Video Transcoding VS awesome-selfhosted

I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video down to an 8 - 10 GB file size: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.

I have primarily used Plex and pretty much everything you said is accurate for Plex as well. Limited transcoding based on the machine it is running on. As disc has become cheaper, I have pretty much stopped doing batch transcodes, which is great for the most part. But there are definitely negatives when you want to watch something offline, or remotely. Biggest pain point is subtitles though. Since they aren't ripped as text and then sent to a client, they have to be burned in to the video itself and transcoded on the fly. Which means losing out on 'forced' ones if it can't transcode fast enough.

Plex has definitely started to try and commercialize itself more and offer other stuff, when all I want is access to my own media. So I may look into Jellyfin more soon.

As for batch transcode jobs, I had a system that I was able to set up as essentially a black box. Drop a rip into a folder and out the other side comes a smaller one at a reasonable quality. With forced subs burned right into the actual video. Mostly based on https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I use Don Melton’s tools to transcode videos to mp4 files. His tools makes use of Handbrake but he has it tuned to produce very small video files of very high quality. You are unlikely to notice the difference when watching the videos.

Checkout https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding. In my experience produces higher quality and smaller files than handbrake alone.

When I was ripping my disc collection, I used Don Melton’s library. Don originally started the Safari and Webkit project at Apple but after he retired, he spent some significant time trying to create an easy way of compressing video but resting quality. Great collection of tools in my opinion that leverage handbrake for encoding. Good luck!

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

I've been using Don Melton's Video Transcoding tool for my whole library. I upgraded my NAS to a Synology DS1019+ a few months ago, so now I have the space to store the untranscoded MakeMKV files. I've had issues with playback in my system, so I don't mind manually transcoding.

Check out https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding – I use it to turn raw Blu-ray tips from 30+ gigs down to 5-7 with no noticeable loss of quality.

None of these lists ever seem to be as fleshed out, up to date, or well organized as https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted , though imo any more attention on the self hosted scene is awesome. We're now self hosting everything at my co-op, and it's a dream. Saves us money, provides learning opportunities, potentially is getting us work (managed hosting providers asking if we can be a devshop for their clients, for example), and lets us give back to the FOSS community as we uncover bugs.

We use:

* Matrix / Synapse for comms (slack alternative) (managed hosting through etke.cc)

There are a ton of resources about HW aspects of home labs for beginners but not so much for what to run on them and why. There are lists like https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted but they are confusing for absolute beginners like me. Are there any good SE project guides you know?

This[1] seems like a well maintained repo.

And thank you for the pointers, we'll try to get ourselves added here :)

[1]: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I've always felt like FOSS as a philosophy has been tangled up in trying to participate effectively in capitalism, when that was never really the point, nor really very possible unless you're lucky, nor really worth it. The origin of FOSS as I understand it from reading books like "Hackers" is from people that were mad that access was being restricted to systems and code from people that really wanted to use these systems and code, and hack them, and learn from them. I recall that one of the things Stallman likes to brag about from that time is not related to FOSS at all, but instead successfully decrypting a bunch of passwords, emailing the decrypted passwords to people, and recommending they instead set the password to an empty string instead. It was about keeping access to the system Free as in Beer.

I suppose some have argued that FOSS represents a Public Commons in the way that fields and wells and physical markets used to, but none of those things survived capitalism, so I don't see why a technological commons should be expected to either.

For me I've been thinking lately that perhaps those interested in FOSS should instead consider how we can use FOSS to detach ourselves from needing to participate in global capitalism at all. Is there FOSS technology we can use to liberate people from things they need to spend money on right now? An example could be the Global Village Construction Set: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ a set of open source designs for things like hydraulic motors or microcombines or steam engines that you can build on your own, usually not for cheap, but for far, far cheaper than you could buy from John Deere. Here's another cool project, some guy has just been building things like solar panels and basic circuit boards on his property from very base components for years: https://simplifier.neocities.org/

Some other FOSS liberation examples:

Combining a tool like Jellyfin with Sonarr, Radarr, and etc, can liberate people from their 5 different media subscriptions. Or at least they can still buy DVDs and put them on Jellyfin to have the convenience of streaming with the media library of their own choosing.

Deploying Matrix or another FOSS communication tool can let organizations have enterprise-level communication software without paying HUGE seat-based license fees to corporations like Slack.

In fact there's many ways to liberate yourself from paid SaaS in this list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted at my co-op we self-host and deploy all our services for this reason, it saves us a TON of money.

I don't have many other examples to mind because this is something I'm actively still researching. Friends in Venezuela though especially tell me how FOSS technology can liberate in ways I wouldn't expect here with my 64gb RAM machine with the latest processor, that I can easily replace components on on a whim. Such as how they can keep all their broken down machines pieced together from junkyards running pretty ok on various linux distros, and how they can sell creative work using free tools like gimp (no, really) or darktable. Like as not they'll just pirate software, though, but apparently FOSS often runs better on shitty hardware.

Anyway my long term plan is to find or build more and more things that let people just not spend money on things anymore. That could be by making it easier to not have to throw things away anymore, or building tools to replace proprietary ones, or, idk, other ways I haven't thought of.

Dashboard in what sense? Is this what you had in mind or no?

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#per...

I often skim through various "awesome lists" (e.g. [1]) and communities interested in open source apps like r/selfhosted [2]

[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/

1. https://nextcloud.com/ https://proton.me/drive https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#fil...

2. Download all data locally then upload elsewhere.

3. https://help.dropbox.com/security/privacy-policy-faq#7.-How-...