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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Just a note, sailing the seas safely is fairly easy today but unless you want a more involved setup and only want to keep unwatched or unwatched plus a few "keep forever" shows, the cost of hardware is not going to be much "cheaper".

I have a friend who calculated up their hardware costs (before ram/ssd/hdd-ageddon) and paying for all the streaming services costs came in lower over the span of something like 10+ years. That said, they have the best UI/UX experience I've seen and don't see ads so I'd still count it as a win.

Oh sure, you can use an old laptop (or seedbox-type thing), an external drive, and get pretty far but if you want to replicate streaming services for all the shows you care about, it's not cheap.

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The additional system load of downloading and subsequently streaming some video isn't particularly intense, even with real-time transcoding.

The same old 6th-gen i7 desktop rig that I do everything else with also does this job quite well. It's not beefy by any modern measure, and I'd have built it and kept it going (and powered on) even if I never had any intention of running these background processes on it.

The only added hardware expense is one external hard drive (redundancy? hah, no -- not for this). This cost a couple of hundred bucks a several years ago, which is the equivalent of surprisingly few trips to Taco Bell.

One certainly can spend a quite lot on nice kit to accomplish any goal, but that's not an indication of any necessity to do so.

If a film of acceptable quality averages around 2GB (yay h.265), then a 10TB hard drive can hold 5,000 average films.

Yeah its not a panacea. IMO there is no full turnkey solution that doesnt involve cobbling multiple services together (ie jellyfin, seer, etc). Then you have high cloud prices that, in order to save money, would require a local setup with old hardware to be cost effective.

You shouldnt be spinning up cloud resources to host your media stack. You should be buying used hardware off cycle and cobbling it together. All of which costs time to operationalize it, ie tweaking gpu drivers on linux to get that old hardware working.

It only really makes sense if youre a real enthusiast, or amortize it across your family, friends, etc. But then youre breaking a bunch more laws and as a working professional that just isnt worth the liability for the value provided.

The real answer I think is simply to consume less content.

I don't understand why there isn't something as simple as PopcornTime (open source, nobody owns it, nobody hosts it, you run it and creates a server you can use, simple), which includes TV stuff (like EZTV.it had it ten years ago) and sport streams (even with info from Rojadirecta stuff, "cleaned") now.

It's something that a good weekend with a local abliterated Qwen 3.8 local model could cook.

I have no idea what you're talking about. have plex on my beefy Linux PC and before that was using a Mac with an Intel i7. unless you need to transcode you can use what ever ancient hardware you have, there are people using raspberry pi's for running plex/jellyfin

I guess it really comes down to:

1. How much content are we talking about?

2. How many people use your server?

Yes, QuickSync is amazing but hard drives alone (for a larger collection) are incredibly expensive (today). Even before prices shot up I know people that sunk $8K+ into hard drives alone.

I think we need to segregate data hoarders from people who want maybe 100-200 movies. At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space. Back in the day, I routinely watched movies compressed to fit on a CD at 700mb. Sure, that is now laughable quality, but most people don’t care about 8k with Dolby digital at 100+Gb per film.

A single 20TB drive can hold quite a bit of media.

> At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space.

Not quite. Before the insane prices I was able to get 4x 20TB for $1,200, so $300/20TB, so $8000/300 = 26.6, call it 27 drives, so 27x20 = 540TB, a little over half a petabyte, not "petabytes" (before mirror/raid/etc).

If you were buying that over time and keeping your price-per-harddrive about the same, you'd come up with much lower (since you would have been buying smaller drives in the past. Also smaller/older drives have to be rotated out due to age/wear/too-small so it's not all additive.

But you are correct, there is a difference between "data hoarders" and people that pirate and it's an important distinction (eww, that sounds a little AI-y, but I wrote it).

I knew I should have calculated it before running my mouth. Still, a single drive is a sufficient media library for most people.

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