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. shuraman7 · 1790267856 · focus · HN ↗

         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

         1. joshstrange · 1790268045 · focus · HN ↗

            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.

            1. 0cf8612b2e1e · 1790268449 · focus · HN ↗

               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.

               1. joshstrange · 1790268905 · focus · HN ↗

                  > 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).

                  1. 0cf8612b2e1e · 1790272540 · focus · HN ↗

                     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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