LG to offer subscriptions for already purchased appliances and televisions, evolving into a provider for “Home as a Service”::Subscription fatigue is a thing and regulators are circling, but Korean giant reckons you’re ready to cough up after buying hardware
This thing with subscriptions has become insane. You can easily spend several hundred a month getting roped into all the subscriptions companies are pushing. It’s the latest way to squeeze as much money as possible out of the consumer.
I’ve gone into subscription boycott at this point. I had too many and said screw that. I still have Amazon Prime where I think I get my money’s worth. I shop there a lot and use their streaming so it’s worth it to me. Subscriptions for appliances? No way in hell.
Yep. I built a fully automated piracy machine that I can stream straight to any device with no hassle. Fuck subscriptions.
Can you expand a bit on how you did that? Sounds enticing and I do have a virtual server and a RasPi to play around with.
Sonarr, radarr, qbittorrent and jellyfin are what I use.
Prowlarr
Definitely! Don’t listen to the folks behind me - Jellyfin can only be viewed outside of your network if you build your own website and host it there, and that’s way more trouble than you need to go through. Use Plex instead. You can just download the app and login and view your media from anywhere in the world without having to be a web designer/programmer.
Jellyfin is cool and all, but the functionality is severely lacking compared to Plex. Plex is getting pretty commercial, so I get it, but it just fucking works haha. Jellyfin will hopefully be there someday, but trust me, save yourself that headache. It sucks in it’s current form. It’s mostly just hardcore nerds that use Jellyfin, and if you’re trying to share it with others, it’s very complex. With Plex, I can just have my elderly mother or whoever download the Plex app on their phone, smart TV, game console, or anything else with internet and you can cast it just like Netflix.
I use unRAID as my OS, which is a Docker-based Linux kernel. I use Plex, Prowlarr/Radarr/Sonarr for indexing and organizing my library, sabNZBD and qBittorrent to download the files, and Overseerr as a search engine and request system for movies and TV. Basically I’ve got Overseerr reverse proxied and myself and all of the folks I share my Plex with can access it and request stuff from any web browser.
I’m actually setting plex up within the next couple of days! I had to make some hardware changes first (mostly adding more storage)
Are there any good guides on how do to it the way you did so it can torrent the stuff you don’t have on demand? I assume that once you’ve torrented it, it keeps that torrented media downloaded for later use as well? Or does it automatically delete after a certain amount of inactivity on that file? Did you set it up with a VPN, and if so how did you get that working in Qbittorrent in docker?
Yep, this guide is a little outdated at this point, but still very solid. It does keep the file - Sonarr/Radarr actually have media management and you can clean up your media folder very nicely with them. There’s containers on the unRAID app store for both that already have your VPN integrated - you basically just plug in your VPN info. Highly recommend Private Internet Access for your provider - they’re the easiest one to configure and they’re one of the most secure. I’m at the office right now, but there’s two creators you want to look out for - hotio and linuxserver. Both of those guys make damn solid containers with this in mind.
Thanks! I’ll read up on that tomorrow, though I’ll have to do something slightly different as I used proxmox as my base OS rather than unRaid. But that looks like a good stepping off point!
No problem! I’m not super familiar with ProxMox myself, but if it’s doable, I’m sure someone on the internet has written something up on it!
Yeah, it’s bad enough that an LG TV makes you agree to have all of your data sent to them, but now they want you to pay for the privilege as well. Screw that!
I mean, i think all smart TVs do that now. Don’t know what I’ll do when my dumb one breaks.
Just don’t connect smart TVs to the internet. Get something cheap like a raspberry pi + wireless mouse/keyboard or an android TV box for the same functionality. (More functionality, actually)
Ugh I wish raspberry pis were still… anywhere… for reasonable prices.
Haha I accidentally bought an extra right before prices skyrocketed, and am just saving that bitch for when the right project comes along. Came close to returning it, but am damn glad I didn’t.
Man I had no clue they went up in price. I have a couple laying around here somewhere.
But you know, if you look on newegg.com, you can just about buy a full cheap motherboard with CPU for the same price and get more ports and probably more speed as long as you can handle the size.
It’s one of those things that was a shock at how prevalent it is on the Apple app store after so much talk of how much better the apps are compared to Android. There’s not even proper filter options to filter out apps that are subscription only. It was ridiculous how you could buy an app then get pop ups to get the subscription plan. It’s why I wish a foss app store like F-droid becomes available once slide loading becomes possible so I can avoid the appstore as much as possible when I need a basic app. Like a calculator.
Yeah phone apps are horrible, don’t know about iOS since I’ve always used Android, but they’re mostly bad. The apps geared to a company service are usually fine, but the rest are just ad support systems.
I actually don’t use third party phone apps that much, but the times I have it’s like an assault. You get a tenth of the screen for the actual function of the app with the rest of the screen gyrating ads. It’s especially a problem for me because I’m old and can’t see the screen that well. I don’t know how people put up with it. I can’t.
Good thing about at least paid apps on play store is that they usually don’t have subscriptions, and there are tags warning if it Contains Ads before you even install the app.
I don’t think Apple appstore even has ad warnings. Only in-app purchase warning. So using appstore was when I found out talking video ads exist.