Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

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Even a simple 4TB HDD is better than nothing. Though beware, this can easily turn into a hobby/passion/obsession that becomes more expensive than years or decades of underlying subscription costs.

Before you know it, you start building your first dedicated NAS with a fancy file system that few people use (ZFS), configured with data striping and a distributed parity bit in RAIDZ (RAIDZ1), with UPS systems for high power availability. You'll become the go-to expert on hard drives among your friend group, and find yourself correctly answering questions like "What's the difference between CMR and SMR?". Backblaze's quarterly drive stats reports will start to become something you look forward to the release of, like a new episode coming out on your favorite TV show. You'll get acquainted with Kodi, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, and more. You'll figure out the allure of mpv over VLC. You'll become the guy who reminds people that the cheapest hard drives are often the most expensive. You'll learn what private bittorrent trackers are, and pine after membership in the most exclusive ones. You will become intimately familiar with commercial VPNs, SSH, VPS offerings, and more.

Be cautious, friend - once you decide to start taking this hobby seriously, you will dicover this is no mere hobby, but a lifestyle.

I know you're being silly, but you'd have to be pretty obsessive to have it cost more than streaming. Internet says Netflix movies are about 5 GB at 1080p and 15 GB at 4k. At $10/TB, that's $0.05 or $0.15 per movie for equal quality. At $15.50/month for 1080p Netflix, that's 310 movies/month, or 10/day, which no one person can watch. At $23/month for 4k Netflix, that's 153 movies/month, or 5/day, which you'd have to be unemployed and have no life to watch.

Even with Blu-ray rips of 30 GB and 70 GB respectively, you're looking at 52 and 33 movies per month, which is more than 1/day (assuming no rewatches), which is still an awful lot of movie watching.

You could add something like 1:5 parity without changing the story much. Or get a friend to buy the hardware for a system that you maintain, and use them as a backup instead of parity. Even at $8/month to be on someone else's account, that's still 53 4k Netflix quality movies/month, so still makes economic sense for them.

This is course all assumes you never delete something after you've watched it.

So you'd really have to just be downloading everything you can find without even wanting to watch it to have the cost work out higher.

I think your point is valid and it’s not way more expensive to host your own, but $10/tb all-in as hosted space is way low of an estimate. If you are getting a NAS that’s big enough to have 1:5 parity it’s gonna be a 6 or 8 bay so maybe $1k, and you’ve gotta amortize that across 10 years which is $8.3 a month. You’ve also gotta pay a lot more electricity to run the NAS. At 50w/hr it works out to 36kw/mo which is $7.2 at 20c/kwh which is a reasonable rate for electricity factoring in fees and such. Then you have to also use up part of your bandwidth and keep some machine running 24/7 to torrent or you have to pay for a seedbox, which is another $5/mo at least. You also might need networking hardware to hardwire this thing in, but let’s leave that off. We’re already at $20/mo of additional costs just for one NAS to keep it running, independent of drive costs.

Granted if you go this route you can host media from multiple different streaming services if you so choose, which changes the calculus some.

You don't need to spend $1k on a NAS. Go on eBay and buy an old motherboard with 6 SATA ports and an m.2 slot for the OS. I see one with a CPU for $88 incl. shipping right now. You might be able to do better. Throw it in any case. If you don't have one, buy any ATX tower on eBay for $30. You might even be able to combine the previous two steps. If you don't have enough bays, just leave the tower on its side with the disks floating somewhere. I did that for years when I was a teenager and it's fine. Then you just need a PSU and disks.

Or if you're into nerd stuff like this you might have an old computer that you can reuse and you just need disks.

You also don't need to leave it on 24/7. Around me the bottom tier download for Comcast is 75 Mb/s, which is 5-10x the bit rate of streaming, so after an initial period to get you started and build up a buffer, you should be able to build your collection faster than you can watch it on average while only keeping it on while you watch.

I got a 4 SATA bay chassis for 75 on Amazon. PSU was 50, board, CPU and RAM was 130.

The drives were another 500...

You can get project cost down by using refurb drives for OS/scratch. Or just picking drives more based on price per TB than a target storage amount

I just used my old PC when I got a new one, use that as my NAS/torrent box with vpn, and kept buying HDDs for it. I'm up to 45TB but it never really "hurt", as I just buy a new drive when things feel tight. At this point I'm going to keep purchasing 18TB drives instead of smaller ones, it seems like the sweet spot of capacity to price right now.

> You'll figure out the allure of mpv over VLC

Can you explain what mpv offers over vlc ?

> cheapest hard drives are often the most expensive

What hard drives do you buy / recommend?

Looking it up, MPV supports the LUA scripting language.

The advantage there is cropping video, from what I’m reading.

If cropping is possible with VLC, I’m not aware of it, and I’m a VLC fan.

18TB Exos Renewed have over 24 of them and none have failed in over a year now

for clarification the drives #25 and #26 are spares that haven't any use

> Can you explain what mpv offers over vlc ?

People have complained about VLC's decoding quality in the past (no specific source but lots of google results). I'm sure there's valid bugs that have been patched over and some still there, but I'd take it with a grain of salt since VLC is super popular and therefore more noise when it drops the ball.

That said, I personally prefer MPV since I can display multiple subtitles at once (for learning foreign languages) and also drop in upscaling / sharpening filters like [1]. Oh and VLC is kinda buggy on my android 14 pixel when streaming from ftp / samba sources (video freezes when seeking too often).

[1] https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K

VLC is my daily driver, but I get a few audio buffering issues that do not appear to be present in mpv. mpv also handles incomplete/partially broken files significantly better.

(For me) mpv is faster. I had videos that vlc could not play without stutter (on my CPU) but mpv had no issues. Just layman's observation.

I have a 10 TB mirrored NAS setup for stuff like this.

I have to curate what I put on it as eventually I will be out of space and I do not want to make a lifestyle out of it ;)

My criteria is:

Will I want to watch it again?

Will it go away forever? (Or is at risk of it)

Can it just not be streamed or purchased in my region? (Yes there are some things)

I have favorited this comment, thank you for making Hacker News a good place to spend time in.

You're welcome :)

Can confirm. I don't watch tv or movies unless people visit and I have over 200TB now.

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