So my first thought is: Download the entire file BEFORE watching it. This ensures that you won’t have to buffer while watching and it’ll run 100% smoothly.

Downloading files isn’t very difficult generally; just go to some (torrenting) website, copy the magnet or download the torrent and import it into your torrent client.

When you have your .mp4, .mkv, .whatever file, you can simply click on it and play it on your preferred media player (such as VLC). However, you may want to watch it on some other device… Easy solution (for TVs) is just connect your laptop to your TV with an HDMI cable, duplicate your screen and start watching.

But if you actually want to stream, you’ll have to tread into the self-hosting zone. Meaning that you run a media server that hosts all your content and your devices (whether it’s a TV, android phone, iPhone, whatever) can access and play the content from your server.

This is a very, very big topic that I won’t cover in a single comment. I will point you in the right direction and mention Jellyfin; Jellyfin is a free, open-source media server that you can set up to manage and stream your files with

I considered voting for them, but I didn’t.

The reason is because there are other parties with comprehensive plans for digitalisation / IT stuff PLUS lots of other plans for healthcare, economy, infrastructure, etc.

Pirate party seems like a party focused on IT stuff only, whereas I also care about other topics, such as international trains, subsidizing healthcare, improving education and lots of other things.

(I voted for Volt Nederland BTW)

I wanted to watch Game of Thrones, but I couldn’t, because there was no legal streaming service available back then. (This was in 2015 or something).

That’s when I discovered the Pirate Bay and its wonders…

I use it to manage my documents, backup my photos from my phone to my server and access all my files from any other device. Basically Nextcloud is my replacement for OneDrive.

Additionally, I have used it in the past to collaborate on various group projects which require documents. For example, I had to make a presentation with some other people and I could create a PowerPoint in Nextcloud, send a share link to others and then we could edit the PowerPoint in realtime with Nextcloud + Collabora, which is pretty cool. It’s the only FOSS alternative (at least as far as I’m aware of) that can compete with Microsoft 365 / Google Workspaces.

Honestly, I’m not really excited about the past couple of major Nextcloud releases.

Mainly because there’s still one big issue for small-scale Nextcloud servers: performance.

Mainly the web UI is still too slow for me to properly use, which is why I don’t use it at all (unless I have to update an app).

It’s a bit disappointing that they’re mainly focused on the large enterprise customers instead of small hobbyists like me, but it’s still understandable; after all, their income is mainly from the enterprise customers, not from selfhosters.

I also don’t really like how they’ve jumped on the AI hypetrain instead of improving performance. But once again, I guess this generates more income for them than focusing on other things like improving performance.

Depends.

If there are no external volumes and the container is in its own network without any other containers, then any malware in the container shouldn’t be able to reach / affect the host server, because it’s isolated.

Docker is a container manager, but that doesn’t say anything if you don’t know what containers are.

Containers are basically isolated apps. For example, take something like Nextcloud. Nextcloud can run in a Docker container, which means that it runs in an isolated environment completely separated from the user’s system. If Nextcloud breaks, the user’s server won’t be affected at all, because it’s running isolated.

Why is this useful? Well, it’s useful because dependencies and such automatically update. Nextcloud for example, is dependent on PHP and if you install Nextcloud directly on your server, you’ll need to ensure that PHP 8 has been installed and set up properly. If PHP (or the required PHP extensions) aren’t properly installed, Nextcloud won’t work. Or, maybe if there’s a Nextcloud update that requires a new version of PHP (PHP 9 or 10 in the future), you’ll have to manually update PHP to the newer version.

All that dependency management is completely gone with containers. The container itself automatically installs and sets up a proper environment for the app that’s running. So in the case of Nextcloud, the PHP binaries, extensions, and all the other stuff is all automatically included without the developer having to do anything at all. Just run one command and your entire Nextcloud instance is automatically updated.

I’d first recommend that you think about what you need.

What do you need? Do you want a safe space to back up your photos & videos from your phone? Or maybe a way to stream your movies, series and/or music in a cheap way?

Once you figure out what you want to host, you can look into which program can fulfill your needs. Check out the awesome-selfhosted list for a HUGE amount of services you could host.

You could try making a symlink, so that there is a ‘file’ in the Nextcloud directory which points to the Immich gallery, although I’m not sure how good it truly works.

If you would like to keep track of the movies you watch and give them a rating from 1 - 10, I’ll suggest Movary. I’m a contributor of the project and the goal is to eventually add support for TV Shows as well.

Ah well, that is a funny coincidence then. I guess neither Christoph Fink nor I were very creative with coming up with a name for our respective apps.

I’ve personally never heard of his project, but I can say that I haven’t published my package at the PyPi register. Although, I do have published it to the Docker Hub.

Maybe metatube-ui for my package and metatube-cli for his? Considering his package mainly runs from the CLI and mine is a web UI.

I didn’t copy any project.

Although, I learnt Flask (the framework I use for this app) while developing MetaTube, and the project structure is heavily inspired by the excellent Flask guide by Miguel Grinberg. Check him out if you’re interested in learning Flask.

You can use this but it doesn’t really download directly from Spotify. Instead, it takes the song name from Spotify, searches it on YouTube, downloads it from YouTube and then adds metadata from Spotify on the downloaded file.

Shameless self-plug, but I made a Python program that basically does the exact same thing, except it has a web ui. It’s called MetaTube and it also supports other metadata providers, such as Musicbrainz and Deezer.

I’m using Calibre-Web

Maybe check out open subtitles?

Besides that, in my experience movies with foreign languages usually have the subtitles embedded in the file itself (usually as ASS / SSA format), so maybe try to download movies with embedded subtitles.

My setup:

Jellyfin for the frontend. Has apps for android, iOS, windows, android TV, bunch of other platforms as well…

Deluge as torrent downloader. It’s old, but it just works without the (in my opinion) complicated configurations of qbittorrent.

Prowlarr to search a bunch of sites simultaneously for torrents.

Radarr to add movies, search them with Prowlarr and add the best torrent to deluge, eventually moving the downloaded content to Jellyfin to view.

Sonarr to do the same as Radarr but for TV shows instead.

Ah ok. Well anyway, maybe add protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, SMTP, IMAP, POP3, SSL, VPN, Git, TLS, SQL.

Is this exclusive to acronyms related to self hosting or also just general acronyms, such as TMI, PLS, YSK, TIL, etc.

I have streamlined and automized my entire process with a Python program I made. It allows me to select a video, select the corresponding song from Spotify, select certain parts that have to be cut off (such as intros and outros) and then it will automatically download the video, transcode it, cut off any segments, merge the metadata.

I personally download YouTube videos, convert them to MP3 and then add metadata to them.