A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Got 100 mbps up ... because that's all I can currently get at home. It's enough to support a handful of streams but can max out quickly when I'm also doing file or torrent uploads. But for now it just has to do.
Do you make your users pay for access?
Of course not, I don't want to become what I hate.
In my area Xfinity cable has decent upload now, though it still trails fiber. Doing a speed test just now I get 2 gigabit down and 300 megabit up and I pay $85/month with a five year price lock. This is a relatively recent phenomenon so worth checking out if you can get a similar package. Prior to this I was getting 25-32 megabit.
I’ve never made my friends or family pay, but prior to getting decent upload bandwidth I did cap remote streams / concurrent transcodes and let people duke it out fist come first serve. Mostly it was fine. I’ve given maybe 15 people access, but only a few are regularly active.
I also keep a small offsite server at a family members house that splits some of my user base and serves as an offsite backup.
You can get away with a pretty low bitrate for most. As others have said, set the egress upload limit in the app to whatever you prefer, and just be ready to transcode.
Never charge for access to your server in any way. That is officially 100% illegal. If you can't do it without charging, you can't do it
Yeah I wasn’t planning on charging. Legality aside, it’s just a shitty thing to do.
I share mine with about a dozen friends and family, and some have offered to pay me. I didn't think about it being illegal (although, of course it is) but the reason I wouldn't charge is that I don't want anyone having expectations about it working. It's worked smoothly for about a year, and if it breaks I'll fix it on my own time.
I started self hosting when I had only 100Mbps down/10Mbps up. For about 5 years years I told my friends and family that I didn't have fast upload speeds so if several people were streaming at the same time there could be issues. Beggers cant be choosers, so they got what they got. That being said, I always tried to get smaller files so that less bandwidth was needed and that helped a lot
I lived alone so 100Mbps down/10Mbps up was plenty for me and I wasn't going to upgrade to a faster plan. I also worked from home with those speeds without any issues and I would have continued with that internet plan if I still lived there. My new place includes 1.2Gb down/up so bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for me any longer.
If you're only at 10mbps upload you'll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn't bother. If you're not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you'll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.
You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I'd still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you've got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I'm not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you'll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I'd probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won't be able to transcode video, so you'll have to be a little careful about what everyone's playback devices support.
Edit: Also, if you're not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it's hard to sleuth out who's doing a good job and who's just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don't even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.
Just saw your edit. Yeah, all of those are familiar to me. Most are on the "banned groups" list lol. I actually have spent the better part of this year, building my own encode library with AV1. It has been more of a fun, educational thing than anything else, but after about 4-6 months, I've finally got my settings where I am happy with the size/bitrate/qualitiy tradeoff.
I only download full quality remuxes and then go from there. The encodes are what are shared to F&F while I watch the remux version locally because, why not? I usually delete the remux version once I'm happy with the encode quality.
But some movies, like Traffic, just don't lend themselves to an AV1 encode yet. So while it works for most movies, it doesn't work for all of them. Nevertheless, it's been a fun project.
Doing your own encodes is also really cool. I'm not too sure what the AV1 compatibility of your friends' players would be, but yes AV1 encodes are a very efficient way to microsize. If you happen to be on PTP, there's a giant AV1 research thread with people testing stuff out. It looks like they prefer SVT-AV1-PSYEX as of the latest posts, though I don't know enough to understand which encoding settings are the most impactful.
I would love to be in PTP. Hopefully one day. Just in the mids now like ATH and BLU.
The PSYEX fork of AV1 is what I’m using too. It’s a big improvement over the stock AOM fork.
Maybe switching some of them onto a cheap seed box replica would be better? They have high in/out allowances.
Set throttling.
Ideally set it at your egress point so that sessions get throttled only when your max upload is reached.
Comcast recently upgraded their internet in our area to give us better upload speeds (from 16mbps to 200mbps) but I'd previously been sharing Linux ISOs with friends and family with a bitrate cap on Plex of 3mbps. With this, I was sometimes able to have 5 concurrent remote streams. Quality certainly wasn't the best but nobody really even seemed to notice when I asked about it and I'd explained to everyone that due to the shitty upload speed I was limited on how many people could watch at the same time.
I don't charge anyone for anything but several have offered money or bribes of beer or food over the years. As others have mentioned, with payments comes and expectations of priority or uptime and I can't guarantee that stuff.
1.3gbps up and down here, i went all in on self hosting when fiber became available and now have 3 fiber providers available. hope they roll out for you soon. i started with 1000/10 on cable and couldn't go back.
I have Xfinity now, so uploads are pretty good (300/80), but I used to have Spectrum, which not only cost more but only got about 8 mbps up. My solution was to restrict clients to low bandwidth streams, like 3mbps. I only had a couple users, though, so obviously there's a limit to how far that will scale.
If you can't upgrade or switch providers to increase bandwidth nor throttle clients, I think the only other solution would be time restrictions, but it's really going to depend on your users whether that's effective.
Can you be more specific on how fast your upload speeds are?
10 Mbps upload