I’ll start by plugging Harvard’s free courses catalog as well as Udemy
Edit: Gonna add 2 more I remembered-
Blender - I wish I had more time to learn it, but I did start the infamous “Donut Tutorial” once!
Watch Cartoons Online - Lots of good older stuff!
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet:
Jellyfin
With just a cheap computer you can have your own Netflix and Spotify.
How is it different than Plex?
Does it find the movies for me, or do I still need to figure out the Usenet or BitTorrent?
Jellyfin Is completely open source, fully self-hosted, and free. With Plex the software still has to phone home to a central server for authentication and some features are locked behind a paywall.
No streaming software is going to find movies for you (without paying for content they’ve licensed) because that would be a sure fire way to get the project taken down for copyright violation.
Plex makes it way easier to stream outside your network.
While I don’t have much experience with Plex, I can say that it’s really not hard to set up Jellyfin for streaming across the internet.
I’m running a docker container using the linuxserver.io image and all I had to do was forward the HTTP/S ports. I will grant that when a third party has to make an easy-to-use container for a service, there’s a problem to address… but if I remember correctly, Jellyfin is easier to set up on bare metal where it can use uPnP.
Most people will stop reading right there. Plex is so trivial comparatively to set up. Don’t get me wrong, I love Jellyfin. It’s amazing that it exists and I want everyone to be on it. But Plex exists and has its market share largely because of how easy it is to up both on your local network and beyond it, not to mention adding friends and family.
I could write out a short half page set of instructions and a person would be up and running in like 30 minutes tops. Even people with very poor tech literacy.
It’s a FOSS plex alternative… yes you will need to stock your own library Then install SonArr, RadArr, some other Arr 🏴☠️just learn Linux nub. Jk but not really
Since no one really answered you, there are generally two routes.
If you use newsgroups you can run sabnzbd, which is a service that downloads from newsgroups. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but there used to be something like CouchPotato for movies or SickBeard for TV (which migrated to SickChill, though you shouldn’t use that anymore as it installed a crypto miner last I heard). Lastly you sign up with a news indexer (look up Nzb.su or nzbgeek.info). CouchPotato could be linked to your imdb watch list.
Plug all of those together with API keys, and now movies on your imdb watch list just show up in your plex library as they become available.
Now if you use Torrents instead of newsgroups, there are similar things that all exist, I’m just less familiar with them.
Ah, interesting. I’m actually only (barely) familiar with torrents, insofar as I have downloaded qBitTorrent and enabled its embedded search. I search for thing, sort by most seeds, and choose first relevant one. Usually it all goes well. Plex on my Mac watches the downloads folder, and the TV has Plex installed.
It works, but at least from my limited view of its search results, the seas seem to be drying up. I feel like there are better, non-default searches I could be adding. There was some kind of Jacket plugin that refused to load so it’s just disabled.
Am a very inept pirate 🏴☠️
It’s Plex but free and without a central login server handled by a third party
It’s also got a few fewer/not as functional features and no live TV (whoopty do?)
The Arr Suite are what you’re looking for to find content, works with either Plex or Jelly in (or others)
JF does support live TV (and radio now it seems)
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/server/live-tv/
Aside from the FOSS that people love.
I will add something real world. I have Plex and Jellyfin running. Now Plex works fine for the most part but certain codecs when I am watching on iOS just has issues and freezes a lot so I have to use Jellyfin, but the UI in Jellyfin is pretty sparse and not as polished.
Can you ELI5 for me what this does? I don’t quite get it.
So when you use Spotify and Netflix, what your doing is streaming from their computers, which costs money hence why they charge you monthly.
They also add profit and licensing costs and all that to it so it adds up.
But what if, you used your own computer?
Very easy to do using just your wifi, some more complexity if you want to steam over the internet.
I feel the need to tell people do not try and stream it outside your network if you do not understand what you are doing.
What does that mean “use my own computer”? Do I need to have all the media files on my computer then? Where would I get those from?
Yes, this is all assuming you have a way to get all the media files you need.
Some of us have been collecting it for years.
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I see, thanks.
Is Jellyfin good with remote access?
You can do that with VPN. I’m using Tailscale, just had to make an account and install it on the computer I mentioned and on my phone.