I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…
Depends on whether or not they signed up for monthly or annual, and many get it in November so things they order show up in time before the xmas postal hell.
It seems like it would work because people wouldn’t think they got their value out of their prime membership yet and are reluctant to cancel after such a short time.
What made decide to cancel Prime was realizing that Amazon was adding a markup to prime products that effectively cancelled out any shipping savings. But also prime video offering was crap where I live.
That and Amazon being a terrible company that I didn’t want to support anyway.
This and the rising costs plus adding ads to 'basic' tiers and attempting to create limitations (resolutions, "screens", offline downloads) is what might push me to build a nice, large NAS. We don't want Cable again.
I appreciate the advice! I am thinking of Synology or perhaps DIY with either TrueNAS (Scale likely) or Unraid. Synology would be cheap, small, easy on power and thermals too though and I've been looking at the latest and previous gen DS2XX lines.
Also I appreciate the Jellyfin mention. I've been using Plex so long and was thinking about something else like Jellyfin especially but I've never worked with it before.
The nice thing about Jellyfin is that you can point Jellyfin and Plex to the same media folders and both will work, to try it out.
I would get a Synology with intel Quicksync if you go the Synology route for hardware transcoding. Unfortunately, a lot of the new models don’t have it.
I just have a 220+ but would maybe get a 4 bay model if I did it again.
i do this with jellyfin and kodi. the media library is standalone. they both get read-only access to all the metadata which i manage with a different tool (mediaelch)
I went the DIY route a month and a half ago and it’s been great. I opted for a larger case so I could add a bunch of HDDs and not be limited to the 2 or 4 that’s the standard in a syno, and I’ll keep adding more over time. I got carried away with the CPU and went with ddr5 so it’s been quite more expensive than it should have been and it cost about 700 euro without the spinning disks, but it’s been great with proxmox + a truenas VM (plus a bunch of extra vms for the arrs, tinkering, media servers, web stuff, pihole, nginx, some game servers…)
Pretty much sounds exactly like I was thinking of doing for the DIY. miniATX/ATX for all the expansion potential + SATA ports + large case to handle it + a CPU with 6 to 8 cores at least. Case would probably be a rack form factor but it doesn't really matter. Probably 32 GB of RAM + a Quadro GPU/Some cheap AMD GPU or something cheapish like that strictly for encoding + Proxmox + TrueNAS or perhaps just unraid. Probably no desktop environments unless something really needs it for some reason. Not sure if I'll go with a motherboard with an ILO/IPMI with its own NIC + vlan or not.
I was going to mix SSD/NVME for performance (if I mix these two, it'd be two separate performance tiers) and HDDs for capacity. Probably two 1+ Gbps NICs bonded and maybe a LACP port channel down the line. VPN with killswitch of course.
I could def. go cheaper on the hardware if I just wanted to use docker/podman mostly but I want VMs too. I'll probably manage updates and backups of what I really care about off network via ansible + rclone + restic repos. I might would use zram + lz4 for most of my VMs because why not.
Yeah, sounds good. My proxmox is installed in a couple of raid0 SSD for redundancy and the VMs are in a 1tb nvme. All the remaining data (media, files, Arma/other game mods, backups…) is stored in spinning HDDs. I’m using an Intel CPU so I didn’t bother with a dedicated GPU and it’s working without a problem, but I still have to stress test jellyfin when transcoding multiple streams.
If I was to do it again I’d downgrade to ddr4 and get much more RAM though, 32gb it’s not that much when factoring in truenas, VMs and a couple of gameservers.
Guess I’ll be putting Helluva Boss on my Plex server.
Meh.
My prime was already cancelled because they billed me in early January, when that extra $100 could be used on Christmas gifts, so it always snuck up on me.
News broke on this a few months ago, and I jumped ship. Their failed music app is another reason I ditched their ecosystem. Kept crashing; music would pause mid-song; couldn’t play downloaded music offline without a data connection.
Video service had such poor title coverage and nothing compelling for the price. As many others have said, the value proposition didn’t work. Enshittification is in full swing. Sail the high seas.
It’s a fairly niche sport, but Amazon had the tennis rights here in the UK. They’ve gone to sky now and the very minimum you’d need to pay is £30 p/m for much less choice in the way you watch matches. As for prime music, they have a good amount of ad-free podcasts, including everything from wondery. I only have prime for the free next day shipping and free returns by collection, but the tennis and podcasts were a really great extra.
See my other reply. Amazon used to be cheap but now it's not the cheapest option most of the time, at least where I live. For some people who are struggling financially cancelling prime might be a good way to save money.
Amazon is not the cheapest option most of the time. I compare prices a lot. What I meant to say was that it appears cheaper due to free shipping and people are lazy and rather pay for prime, pay more than they have to and support a horrible company all at once
Living in a major city where we have a Amazon warehouse, I cancelled prime because they failed their promise on two day shipping. 2021-2023, I started seeing packages take as long as 5 days. Now, half my orders take that long. What is the point of that’s the whole ad pitch?
Man I just moved to the arr’s I’m a Usenet guy… but torrents are the same deal… I added overseerr on top of that and all I do now is “request” it on overseerr and blamonit appears on my Plex server.
For example if you wanted to download all of the seasons of say… SpongeBob. With overseerr it’s literally 1. search for the show 2. click request and wait.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience Check out trash guides and overseerr.dev
I run all of mine in docker with docker compose.
Also I gave my mil and fil link to overseerr which Plex authenticates… They can request what ever and it appears.
Is there an idiot guide how to do this? I’ve never pirated and I don’t currently have a VPN. I use my Xbox for streaming straight to my TV using HDMI. I see posts like yours with various words like Plex, overseerr, docker, jellyfin, etc., and I don’t know where to even start. I could Google it, but among the hundreds of results, I don’t know which things are reputable, functional, and not malware.
I have some room to optimize my torrenting setup but it’ll never be as good as watching the trailer for a show and immediately with one button push, watching the show itself. I mean, fiddling on my phone and waiting 10 mins is the best it’s gonna get, but that’s still better than going over to my always-on, old laptop whose only job it is to torrent, finding the one I want, waiting for it to download, then moving it over to my Plex server.
All of their ads that said “there’s more to prime!” are what planted the seed in my mind that I should cancel. I don’t use any of the “more” stuff, but we were paying for it anyway.
I don’t miss Prime at all. You still get free shipping as long as you let you wait until you have $35 of stuff in your cart.
that's fine if you have the patience for their shipping shenanigans. they sit on orders for days and/or ship from distant warehouses when you don't have the prime sub.
Not really defending Amazon, but that’s not really shenanigans either. If you’re expecting 100% completely free shipping without prime, they’re going to wait to send it with a more cost efficient larger shipment to your region while prioritizing prime orders. Sometimes the distant warehouses are used even with prime because that’s where those items are, they don’t keep them stocked everywhere, especially when they process third party orders. I can easily expect to wait 2 weeks or more for something if I don’t pay for shipping.
The Boys, Expanse, Invincible, Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, Fleabag, Good Omens, Man in the High Tower and Reached come to mind. Admittedly, I haven’t watched a few of those.
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