This post contains content related to media piracy. I couldn’t find any rules for this community and I don’t know if it’s allowed. I accept the risk of getting this post taken down or being banned without knowing the rules.
With that small disclaimer out of the way, let’s tackle my question.
I’m a simple self hoster: I have single server made out of an Optiplex 3060 Micro (i5 8500T, 32GB, 14TB of storage in one drive), I use duckdns instead of a real domain and I have no supporting infrastructure. I don’t really like watching things, I set up arr stack mainly because everyone says it’s the best thing to use a homelab for.
My family have strong opinions on piracy and I know for a fact they wouldn’t use my jellyfin, even if I tried to manipulate them, which btw is a really bad practice (if it’s as common as responses under posts about getting people to use your homelab suggest).
I also have hard time getting them to even allow me to run my homelab (I’m a teenager, I live with my parents), because it takes space and uses power (for context idle is around 8W).
As I said, I don’t watch things that often and even if I watch, I’m extremely monothematic, I watch basically only AOT and sometimes some random popular movie.
I understand that my situation is quite unique, but I find it hard to argue for Jellyfin+arrs when fmhy and countless reliable streaming sites exists.
I already made my mind, I’ll stop using those services today. I’m interested how others look at this “problem” tho.
Are you hosting arr stack/plex/jellyfin?
How much is it utilized (in watch hours/week for example, mine was less than 2/week)?
Have you considered not using it?
If you stopped using it and went back, what happened, why did you change your mind?
It sounds like it’s just not worth it for you, and that’s totally fine! Plenty of people get by just fine with using random streaming sites.
Personally, I want something more reliable, I want to have copies of what I watch in my possession that cannot be taken down, and I want to share this with others so that my friends can benefit from my time investment instead of using a solution that only works for me. So that if my friends ask me “where do you get your stuff” I can offer to share with them at 0 extra effort instead of telling them “go do all these things that I already did”
As for usage, I only watch a few hours a week myself, but I share with 15-20 friends and family who watch a collective 160 hours a month last year and around 360 hours a month this year (about 15 days of watch time per month).
I have a fairly comprehensive arrstack, torrents and Usenet, seerr, Plex and jellyfin side by side with identical media mounts for maximum user choice, running on a nuc with quicksync so it handles 8+ simultaneous 1080p live transcodes without using much power or increasing CPU usage much more than 5-10%.