Netflix kills Basic plan, making its cheapest ad-free tier $15.49

Megathread is in the pinned post.

When I downloaded streamio it couldn’t find that add-on

You can get a 4tb HDD for less than 50 bucks

[citation needed]

Couldn't find them (or some that are close), at least not in the EU.

Edit: But I'd be happy to see US examples as well.

If you look at price per TB 4TB drives are a bad choice.

Then I would definitely dig out my old eye-patch and captains hat again 🏴‍☠️

No doubt this is coming in the near future

A lot of other services usually offer a yearly discount, and I can see Netflix offering that. However, I don't see Netflix choosing to get rid of the monthly market entirely.

If that happens...mass exodus don't think they are that stupid! The service, the company are on a cliff edge...it would be equivalent of slitting their throat and bleeding out fast!

They go by peoples perceived attention spans. On average most people don’t get invested more than 2-3 seasons per show and they keep needing to make more money each year so this is a more efficient strategy.

I self host so much stuff but like.. the amount of time and effort that’s gone into that.. maybe $10 or $20 a month totally makes sense after all to most people haha

Well, I mean on those vendor NASes it's pretty much just chuck in a hard drive or two, follow prompts for setup, install the Plex app from said vendor's app marketplace, make a login, and add your content to the specific TV, Music, or Movie folders...Admittedly this doesn't get you setup with running Plex outside the network, but as a basic setup it's fairly easy.

I'm also confident someone would mess those instructions up, but if you even understand what self hosting is I'm fairy confident someone could follow the above instructions to add their content. Obtaining content is a different story, but if you already have your content it is easy.

I think we gotta work on building community if we want to see people really move away from streaming services. One person with a NAS in a small apartment building could help a lot of their neighbors out with entertainment. It would be more work for the person hosting, but if the folks who benefit help their friend out too it might end up being less work overall.

I'd give someone access, teach them how to use the software, and download some of their favorite shows if they let me borrow their truck when I needed, shared dinner sometimes, or helped me clean house. I think a lot of folks would benefit from that kind of thing, but it would require us making friends with our neighbors. Which, on reflection, is actually really really hard. I imagine it would be kinda awkward to start the conversations around this, but you'd get around the step of everyone getting their own NAS at least!

If you take the time to RATE everything you watch in Jellyfin the recommendations start getting pretty good.

I have a built-in interface on my smart TV for Jellyfin, and I had one for Plex.

I didn't have to deal with any network config, just login once.

Your concerns over obtaining the content are valid, but concerns around the user experience are not.

Plex gives recommendations and has apps for smarts TVs.

Agreed that obtaining the content can be difficult but the user experience is top notch. It even skips credits and jumps to next episodes for tv shows now too.

For obtaining content, Nefarious is my go to solution. It’s nearly as seamless once you get past initial setup (which is not simple)

Yep you do and some may argue that, depending on how you obtain that content, it's even easier than the setup of the NAS and Plex itself.

If you don’t know anything about this stuff and don’t want to get into setting up linux software, you’re better off just getting a simple self-enclosed NAS drive like a WD MyCloud (just an example, I don’t know all the options out there now) that you connect to your LAN and then connect to it with Kodi or another player. With that you just login to it from a web browser to create your content folders, then map it as a drive in windows explorer and copy data to it over the network like any other drive. Then Kodi etc can be provided the network address for that drive and content folder. (And have a separate USB drive to make a content backup in case the NAS dies one day.)

Otherwise I use a raspberry pi 4, as it’s fast enough to be an emulator box with retroarch (etc), and a torrent seedbox for acquiring content with deluge installed (behind a VPN), and a pi-hole for blocking ads network-wide, and has 4 usb ports for content drives. For just hosting media you’d only have to make changes to the config for it to automount the usb drives every startup, and then the pi just acts like a NAS with several drives. The software for vpn, torrents and emulators (all included or free via git) can be a bit complicated to setup but once you have it correct, you can make a backup image of the microSD card that the os is on if you have to restore it later. I personally didn’t know what I was doing on linux when I first set it all up years ago, but got everything working properly just copy and pasting from guides on stackexchange etc.

Again, if all that makes your head hurt, just use a self-contained NAS drive for content.

edit: should probably add that I personally haven’t installed a vpn on the pi for torrenting, as I have a router with vpn built-in, and set the firewall rules so the pi can only access the internet through that (because it’s faster.) There’s a few ways to handle it.

Yeah I see you harping about having to download your own material, but that is the reality of self hosting, acquiring content. And the joy of not having an algorithm recommending things. It’s not for everyone. If someone’s not capable of such things, that’s fine, then this convo isn’t for them and they should just keep using netflix.

Sonarr and Radarr with Ombi for requests if desired. Transmission + OpenVPN for the download side.

Or you could manually rip DVDs/Blu Rays if you can still get ahold of them for the stuff you want to watch.

On any other hardware platform I'd tell you that Jellyfin is the best of the best. With that board, it might be worth trying Kodi.

I dunno, I've always found Kodi pretty janky but it seems pretty good at playing back content on lower spec hardware.

I haven’t had anything that kodi wouldn’t play, but I also don’t have a ton of different file types. For music and movies it hasn’t failed me yet. You just need to be able to give it a network address to the content folder on a NAS or pi, and it usually scans everything for me. Kodi connects to it from a Fire Tablet, FireTV Stick and the pc app.

The vitriol meant you were right.

Honestly, I was expecting them to try this a lot earlier then now.

real debrid might be a good option

@dan @cyberpiggy is Plex really that much better than say Jellyfin?