TedZanzibar

Judging by the rest of the thread I'm going to get downvoted for this, but what the hell:

I'm sure I'll switch to Jellyfin eventually but I tried it out a few weeks ago to see what all the hype was about and it just... wasn't great. It was difficult to setup, with way too many overly-complicated settings, and then it refused to play one of the two test files I tried. Like it or not there's a reason that Plex is the dominant player in the game, and a large part of that reason is that it verges on plug-and-play for simplicity of both setup and use.

Yes, it sucks that they're removing remote streaming for free users, but I imagine there's a significant chunk of users who don't know or care how to properly open their server up to the world and are relying on the Plex proxies for their streams (which happens entirely in the background), and those aren't going to be cheap to run. Maybe putting them behind a paywall will provide the resources to make them faster.

I did buy a lifetime pass last time they announced a price hike; it's honestly paid for itself many times over, and I've been encouraging other users I know to do the same before this next one, because yes, it is a significant hike this time around. That said, while I wouldn't pay monthly for it, I do still feel like the lifetime pass is tremendous value for such a polished product. It's a shame they've had to do it at all, but I don't begrudge them for it.

Good shout. I've just recently moved from Pihole to Adguard Home myself, complete with Hagezi lists. I consider myself very tech savvy and I work in the field but AGH suits my needs much better.

One example is wildcard DNS to route all of my hosted services via reverse proxy. In Pihole I had to make weird blocking rules to make this work, but AGH has specific settings for it. It also supports DoH out of the box, whereas Pihole needs non-standard faffery to get it working.

Very pleased with AGH in general.

HACS installs community integrations whereas addons are like external programs that hook in HA. You can do the same thing with HA in Docker by installing the addon containers separately and then hooking them in manually but HA OS makes it much simpler.

For example I'm running the Mosquitto broker, Z2M, a Visual Studio Code server, diyhue, and Music Assistant as addons.

Docco page about it is here: https://www.home-assistant.io/addons/

If you want to give Home Assistant a try like others are suggesting, save yourself some time and hassle and install Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine. While you absolutely can run it in Docker you lose out on some neat quality of life improvements like add ons (which, funnily enough, are Docker containers pre-configured to hook in HA).

Exactly this. Also it annoys me that Namecheap tries to automatically "top up funds" over a month before renewals are due. I think they've always done it but it wound me up enough this year to move to Cloudflare.

Yeah, everything that's already been said, except that I specifically chose an off-the-shelf Synology NAS with Docker support to run my core setup for this exact reason. It needs a reboot maybe once or twice a year for critical updates but is otherwise rock solid.

I have since added a small N100 box for things that need a little extra grunt (Plex mainly) but I run Ubuntu Server LTS with Docker on that and do maintenance on it about as often as I reboot the NAS.

You didn't mention what platform but all of the Sniper Elite games are on Gamepass including the literally just released Resistance.

Just to add to the info so far: while you're spending the effort doing a migration it's worth going the extra few steps and moving to their Docker image. It'll make any future server moves a doddle, not to mention updates etc.

Isn't that exactly why so many of these company and app names have missing vowels? Because they can't trademark a word but they can trademark a collection of letters that sounds like a word when spoken aloud. It's really dumb.

I like the idea of open worlds much more than I like the reality. With a full time job, kids, and a completionist mindset I just don't have the time or mental stamina to spend 100+ hours doing side quests and revealing every inch of the map. Not to mention reading all of that dialog and lore.

Give me a corridor with a tight, focused story over a sprawling open world any day of the week. Coincidentally Bioshock was awesome.

Third Plex. It's a bit baffling as to why it's got such a bad rep recently because it performs its core function of serving media incredibly well, is super easy (barely an inconvenience) to setup, and there's apps for every conceivable platform.

Yes there's a few features locked behind a subscription (though they still sell lifetime passes, often at good discounts) and they're trying to "legitimize" with their ad-backed streaming thing, but the core product of local media server is still very much there, and free, and isn't going anywhere.

Webtop. Lightweight Linux VMs but in Docker.