Thread

1. wastedpotencial · 1790265682 · focus · HN ↗

   What's a reasonable setup for sailing the seas safely?

   It's not only the price hikes and the atomization/fragmentation of content, what made me cut the wire was that I couldn't get high quality in my computer unless I used X browser for Y service.

   1. joshstrange · 1790266924 · focus · HN ↗

      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.

      1. tmpz22 · 1790267756 · focus · HN ↗

         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.

         1. xtracto · 1790274977 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

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