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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

I hate you.

Well, just envy hate and just momentarily. Back then, such hacks were harder to find/discover. I would have loved to do that hack, I yearned for true multicpu.

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That stuff was all over Slashdot at the time, where I heard about it; even got one and ran it for awhile, eventually relegating it to a Linux server.

For some reason I feel like running home stuff fell out of favour. Or perhaps, I stopped doing it. I would prefer to do it again however I don’t ever have an idea what to do with it since these days I just stream everything from the internet. And I have plenty of cloud compute for whatever I want to do.

People call it "homelab" or "data hoarding" these days, but yes, the easy access to hours and hours of movies and music was "solved" for the average person by the content streaming sites, so there's not as much a drive as there used to be for it.

Heheheh, drive.

And now I learn that I am average.

It really is a world of difference - XBMC 20+ years ago made your TV a wonder to behold, more powerful than anything anyone else would have (and desirable, too!).

Now a full Plex + JellyFin + Infuse setup just makes it feel like some sort of knockoff Netflix.

There are still advantages. But they’re not as noticeable (main one being if you can find it, you can have it instead of having to search various streaming platforms).

yes i remember setting up a system through xbmc that made it so the tv would appear to have cable channels that were built from everything that was on my storage. So you had channels for different genres or cartoons or movies or whatever. and you could flip through the channels and watch whatever was on. and now it's just that you can even watch digitizations of old vhs recordings of television on youtube if you want. there just seems to be no need to do all that work and when you do, it never seems terribly nice and half the time things are falling over. It was fun when i was a student but now I actually want to watch television if i sit in front of the tv, not try and fix whatever broke to make it work again.

Yeah, though one really nice thing I've discovered is that JellyFin has support for what it calls "home videos" and that + Infuse means the family has access to all those recordings to take but never watch, like kid's recitals, etc.

If your willing to try /r/homelab and /r/selfhost have great wikis and are good enough entry points to start you on your way.

There is a lot you can do with a rPi and an 8TB HDD!

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