Also get rid of password authentication if you can.

So true. But I can’t complain that the software is getting better.

I don’t think it justifies putting remote streams as a whole behind a paywall. But I suspect that the feature is very widely used since it makes remote streams work out of the box regardless of your setup. It’s also turned on by default.

Requiring a subscription for remote access is actually fucking insane, they don’t have any bandwidth costs associated with that other than authentication so ???

They have provided a free relay service for years that makes it possible to access a server even if there are things in the way like CGNAT. That service had a low bandwidth limit but undoubtedly cost them money, so yes. But yes, they should have just moved that feature entirely to Plex pass (there is already a higher bandwidth limit for Plex pass users)

Browser apps are very annoying though. The support for some codecs (like HEVC) is usually worse in a browser.

You have drives packaged like other stuff with a colourfull box with marketing and all that? All the drives I have ever bought in store or online were shipped or handed over to me like I described above.

SSDs and external hard drives usually have some kinds of retail box here, but I don’t think HDDs usually do. Granted, I have never bought the normal consumer tier drives, like Seagate baracuda or WD Blue so maybe that’s why. For personal use in my PC, I usually stick with Seagate Ironwolf or WD Red.

Don’t HDDs usually come just in antistatic bags?

All the drives I ever purchased came in just a plain box with packing materials and the drive in some antistatic bag. So I assume the retailer gets big loads of disks from the manufacturer/reseller and unpacks them and then ships them individually and thus packs them on demand.

Weird. It has always worked perfectly fine for me. You must have something interesting going in in your setup.

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If you enable the “remote access” in Plex you are essentially port forwarding you server to the internet using UPnP (by default. You can also port forward manually if you’d like).

It’s indeed a point to point connection but a point to point connection the same way your connection to normal websites are point to point.

If you knew the public IP of anyone that’s using Plex you can likely go to [IP]:[Random PORT] and access their server. You still need to login though.

Source: My own tests and https://support.plex.tv/articles/200931138-troubleshooting-remote-access/

No, that should work straight out of the box. Maybe you have some network configuration that stops that, like a firewall.

The quality was probably bad because you were routed through Plex Relay services which have a bandwidth limit. It is honestly quite a nice free service because it means it will work pretty much regardless how your network is setup but the quality will be bad. If you want to directly connect to your server you need a public IP so CGNAT won’t do you might also have to open some ports.

If all you want is a local media server. It’s very easy.

You pretty much just have to install Plex or Jellyfin, setup a “library” in the software.

You usually set up one library for movies and one for TV shows. You then point these libraries to their respective folders on your hard drive and assuming you have some half decent organized media with proper naming it usually just works.

Plex doesn’t have automatic subtitles per say but mostly Plex players allow you to download new subtitles from the player. I don’t know about Jellyfin.

If you want to have external access it’s a bit harder if you use jellyfin as you will have to setup a reverse proxy but I’m guessing that there are a lot of guides for that online. Plex should work for external access out of the box assuming you have a public IP, and even if you don’t you can use their automatic relay services to get it to work anyway although in very low quality.

Proper naming is honestly the hardest part but that’s very dependent on how much existing media you have and how the naming is today. Luckily Plex and Jellyfin are fairly good at recognizing and finding media with subpar namin (you should still fix the naming to comply with the documentation)

If you want to have automatic torrent downloads, fully automatic subtitles and all that it’s quite some work to set it up properly and have it working without any input from you. If you want to tackle it (or are just curious), I recommend checking out https://trash-guides.info/

So it’s more useful as a video player than a YouTube replacement?

And do that multiple times?

There aren’t any “gotchas” they absolutely lose money us who store more than a few TB but its worth it considering that we are in the minority.

Someone from BB posted a graph showing the distribution of data usage over all users and the VAST majority are under 1-2 TB

Restoring data is free from backblaze.

I use a wildcard domain (with simplelogin which makes it easier to use). All the emails are sent to my normal email and it works great.

I have never heard of spammers spamming an entire domain like that. They are not human operated anyways.

A switched network does come with the disadvantage of needing switches and since you need high bandwidth and optimally a Ceph storage network completely physically separated from everything else it can be quite an expense. It’s very neat though 😀

If you do want to use Ceph you could probably use NICs with multiple ports per NIC.

Additionally you could use switches instead of a fully mesh system.

Full mesh is pretty neat but gets overwhelming very quickly if you have many nodes. With switching you only need two ports per node for your Ceph network.

That one seems to be WiFi 4 (and upgradable to WiFi 5) so probably not a good choice for someone with a half decent internet connection.