Unless your initial recordings were lossless (they probably weren’t), recompressing the files with a lossless flag will only increase the size by a lot. Lossless video is HUGE, which is why almost no one actually records/saves it. What you’re probably looking for is visually lossless transcoding, where you do lose some data, but the difference is too small for most people to notice.

My recommendations:

1. Go to your recording software and change the setting to better compress your videos the first time around. Compressing once generally gives a better quality to size ratio than compressing twice. It’s therefore best if your recording software get it right first time, without you having to keep on recompressing your videos.
2. When tinkering with encoding setting, trying to find what works best for you, it might be useful to install Identity to help you compare the original files and one or more transcoded version(s).
3. Don’t try to recompress the audio; you’ll save very little space, and the losses in quality become perceptible much faster than video. When using ffmpeg, the “-c:a copy” flag should simply copy the original audio to the new file, without any change in quality or size
4. I’d recommend taking some time to read through the ffmpeg encoding guides. H265 and AV1 are good for personal archiving, with AV1 providing better compression ratios at the cost of much slower encoding. You could also choose VP9, which is similar in compression ratio and encoding speed to h265.
5. You’ll have to choose between hardware and software encoding. Hardware encoding can (depending on your specific hardware and settings) be 10-100x faster than software, but software generally gives better compression ratios at similar qualities. You should test this difference for yourself and see if the extra time is worth it for the extra quality. Do keep in mind that AV1 hardware encoding is only supported by some of the most recent GPU’s (rx7000 and rtx4000 from the top of my head). If you don’t have one of those GPU’s, you’ll either have to choose software encoding or pick a different codec.

Luxury! My homeserver has an i5 3470 with 6GB or RAM (yes, it’s a cursed 4+2 setup)! </badMontyPythonReference>

Interesting, I also run Nextcloud and pihole, and vaultwarden, jellyfin, paperless-ngx, gitea, vscode-server and a minecraft server (every now and then).

You’re right that such a system really does show its age, but only when doing multiple intensive tasks at the same time. I try not to backup my photos to Nextcloud while running minecraft, for example, as the imagine identification task pins my CPU at 100%. So yes, I agree, you’re probably not doing anything out of the ordinary on your setup.

The point I was trying to make still stands though, as that pi 2B could run more than I would’ve expected beforehand. I believe it once even ran jellyfin, a simple file server, samba, and a webserver with a simple HTML website. Jellyfin worked just fine, as long as the pi didn’t have to transcode (never got hardware transcoding to work).

It is funny that you should run out of memory, seeing as everything fits (albeit, just barely) on my machine in 1/5 the memory. Would de overhead of running VM’s account for such a large difference?

Coming from someone who started selfhosting on a pi 2B (similar-ish specs), you’d be surprised. If you don’t need anything fast or fancy, that 1GB will go a long way, and plenty of selfhosted apps require very little CPU. The only real problem I faced was that all HTTPS-related network tasks were limited at ~3MB/s, as that is how fast my pi could encrypt the data (presumably, I just saw my webserver utilising the entire CPU and figured this was the most likely explanation)

It depends what you’re optimising for. If you want a single (relatively small) download to be available on your HDD as fast as possible, then your current setup might be better (optimising for lower latency). However, if you want to be maxing out your internet speeds at all time and increase your HDD speeds by making the copy sequential (optimising for throughput), then the setup with the catch drive will be better. Keep in mind that a HDD’s sequential write performance is significantly higher than its random write performance, so copying a large file in one go will be faster than copying a whole bunch of random chunks in a random order (like torrents do). You can check the difference for yourself by doing a disk benchmark and comparing the sequential vs random writes of your drive.

qBittorrent has exactly the option you’re looking for, I believe it’s called “incomplete download path” in the settings, letting you store incomplete downloads at a temporary path and moving them to their regular location when the download finishes. Aside from the download speed improvement, this will also lead to less fragmentation on your HDD (which might be part of the reason why it is so slow when downloading directly to it). Pre-allocating space could have the same effect, but I would recommend only using one of these two solutions at once (pre-allocating space on your SSD would only waste space)

It’s possible for a certain hardware/software setup not to support a certain codec. For example, my jellyfin client (Finamp) uses the iOS native decoders (afaik), which means opus files are practically broken. My music library (8000+ songs) contained exactly 1 lossy file, which just so happened to be an opus file. I decided to spend the extra ~20MB to standardise my entire library to flac files, ensuring I could play every song on all my devices.

Edit cause I posted too soon: you are generally correct; only in very specific circumstances will you encounter compatibility issues like this one in the modern world. This is 100% apple being apple, and you can expect pretty much every other (reasonably modern) device to support all codecs you might encounter in the wild.

To add to the audio compression: it isn’t possible to further compress an mp3 file without losing any quality. You can either:

1. Recompress to a lossy codec (mp3, aac, opus). This will lead to smaller file sizes if you set the bitrate lower than that of the input file, but it will always worsen the quality, no matter the bitrate.
2. Recompress to a lossless format (flac easily being the best one). Going from a lossy to a lossless format will increase the file size (sometimes by quite a substantial amount), while keeping the same quality. There is very little reason for you to do this
3. keep the original files (my recommendation)

If you’re willing to spend some extra time learning about audio compression, you can download lossless files and compress those directly to whatever format and bitrate you want. The quality will be better than option 1 above, as the audio is only lossely compressed once instead of twice.

Which compression level are you using? My old server is able to compress flac’s at the highest (and therefore “slowest”) compression level at >50x speed, so bumping the level up shouldn’t be too hard on your CPU.

I’ve been running some external drives on my server for about a year now. In my experience, hard drives with an external power supply suffer less from random disconnects. The specific PC also makes quite a large difference in reliability. My server is just a regular desktop and has very little problem staying connected and powering my 3 external drives. My seedbox is an old laptop, and has been having almost constant problems with random disconnects and power issues. Maybe test how well your framework does with some external drives before committing to the plan?

Have you tried the official guide from the jellyfin website?

As for the guide this AI generated: it bothers me that they instruct you to use chocolatey for the *arrs, but still advice you to install docker, qbittorrent and jellyfin manually (all of which have chocolatey packages). I disagree with the comment that external storage would be recommended, as internal storage is generally more reliable (depending on a lot of factors of course). Also, I believe the “adding a library”-section of the jellyfin setup is a bit too short to be of any use, and would recommend referring to the jellyfin docs instead.

This guide also doesn’t explain how to make jellyfin accessible outside of your LAN. Once again, I’d recommend referring to the jellyfin docs if you want to do this.

I personally have only set up qbittorrent, jellyfin and docker (not the *arr suite), so I can’t comment on the completeness of the guide, but I wouldn’t trust it too much (seeing the previous oversights).

And finally, as someone who started their selfhosted server journey on windows: don’t. There is a reason why almost all guides are written for linux, as it is (in my humble opinion) vastly superior for server usage once you get used to it.

I tried using Linux alternatives to iTunes, but it was always a pain. Even iTunes itself on a separate windows box was more of a hassle than I wanted. I eventually discovered rockbox, which works great with my iPod (5th gen AKA video): it has way more config options and allows me to simply create .m3u playlists and use my own folder structure. If your iPod is supported (https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodPort.html), I’d absolutely recommend Rockbox over other solutions.

If your iPod isn’t supported by Rockbox (like my nano 5th gen), you could probably use strawberry or GTKpod. Both are imperfect, but work “good enough”.

You could look at the awesome-selfhosted list, specifically these two sections:

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/recipe-management.html

https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/task-management--to-do-lists.html

I don’t have any experience with any of those, but there might be something that fits your needs.

If the installer is small enough (<650MB I believe), you can upload it to virustotal.com to have it be scanned by ~65 antivirus programs

Ah, it looks like we have a small misunderstanding. I thought you were talking about uncompressed video, which is enormous. This is only used in HDMI cables for example. A 1080p60 uncompressed video is 2.98Gbit/s, or about 1.22 terabytes per hour.

A remux is “uncompressed” in the sense that it isn’t recompressed, or in this case transcoded. A remux is still compressed, just to a lesser degree than a transcode. This means the files are indeed larger, but the quality is also better than transcodes.

To clarify the article’s confusing statement: they claim that remuxes can reduce size by throwing away some audio streams, while keeping the original video. This is true, but the video itself hasn’t gotten any smaller: you are simply throwing away other information.

Remuxes aren’t uncompressed, nor are they losslessly compressed. They’re just a 1:1 direct copy from some other medium (generally blu-rays or DVD’s).

The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress

I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.

These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.

I have had decent experiences with TiLP on linux. According to their website, it “can handle any TI calculator (from TI73 to V200) with any link cable.”. Their website also explicitly states support for the NSpire and NSpire-CAS, but the NSpire CX II isn’t mentioned. It might be worth a shot?

If it doesn’t work, the easiest solution would probably be a windows VM with USB-passtrough (which wine doesn’t support as far as I know). You could then use the webapp I linked earlier.

I use the “wakeonlan” package. Simply install it, ssh to your server, and run “wakeonlan xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx”, where “xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” is the Mac-adres of the PC you’re trying to wake.

If I understand your post correctly, you have 2 PC’s at home: one running wireguard, and one you want to wake using WoL. This is similar to my setup, where I have a server and a personal desktop. When I want to wake my PC remotely, I just ssh to the server and use the server to wake the desktop. Connecting to the server and telling it to wake your PC seems easier than trying to redirect your phone’s WoL app over wireguard.

I am currently using the proprietary Nvidia driver, simply because nouveau isn’t performant enough. I can’t wait for NVK though, maybe that driver will finally be viable for us Nvidia-users.