’t have a problem saturating a gigabit link, at least until the cache is full. It’s even got a iGPU with hardware decoder.

Considering that most people have a few old USB HDDs lying around, you simply can’t get a cheaper NAS/Media server. Some of the older(still quad-core x86/GCN iGPU) AMD thin clients can be had for less than 10$. Not sure how much real-time encoding they can handle, but they sure can serve some files. Most people spend more money in Starbucks.

As to the advantages? You have an always-on Linux computer.
You could do all sorts of stuff, from using it as a SSH jumphost, hosting files via CIFS/NFS/HTTP/FTP, running a website, DNS(with adblock), DHCP, local HTTP/Steam cache, print-server, redundant backup location, …

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no mate the media is fine to copy.
breaking the copy protection so you can copy it off the disk is where you fall foul of the law.
and because you have to break the copy protection to copy the media.
it makes the whole thing of ripping data from original disks illegal.

a quick google will confirm it for you. so no need to take my word either :wink:

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I should read up on history around DeCSS ?

For example, what if someone else in another jurisdiction breaks the copy “protection”, copies their copy of the disc, and then shares this with you, and you make a copy, of their copy of the same content you already have a physical disc of; — how does that count?

There’s also the “supporting the artists/entertainers/creators” issue, but since it’s often such a mixed bag it’s often impossible to support people you want to support without also supporting lazy lawyers implicitly censoring what you can watch or not watch.

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It is illegal to rip media as far as I know. To me, its illegality holds no sway in whether it is right or wrong. I think paying for a physical copy, ripping it, and only utilizing it for personal use is perfectly fine.

Even as a young lad I was against piracy (in the traditional sense, stealing movies, games, etc.) - it did feel like stealing. I still hold that position.

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Depends on where you life if that would actually hold up. But even assuming its illegal seems vanishingly unlikely you´re gonna have any problem with that as long as you keep the ripped content to yourself and don´t share it online.

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Big Media companies do go after people who share media.

They Don’t seem to go after people who format shift / break DRM to copy their own media. (In general)

Different countries/territories do have differing laws, but most agree on copyright in principal, and on the right of the owner (or their agents / representatives) to seek out and stop breaches of their rights.

I don’t think we need to have a discussion on the legality of format shifting, but it is a reason some have for running servers.

And the thread does ask specifically about a media server.

So it would be a valid reason for people who interpret shifting as legal?

Some other people may make their own media (content creators / musicians / animators / film makers / streamers etc) who may have a need.

Don’t break the law kids. Else you’ll be sent to the Big House…

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Copyright rant

You might be correct, at least in the USA.
However, there are exceptions to this, for example I’ve read that private copies of music are exempted, e.g. put your audio CD onto your iPod(even if it were encrypted, which it is not). And I’ve certainly seen other people doubting the illegality of a private DVD backup, citing not having a clear legal precedence(but I’m not sure nobody here wants to be that precedence).
How would somebody notice that you have a private backup of a DVD?
Again, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t even live in the US, never have, probably never will. Probably I’m wrong.
Don’t break the laws.

GEMA rant

In Germany this is different, but not necessarily better:
We have the GEMA, state-mandated for-profit company that is in charge of managing all authors rights in Germany.
They collect a tax on every sold device or storage medium(“blank media tax”), and distribute it to it’s members(“authors”). They are horrible and evil, and are known to be very anti-consumer and very pro music industry.
In theory, this tax is collected so that the GEMA can compensate it’s members for potential losses via piracy, and especially the otherwise-legal “private copies”.
Unfortunately, Germany has a dubious “don’t circumvent technical measures” law as well.
Yes, private copies are explicitly legal, we pay a tax on every electronic device SO THAT we can create private copies, but WE’RE STILL NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE A DAMN COPY? WHAT DID I PAY EXTRA TAXES FOR?!
Don’t break the laws.

Morality rant

I agree with the sentiment that the legality of such things is not the same as morality.

  • If you appreciate the work of other people, and you can pay for it, you should.
  • If you do that, then you should be able to use the content privately in any way you please.
  • If you can’t or don’t want to pay for the content but still watch it, you’re not stealing, you’re not amoral, but you are pirating.

Now, the “won’t pay but still watch” part sometimes gets people to think this is amoral, even unfair:
Content costs money to produce, and monetizing that content by charging a fee from the viewers via your distribution channel is fine, fair.
But if some people watch it for free, the content doesn’t suddenly cost more and you didn’t “loose sales”. Even if they just didn’t want to pay. That’s the crux with infinitely-reproducible digital goods.
As long as there are others that pay for the content, as they do normally, nothing has changed.
And piracy will never replace buying - Don’t try and tell me that if enough people pirate content, people will start to “unsubscribe” because others pirate that content as well.

And that’s not even speaking about the value the viewer provides. Even a nasty pirate might sea-shanty some free advertisement for the content by telling his friends.
Or that even piracy costs money(HDDs, VPNs, seedboxes, computers, internet connection, …):
Part of the problem is that all the media giants don’t want to share their customers, leading to dozens of streaming services, and rising costs for the consumer.
Or that piracy is often the only way to get certain content(geo-blocking, just too old shows, rights-holders not having any current distribution deal, etc.).
The most effective way to stop piracy? Make a streaming service that has most content people want to watch, at a reasonable price.
Why do you think limewire etc. died out? iTunes, Spotify, etc.
Why would people risk legal troubles, spend money, and generally inconvenience themselves if they could just spend a few dollars.

In conclusion, I think for the large companies that are fighting this war, from a business perspective piracy is a non-issue. They just whiffed that they could make more money by owning everything, doing nothing. That’s amoral.

"Piracy is stealing" rant

The whole concept of “piracy is stealing” is such BS:

  • If I go to a store and steal a DVD, that store needs to order a new DVD, drive it to the store, have someone put it on shelves, etc. - It has some actual, real costs associated with that - That’s stealing.
  • Torrenting a movie I don’t have the rights to own - That’s piracy.

Stealing directly causes damage to a business. There is a costs associated with that.
Piracy doesn’t really cause damage to a business. Maybe, possibly a little, indirectly in the long term. The only “loss” to a copyright holder is that of a hypothetical sale, and there is no way to proof that if you didn’t pirate something you would have bought it. I think it’s highly unlikely that if you can’t pirate some media, you’d have bought it.
Don’t break the laws.

Copyright, IP, patents rant

You want to lock away your super-advanced information forever, diminishing it’s use to humanity? Start paying humanity for the concept of wheels, chairs, thinking - everything, or at least everything you depend on. Just fair, right?
I’m kidding of course, and I think some sort of copyright/patents/IP rights are needed. But the current ones have been co-opted! They don’t guarantee access to the information anymore. They give you as little information as possible, while giving the owner rights for as long as possible.

The whole broader area of Copyright, IP and patents worries me.
It’s artificially limiting humanities progress, it’s access to information - And for what, a few cents?
The natural state for important information is distributed to all, because that’s it’s least energetic state.
The question is how to distribute it, and “only if you pay for it” is a bad business model for humanity.
(I’m sorry for the rant)

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For me, there’s also a “principle of the thing” involved. When you subscribe to streaming services or other cloud content (Kindle, Google Play, iTunes etc), they are actually profiting off you twice: once when you pay and a second time when they turn around and sell your data to marketers and data mining services (including all the personal info you give them to sign up and all the data on your media consumption habits). And that’s if they aren’t triple dipping and serving you ads!

Additionally, buying these things isn’t really “buying” them the way we understand it with physical media- it’s a lot more like licensing it, since they can take it away from you with no compensation required and no warning. Amazon has done this with both videos and books in the past. And you often only own it as long as they exist, even if they don’t actually arbitrarily remove it. Plus, they control how you can use it, making it extremely difficult to change formats or storage media, back it up, allow it to be borrowed or shared, and the like in a way that is barely dreamt of by the worst DRM on physical media.

Also, depending on the streaming services you pay for and the media you actually consume, the math can work in your favor. My family (wife and I plus 4 kids) was doing Prime, Disney+, Spotify Family Premium, Hulu (with ads), Netflix (without ads), and Kindle Unlimited. We felt like we had to because of course, each service has 1-2 shows you want to watch and the space is Balkanized all to heck.

Amazon Prime alone costs $140-$180/year (at least here in Alabama). To replicate what you get running your own media experience (multiple streams, no ads, etc.), Netflix is another $240. Hulu and Disney+ costs something like another $200. Spotify Premium Family is another $200. That’s a fairly standard lineup and you’re talking at least $600-650 a year even if you choose to keep Prime for the free shipping (even though, at least here, you no longer get 2-day shipping, it’s like a week or more!).

A basic media server can be built out of an old desktop or even laptop you or someone in your family might already have and not be using. Or you could go ahead and greenlight that upgrade to your daily driver and repurpose what you have now. At worst, you can probably pick up something perfectly adequate from Craigslist, FB Marketplace, the classifieds, a local thrift store, or even eBay for under $100.

That leaves you $500 the first year and at least $600 every year after that. You can buy used DVDs and CDs on eBay or at thrift stores for $1-3, and all it takes is a decent DVD drive and some free software to rip anything you want. Even if power is eating half of that, you can easily and rapidly expand your collection- and whatever you spend is only being spent once instead of over and over and over every month until you die or the service goes full rug pull.

EDIT TO ADD: I pay for media, I do not pirate, and the math still works in my favor.

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This is what bothers me. One of my favorite tv shows got censored and got episodes completely banned in the US on all streaming platforms back in 2018.