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Comment by 7bit | Hacker News Reader

How many Linux ISOs are stored on your $5 VPS? One?

Like I said, this is on an old desktop PC that I shoved some spare SSDs into. I have a few thousand Linux ISOs on there. I have an rclone job running regular encrypted offsite backups as well, so that my Linux ISOs are safe from hardware issues.

How are you adding new Linux ISOs? Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?

> How are you adding new Linux ISOs?

With qBittorrent.

> Do you prune the ISOs you've already installed somewhere, or are they kept around to be re-installed?

I keep them all. Compression algorithms are pretty good these days, as is storage density.

I'm surprised you save much space since ISOs are usually stored in already compressed formats

No he means a full length Linux ISO can be as small as 700 MB, I personally prefer 1.4 GB

I prefer my Linux ISOs to one or two orders of magnitude more fully featured than that.

Weirdly, my "Linux ISOs" are compressed in x265 :)

Which is only marginally more effecient than the H.264 encoding that many of them are delivered in. And the biggest shiniest Linux ISOs already use H.265 out of the box.

Does this mean you have to decompress your "ISOs" when you want to watch them ? Does jellyfin support this ?

They're compressed in x265, most web browsers can decompress that natively ;) Heck, when you watch something on YouTube you are decompressing the content ont he fly

But yes, Jellyfin can also natively transcode formats on the fly if you stick a GPU in there: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/transcoding/

Oh i thought you went 1 step further, compress all those "ISO" into 1 single blob.

Since Linux ISOs demand random access for a good user experience most of the relevant compression formats support that and so compressing as a blob wouldnt't really get you much but also not prevent individual access.

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