Tech: Media and streaming services

Subject: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 03:36 AM

Just setting some stuff up yesterday and was musing how far we have come from the days of video and audio tapes. Or even DVDs. As well as the main smart TV I have 2 Firesticks in upstairs rooms. Connected to the main TV I have a Raspberry Pi running Kodi which can find almost any film, TV show or music I want. I have my own Plex media server running on Linux which houses my entire music collection and dozens of videos and I can access that from anywhere in the world.

What's next? Towards the end of my working career we were shifting to virtual servers running on AWS. I currently have plenty of cloud storage so, logically, will we be moving to having our own servers in the cloud and just having thin clients or Android devices accessing them?

Any views on where we will go, what we should do and what we should avoid?

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 04:02 AM

The Firesticks are connected to old (non smart) but still good TVs BTW.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 04:07 AM

I suggest you learn to play an acoustic instrument for when the electricity supply fails.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 04:27 AM

I play guitar, harmonica, anglo concertina, piano Accordion, mandolin and tin whistle, Hootenanny. Oh, and I read a lot too so I have no worries what to do in a power outage. I hope to keep this thread about technology but thanks for the input anyway.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: GUEST,Hootenanny
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 04:48 AM

I thought Mudcat was set up to be about traditional music and song, not technology. Wrong again.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 05:12 AM

I don’t know dtg but I guess more and more will move to the Internet over time but I try to avoid streaming over the Internet as we have a poor Internet connection (1760Kbps as I type). I have fairly recently added a SIM card to my router. This improves things but I find the EE set up I’m using expensive and I find I eat up data just downloading software and performing updates, things I’ve been doing a fair bit of lately.

Like you, I have some home media things. At the moment, I have:

HDHomeRun quad dvbt2 network tuner
Vbox quad dvbs2 network tuner
Linux PC in living room connected to tv in the room via HDMI. The PC runs the mythtv master backend which can use the HDHomeRun tuners and a Jellyfin media server. It also can share files via nfs and samba.
Other devices can connect to the system via mythtv and/or kodi.

I do have a Raspberry Pi on the LAN but that’s running Homeseer home automation and a couple of scripts I wrote in Java and python that communicate with homeseer via mqtt.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 06:41 AM

Hoots - The Mudcat has a "Tech" topic available for all. I used that label and clearly titled the thread "Media and streaming services". I don't know why you opened it if you don't want to discuss technology. If you don't like the topic, keep away! If you believe it should be down below, where you cannot post anyway, have a word with the mods.

John - The Plex media server runs DNLA so I can stream all my own music without recourse to the internet. It is easy to set up and run on a Linux server and I would recommend it.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 09:04 AM

Thanks Dave. There are a few DNLA servers here (mythtv, jellyfin and both network tuners) but one more will do no harm and the living room PC has plenty of capacity so I've installed Plex on it and added libraries. Installation/setup was easy as you said. I've tried it with BubbleUpnP on my phone and all seems OK.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 09:26 AM

It has a few good streams of its own too but as you have a poor internet service it may not work well. I noticed some good films on the other day - Including Zulu!

Hace you looked into 4/5G routers for your broadband? 3 were advertising a 24 month contract the other day for £20 a month.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 09:48 AM

I'll have to ask mum and see what she wants with the Network.

Rather excessive but my router is quite an expensive Draytek one. It has built in support for 2 SIMs with LTE. It can also take an external USB mobile modem. The device also allows 3 WANs simultaneously and allows you to set routing and priorities, eg. at the moment I have it set to use the SIM card and to fallover to ADSL.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 12:25 PM

Many tech problems encountered by Mudcat members have had innovative solutions offered by other members (and guests) in our tech threads. Whether home entertainment or how to connect microphones to amps and speakers for busking and everything in between.

I like how Jon has set up his family network, and in another thread he talked about setting up a photo file for his Mom's computer. I imagine that is streaming from a stored location?

Streaming is here to stay, and the questions now have to do with whether you keep the files locally or in the cloud. Cloud storage has been temporarily deployed for Mudcat but it is expensive for the size of this database.

Actors and writers are striking in the US now, and streaming has a huge part in the conversation. And for all of the big names who might make the headlines, it is the hourly workers (and their cohorts - including musicians) who seriously need an update in the pay structure as impacted by streaming.

I've been working on my home network; the previous version of Windows I was using tended to make the home network more difficult to deploy, but with Smart TVs and my house wired with lots of LAN ports and a couple of switches to add capacity, I can stream from my computer to various devices. (Win10 now, I haven't upgraded. Maybe when Win12 comes out.)

I recently took advantage of a Malwarbytes VPN offer that came bundled with six apps. One I had been thinking of buying is now in use, and one I looked into, but didn't set up. It's called Hotspot Max, and lets a LAN computer become a wireless hotspot. This would be for homes that don't have WiFi? It apparently allows sharing these through a VPN from the computer. Any of this technology or these apps are only as good as the speed that users are able to achieve.

My final thought - I have Fire Sticks around the house, but the one in my office spends more time doing twirlies and dropping the signal that letting me view. I've picked up a Roku stick during Prime week to set up and see if it does any better. I've connected two other of the Fire Sticks to the Ethernet (there are adapters for this) but it didn't help in this case. At one time you could load something like VPN onto the sticks and a file management program and that was enough to let you stream from the main computer drive where videos were stored, but I stopped trying to do that a long time ago. It may be time to see what apps are out there to let me safely try it again (something that just connects and manages files, not report back to a mother ship somewhere in the Internet universe.)

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 12:42 PM

SRS, I put a local copy of the pictures on mum's new laptop. I'm doing the same with dad's new laptop as I type this.

They can be shared from the living room PC in a few ways. nfs which is the most common method with Linux, Samba (Windows Workgroups) and, now Dave's mentioned it, DLNA.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: DaveRo
Date: 14 Jul 23 - 03:01 PM

Nothing to do with streaming, but my music is all on an RPi, and I've just added a DAC HAT to it. Improved the sound quality a lot. (It feeds the hifi.)

I've recently bought DVDs, on ebay, of several old films and some TV series I either missed (e.g. Denis Potter) or wanted to watch again (e.g. I Claudius). In the future, when stuff is no longer produced on physical media, I expect it will disappear into the vaults and be unobtainable.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Jul 23 - 02:17 AM

Always check eBay for that stuff. It is amazing what people have listed. I have a DVD hanging in my "buy later" file on Amazon for Colossus: The Forbin Project. A pretty good film of a really great book, and alas, more likely to be true in our or our children's lifetimes. I guess I ought to go ahead and order it.

Next month my library card must be renewed - they used Overdrive for a long time, but have switched to the more streamlined Libby app (built by Overdrive). I'm getting a lot of my audio through Libby and headphones when I workout at the gym. I may have to pay this time around, my village doesn't participate in the larger library program of the city that surrounds us. This little enclave puts the definition to "frugal." Those of us who live here have ways of getting around the restrictions, usually to do with water bills from friends who actually live in Fort Worth. That is the case with the Library participation. Every time the card is renewed I expect the city might have put up some digital barrier.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 Jul 23 - 02:02 AM

Dave, a friend told me one time that individuals can set up and host sites through AWS. I think he has his poetry posted there.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 19 Jul 23 - 02:05 AM

I had an AWS account until they wanted to charge me for it. I don't object to paying for something I use but I had no reason to keep it at the time

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: DaveRo
Date: 19 Jul 23 - 02:51 AM

AWS has what it calls a 'Free Tier' whereby you can use it for small jobs - a website, a database, lots of other things - free. Some services are free for a year, some for ever.

You have to provide a credit card, so if you exceed the free usage - number of website visits say - you get billed at a PAYG rate. (At least that's how it was when I used it a few years ago.)

So worth trying - though tricky to understand. But if your poetry becomes too popular - e.g. someone dances to it on tiktok...

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 19 Jul 23 - 03:50 AM

I use the developer tools part of the Amazon services and that's been free so far.

I use that for Alexa and Homeseer integration. Homeseer provide 2 skills for Alexa and the more capable version is only available for US (or is it North American) users. Someone came up with a way for UK users to get the full capability. I did also toy with trying to use it for the rtsp cameras and Alexa (there are some ideas online) but abandoned that one.

Subject: RE: Tech: Media and streaming services
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 Jul 23 - 11:07 PM

I ran into problems setting up the Azure account because I had a personal Microsoft account and my university used Microsoft software (Enterprise) and for various authorization purposes (email, etc.) I ended up with a personal account that kept (on the Microsoft end) trying to use the university email address, so I bailed on that project. I suppose it is lingering somewhere in the background. It was, as DaveRo suggests, tricky to understand.