Nice, I'm sure that works great on an iPad in the car

How is your iPad going to connect to your media server on the road with no signal?

I normally solve this by tethering.

All these media clients support downloading too for offline usage.

To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth. Setting up a server and installing clients, pirating a bunch of content to put on your server. Then using the client to download files since you won't have signal (how is the tether going to have any signal?). I guess it's fun for hackers to tinker with this stuff, but just putting the file on the device like we did 12 years ago seems much easier.

The only additional step is installing a server application, you would probably have installed VLC or something to use anyway on the client. Having a box to store your stuff, ripping or downloading to it is still the same regardless of installing a client or not.

> how is the tether going to have any signal?

I have a phone plan? Your decisions would be different if you have different requirements and restrictions.

It's not like any of this requires expensive hardware, Intel Quicksync is on my £75 Wyse thin client acting as the server and can transcode perfectly for an iPhone/Android TV/etc.

Secondly, it isn't only doing those duties. It's also hooked up to stream TV so if I remember something I want to watch later it will record, and if I'm having to wait and there is nothing to read I can watch a show.

Can't do that with "putting files on a device".

What I mean with signal for the tether is that in the example of watching stuff on an iPad in the car, you'll probably be in places where there is no signal and then it doesn't matter if the chip is in the iPad or in your phone – you still can't get signal.

But I'm probably not the intended user for these self hosted media servers. I don't watch a ton of stuff, and what I watch is generally on YouTube.

> To me it seems to be much more trouble than it's worth.

I'm glad that use case works for you. However, an inability to imagine a usecase where that could be of value than shitting on people who say they have that use case isn't a great look.

I meets the needs of my usecase and my family. We were using plex before but since it required central login for of network use it has been on the deprecation list for me. But the exact solution is not relevant to the need and use case that makes the quite a bit less work than other options for us.

I spend quite a bit of time with my family moving between locations so, yes we have internet for that. The timing isn't always pre-planned so offline media consumption can be tough. Additionally, we may leave with a couple hours notice and spend a week or more before we come home. In which case, we'll stream media from a different location than our primary residence.

Additionally, we record/watch things off our digital tv antenna to stream when we are out of range. Which gets a little tougher for a generic fileserver.

So for us, it's quite a bit less trouble than it's worth. It's all the same things that setting up a local media setup involves with the addition of an authenticated streaming frontend that can be setup to work with multiple clients in multiple locations and multiple times.

Your behaviour is the low-point of this thread, so I'm not giving you any more of my time. You're the only person "shitting on people" here.

There have been iPads with cellular modems since launch.