I’ve got an older AMD bulldozer platform with 16 or so tb behind it. SMB serves up all of the media to Nvidia shield platforms running Kodi. Away, I’ll wire guard in to my network to remotely access media and compute as needed. I’m a big fan of not running a bunch of integrations that would fail at a time I’m just trying to watch something and relax; IT support at home after doing it all day sucks.

Today I’m dependent on my Jellyfin and Truenas setup, and I am exposing only one folder via SMB to manage my media from my laptop when I need to. This works great for me as I can stream my media to any of the multiple TVs and FireTV sticks around the house, and Jellyfin allows me to pause play on a device and resume on another.

My setup grew over time to adapt to my changing needs. If your setup works for you, that’s great! Keep it, use it and adapt it as soon as your needs change. This is the beauty of self-hosting: you setup what you need, how you need it.

Not quite the same. But my NAS does files. That’s it.

Everything else is hosted elsewhere.

I have 5TiB of media and I’ve never felt the need to set up any kind of hosted frontend.

I’m closing in on 80 and I feel a very strong need for one :)

Tbh setting up all cool frontends has always mystified me but I like minimal terminal interfaces and use stuff like MPD, Yazi, etc. and it seems like a pain to manage this big thing. I think the benefit really sets in when it’s something you’re sharing with others.

Like, I’d love to have all my documents in a folder written in pure markdown via vim, but hedgedoc helps me share and collaborate with my friends. A lot of people who operate these services share them with family, so I imagine ease of use helps. Tracking can be huge for people as well, but idk I just write down my episode list or have a separate tracker app.

Speaking of, Yamtrack is really good for that.

Overall, I feel like minimal UIs really help me focus instead of getting lost, but sharing my media via Jellyfin is one of the few reasons I want to do this in the first place. I like providing access to obscure media that’s hard to get ahold of for my friends. So I’d say I’m a mix. Minimal stuff for myself, but interfaces for friend/external access.

Jellyfin, Immich, and Paperless-ngx are three of the apps I use the most but you do whatever works best for you. That’s half the advantage of self hosting. You can have a solution that’s custom tailored to your needs.

Not me. I need nextcloud and jellyfin. I use nextcloud for my calendar, task, note, photos, contacts etc. Jellyfin, well, media.

I dont have gdrive, icloud, spotify stuff like that. So, i need to host it myself.

I assume you don’t have a TV or a spouse?

I ran mine like this for years. Then a few weeks ago I installed Immich so we can browse photos directly from the NAS on our phone. That’s how it will stay. I don’t want it to turn into an application server.

I run my NAS that way too. I just mount it and play videos with VLC if I want to watch something I have on it. The main reason I have a NAS is because I ran out of drive bays in my main system a few years ago… Works fine for my needs currently; no need to make it more complicated.

My NAS just stores, its my stack of tmm’s that do all the heavy lifting.

Though I use a front end for everything, like jellyfin, audiobookshelf, kavita, etc.

I’ve basically got everything thrown into a Samba share on Linux then most media is consumed via the Infuse app for iOS, macOS.

As for music, I have some lossless/hifi that I can stream via Apple’s Music app too.

I’m one or those as well, but instead of VLC I use NOVA player on Android devices because of the remote sync.

Said that I’m using WebDAV shares as SMB is way slower. Is it just me? Any other protocol suggestion?

No. I like my laptop to backup over the internet. I like my phone to use my nas for photos instead of Apple.

Yes. And No.

I have a home made (arch btw) NAS that stores all our files - mostly via syncthing, even from remote family.

That was it.

Then I installed Immich so that we could see the photos… so… it’s technically just a NAS, but it does now have a web application running on it…

Videos & Music are on a completely separate MythTV box which existed before the NAS - I saw no point in moving ~3TB of data to a separate box that would need to be powered when I want to watch / listen to something… my NAS powers itself up & down throughout the day to save electricity (and it was interesting to learn how to make it know when it was / wasn’t being used)