I think the one I have is the BP60NB10 LG Slim Portable. It looks like prices are at around $100-$130 for it online now though, I think they are not made anymore. I got mine up at a local computer store a long time ago.

I strongly recommend this webpage: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19634

There are some external/portable USB blu ray drives that work with MakeMKV and cost like $30.

I have set up WireGuard manually running on a home server. It’s not that hard to set up IMO but that definitely depends on your experience level.

Other than that I’d second Tailscale which is similar but easier to set up

It’s the most plug-and-play Linux has ever been from my experience.

Unless something has changed, Amazon Music only offers low quality mp3 downloads, and sometimes even includes audio watermarks.

This is why I use CloudFlare. They block the worst and cache for me to reduce the load of the rest. It’s not 100% but it does help.

Thanks I’ll look some of these up and maybe I’ll understand why people hate systemd

Windows was developed by a huge corporation for profit, and that drives enshittification, because eventually they have all the users they think they can get, so instead they start trying to milk those users for more $$$.

Linux is developed by a bunch of nerds who are doing it as a hobby, or because they weren’t happy with the other options. This type of group does not leas to enshittification.

I’m with you I don’t really get the hate for it, nor have I seen a suggested alternative.

I found an older version that sounded like it should be compatible on the OpenRGB webpage but it didn’t work. I suppose I should look further. Thanks for the tip!

It’s working for just setting static colors, but when I try to install plugins it doesn’t show up at all. I wanted to use HardwareSync and maybe Effects.

I started trying out Bazzite yesterday and it’s been great so far! HDR is not as simple to get working as their marketing would make you think, but once you know what to do it’s not so bad.

Al’s I’m having trouble getting OpenRGB working correctly.

But other than that it’s been pretty good. It’s harder to tweak than Ubuntu (what I was previously using) but works much much better out of the box.

I have a foldable Bluetooth keyboard that I sometimes use with an ssh app on my phone

Some of those services are pretty easy to set up, some might be more complicated. You’d have to look around for open source projects for those services and see if you can find ones you like. It will take more time to get it initially set up than to maintain, but expect to fix something that breaks every once in a while.

As for cost, probably like a few hundred to a thousand USD can get a reasonable computer for this. You don’t need a GPU, but want a decent CPU, plenty of RAM, and a LOT of storage. Look for companies auctioning off old servers.

Loosely I’d say expect this project to be a whole hobby.

As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs.

Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.

That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.

I use rsync + ZFS for backups which includes historical backups

Literally just the basics of choosing audio/subtitles/quality settings

Jellyfin simply doesn’t work as well as Plex unfortunately.

I can try it again, but what I did was compare h265 to SVT-AV1 in ffmpeg, using a couple different clips of different styles (including a video from my phone and some ripped blu-ray movies). I used “constant quality / variable bitrate settings, and ran each file with a variety of settings for both encoders. I judged the videos with a quality comparison tool ffmpeg has, and I also took subjective notes when I could tell the difference.

I found AV1 did better at very low quality (when it was firmly into the region where it was visibly different, AV1 did have better quality per bitrate).

But when trying to produce high-quality clips, AV1 was never able to produce a clip that matched the quality score of h265, even when the bitrate of the AV1 file was higher.

AV1 only has gains at very low quality settings. For high quality, h265 is much better. At least with the codecs available in ffmpeg, from my tests.