Beware Hollywood’s digital demolition: it’s as if your favourite films and TV shows never existed | Zach Schonfeld
www.theguardian.com
The amount of media being wiped from the internet is worrying for viewers, and industry workers who need the exposure, says journalist and critic Zach Schonfeld

Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.

  • GormadtEnglish
    118•21 hours ago

    Recent events with streaming services has really been the best argument for self hosting your own content

    • @[email protected]English
      6•6 hours ago

      Every day I inch closer and closer to setting up my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)

      but the term “raspberry pi” makes me scared and confused

      • @[email protected]English
        2•36 minutes ago

        my own plex server (or something else if there’s a better alternative idk)

        – complexity level 1:

        First off a heads up, Jellyfin will serve you much better. Plex is commercial software, and they’ve treated their users quite poorly numerous times to appease copyright pressures. Commercial software always has an incentive to screw you.

        Lots and lots of well-made guides and stuff on YouTube and such for getting Jellyfin setup, but if you want a little more in depth, I’ve detailed a bit below 👇

        — complexity level 2:

        Even better than a Pi for media hosting, if you can swing it is those “1 liter PCs” that IT departments throw out en masse anymore. (At least I hope they still do? They might just burn them now since reusing them has caught on /s)

        Basically, something you can stuff a bunch of hard drives in. You can turn any old PC and hard drives into a decent little server. The only other important thing is offsite backups for what REALLY matters to you. I use a cloud service called “iDrive” that’s decent enough. That way my family pictures and artwork aren’t obliterated if my office burns or floods or something.

        Self-hosting IS a project, but you learn a lot and it can be really fun! I want to preface that I’m not an IT professional by any stretch.

        –complexity level 3:

        I currently use an OS called “Proxmox” to host virtual machines. It’s really powerful and gets easier as you get the hang of it.

        It hosts a little virtual server that only runs PiHole, which blocks ads and tracking across my entire WiFi network. It’s amazing. (Not YouTube ads tho. Long story. Other tools for that.)

        But it mainly hosts OpenMediaVault, which is great for just hosting a file server, and it’s well integrated with Docker for setting up “containers.” Lighter than virtual machines, consistent, and easily managed. (Imagine getting to wipe Windows but leave your D:\ drive untouched every time, and everything comes back configured like you want it.)

        Right now, I’d say experiment with stuff within virtual machines, try it out. Figure out how you want to set yourself up. The best part is, you don’t need to open up anything on your home network.

        – Complexity level 4:

        There’s a neat service called Tailscale for accessing your network securely from out of the house, but don’t worry about that yet.

        There’s a service for everything. I’ve replaced all of Gsuite with a self hostable called NextCloud, for instance!

        Facebook clone for just your family? Minecraft / Terraria / whatever server? (Private MMO server?), the sky’s the limit really!

        TL;DR: Just take it one step at a time. Take notes. Learn to take good backups. Ask questions. Lots of questions. We’re all in this together. :)

      • GormadtEnglish
        7•5 hours ago

        Personally I just setup a PC as a NAS‡ and installed VLC on my TV so that I can just browse the NAS and play the files directly

        Is it efficient? No.

        Is it the best way? Also no.

        Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well in fact.

        ‡ The first time was simply a network shared folder, the second time was using TrueNAS.