Tell me you live alone or only with a partner in a single TV home.
Multiple users, multiple locations, one setup. That's the value.
Multiple users, multiple locations, one setup. That's the value.
Both my non-tech wife and my four year old have figured out how to watch things. Which, is, my point. VLC, a directory browser, and ktorrent suite our needs so perfectly. Admittedly, the four year old hasn't figured out how to download torrents yet; but for my wife it was super simple to explain: "goto this website, search for desired show, only download from purple or green pirates."
My setup is slightly more complicated than I let on in the first post. We have multiple TVs, each hooked to a linux laptop (lenovo T430s, because I had one and the rest were cheap on ebay.). Then there's a NAS with SMB. All media is downloaded to the NAS, any T.V. can watch any downloaded media.
20 years ago, we'd connect any PC or Mac to the TV with HDMI and watch a movie or whatever we wanted.
All these media clients support downloading too for offline usage.
> how is the tether going to have any signal?
I have a phone plan? Your decisions would be different if you have different requirements and restrictions.
It's not like any of this requires expensive hardware, Intel Quicksync is on my £75 Wyse thin client acting as the server and can transcode perfectly for an iPhone/Android TV/etc.
Secondly, it isn't only doing those duties. It's also hooked up to stream TV so if I remember something I want to watch later it will record, and if I'm having to wait and there is nothing to read I can watch a show.
Can't do that with "putting files on a device".
But I'm probably not the intended user for these self hosted media servers. I don't watch a ton of stuff, and what I watch is generally on YouTube.
I'm glad that use case works for you. However, an inability to imagine a usecase where that could be of value than shitting on people who say they have that use case isn't a great look.
I meets the needs of my usecase and my family. We were using plex before but since it required central login for of network use it has been on the deprecation list for me. But the exact solution is not relevant to the need and use case that makes the quite a bit less work than other options for us.
I spend quite a bit of time with my family moving between locations so, yes we have internet for that. The timing isn't always pre-planned so offline media consumption can be tough. Additionally, we may leave with a couple hours notice and spend a week or more before we come home. In which case, we'll stream media from a different location than our primary residence.
Additionally, we record/watch things off our digital tv antenna to stream when we are out of range. Which gets a little tougher for a generic fileserver.
So for us, it's quite a bit less trouble than it's worth. It's all the same things that setting up a local media setup involves with the addition of an authenticated streaming frontend that can be setup to work with multiple clients in multiple locations and multiple times.