This hypothetical situation will haunt me for the rest of my life. I already can’t watch Netflix because I don’t own a smart TV and my phone doesn’t pass SafetyNet so Netflix refuses to open. In this situation I would whip out some of my external drives and we would have to pick one of the movies I’ve already downloaded from a csv file, and hopefully one that is not h265 encoded otherwise my laptop would stutter all the time. Oh my god I feel extremely uncomfortable if I think about this
Raspberry Pi 4 with Kodi installed hooked into your tv. Install samba on your laptop and share movies, load this share into Kodi. Now you have open source and local Netflix, you’re welcome.
I’ve actually used this setup for a while (but not with samba, I simply plugged my drives to an usb hub). The only issue is that my pi3 + kodi cannot play 4K movies (it would simply freeze, as far as I know the pi3 cannot play 4K files properly (was it 4K files or x265 encoded files? I don’t remember)). Another issue I’ve run into is that for some reasons, the voice track volume was always extremely low. It’s been two years now, I would like to try to set it up again and see if now it works better. Anyway at some point I decided to dismiss the whole thing and now I simply plug my laptop to the tv. I figured MPV properly plays x265 files
Another issue I’ve run into is that for some reasons, the voice track volume was always extremely low.
VLC media player (I’m assuming that this was the application you used) has the default volume set at 100%. What is not immediately apparent is that the maximum volume is in fact 200%, not 100%. Or in other words, half it’s advertised volume. I don’t know who the hell thought up the idea to implement that, but it is a very stupid one. On Android and iOS (perhaps also Windows/OSX/Linux too) you have to go into the settings to enable the full volume.
I currently use a Raspberry Pi 3B (not plus, I think) with SAMBA on my LAN with no visible problems. I’ve never used Kodi, I just put downloaded files from torrents onto my RPi from my desktop PC.
I don’t know if the issue is with Kodi, or if it is from a possible bottleneck from reading data from the external drives, and going through a hub. I’ve just been putting the data onto a 128GB microSD card containing the OS. The medium did cost me a fair bit back in 2018 (£28.50, almost as much as the raspberry pi itself, excluding accessories). In 2021, you can get roughly the same thing I bought in 2018 for £15, or instead, a 256GB (100MB/s) microSD card for £35 - on Amazon (don’t use that though).
However it is still dwarfed by my Netflix bill of £5.99/month over 43 months, adding to a total of £257.57. All for something intangible that I didn’t need to use. In perspective though, my VPN subscription is €5, which I need to access torrent sites, however I’m happy paying that, even if it does add up to hundreds over years. I hope I never sink in another £5.99, especially post-“Cuties”.
VLC media player (I’m assuming that this was the application you used)
Nope I was talking about playing medias using Kodi - I never tried to play something on that raspberry using someting else, also because it was running on LibreELEC and I’m not sure there’s a way to use it as a desktop os
I don’t know if the issue is with Kodi, or if it is from a possible bottleneck from reading data from the external drives, and going through a hub
The bottleneck was most likely the hardware being not really meant to be a media server. Playing x265-encoded videos was pretty laggish, but their size is generally smaller than the same exact file but encoded in x264 (which played fine)
In perspective though, my VPN subscription is €5, which I need to access torrent sites, however I’m happy paying that, even if it does add up to hundreds over years. I hope I never sink in another £5.99, especially post-“Cuties”
This is an interesting perspective, I never thought about that in this way. I’m too paying a subscription to a vpn just so I can torrent behind a vpn, I’m basically paying a monthly bill to watch whatever I can torrent lol
I don’t know what a seedbox is :thinking face: I will look it up
My current torrent setup is a raspberry pi with qbittorrent installed and a 1TB drive where to store ongoing and completed downloads. The VPN subscriptions is 4€/month
Edit: one thing I love about my current setup is that I’m running a Telegram bot on the raspberry that notifies me when a torrent finishes to download, it also allows me to remotely add torrent files/magnets just by sending the file/url, and quite many other stuff. I mostly use it to keep an eye on the downloads queue since from mobile it isn’t as cumbersome as a web UI and I can use it from any device. I wonder if it would be possible to run it on a seedbox. As far as I’ve been able to see, most seedbox use Deluge as torrent client, which means I would have to rewrite it entirely to use its API. Hmmm. I will think if it’s worth the effort
This hypothetical situation will haunt me for the rest of my life. I already can’t watch Netflix because I don’t own a smart TV and my phone doesn’t pass SafetyNet so Netflix refuses to open. In this situation I would whip out some of my external drives and we would have to pick one of the movies I’ve already downloaded from a csv file, and hopefully one that is not h265 encoded otherwise my laptop would stutter all the time. Oh my god I feel extremely uncomfortable if I think about this
Raspberry Pi 4 with Kodi installed hooked into your tv. Install samba on your laptop and share movies, load this share into Kodi. Now you have open source and local Netflix, you’re welcome.
I’ve actually used this setup for a while (but not with samba, I simply plugged my drives to an usb hub). The only issue is that my pi3 + kodi cannot play 4K movies (it would simply freeze, as far as I know the pi3 cannot play 4K files properly (was it 4K files or x265 encoded files? I don’t remember)). Another issue I’ve run into is that for some reasons, the voice track volume was always extremely low. It’s been two years now, I would like to try to set it up again and see if now it works better. Anyway at some point I decided to dismiss the whole thing and now I simply plug my laptop to the tv. I figured MPV properly plays x265 files
VLC media player (I’m assuming that this was the application you used) has the default volume set at 100%. What is not immediately apparent is that the maximum volume is in fact 200%, not 100%. Or in other words, half it’s advertised volume. I don’t know who the hell thought up the idea to implement that, but it is a very stupid one. On Android and iOS (perhaps also Windows/OSX/Linux too) you have to go into the settings to enable the full volume.
I currently use a Raspberry Pi 3B (not plus, I think) with SAMBA on my LAN with no visible problems. I’ve never used Kodi, I just put downloaded files from torrents onto my RPi from my desktop PC.
I don’t know if the issue is with Kodi, or if it is from a possible bottleneck from reading data from the external drives, and going through a hub. I’ve just been putting the data onto a 128GB microSD card containing the OS. The medium did cost me a fair bit back in 2018 (£28.50, almost as much as the raspberry pi itself, excluding accessories). In 2021, you can get roughly the same thing I bought in 2018 for £15, or instead, a 256GB (100MB/s) microSD card for £35 - on Amazon (don’t use that though).
However it is still dwarfed by my Netflix bill of £5.99/month over 43 months, adding to a total of £257.57. All for something intangible that I didn’t need to use. In perspective though, my VPN subscription is €5, which I need to access torrent sites, however I’m happy paying that, even if it does add up to hundreds over years. I hope I never sink in another £5.99, especially post-“Cuties”.
Nope I was talking about playing medias using Kodi - I never tried to play something on that raspberry using someting else, also because it was running on LibreELEC and I’m not sure there’s a way to use it as a desktop os
The bottleneck was most likely the hardware being not really meant to be a media server. Playing x265-encoded videos was pretty laggish, but their size is generally smaller than the same exact file but encoded in x264 (which played fine)
This is an interesting perspective, I never thought about that in this way. I’m too paying a subscription to a vpn just so I can torrent behind a vpn, I’m basically paying a monthly bill to watch whatever I can torrent lol
If you want to use a VPN only to download torrents isnt it better to pay for a Seedbox?
I don’t know what a seedbox is :thinking face: I will look it up
My current torrent setup is a raspberry pi with qbittorrent installed and a 1TB drive where to store ongoing and completed downloads. The VPN subscriptions is 4€/month
Edit: one thing I love about my current setup is that I’m running a Telegram bot on the raspberry that notifies me when a torrent finishes to download, it also allows me to remotely add torrent files/magnets just by sending the file/url, and quite many other stuff. I mostly use it to keep an eye on the downloads queue since from mobile it isn’t as cumbersome as a web UI and I can use it from any device. I wonder if it would be possible to run it on a seedbox. As far as I’ve been able to see, most seedbox use Deluge as torrent client, which means I would have to rewrite it entirely to use its API. Hmmm. I will think if it’s worth the effort
I imagine you could make it work on Deluge and/or also there must be a Seedbox that allows qBittorrent.