As a general rule: One system, one service. That system can be metal, vm, or container. Keeping things isolated makes maintenance much easier. Though sometimes it makes sense to break the rules. Just do so for the right reasons and not out of laziness.
Your file server should be it’s own hardware. Don’t make that system do anything else. Keeping it simple means it will be reliable.
Proxmox is great for managing VMs. Your could start with one server, and add more as needed to a cluster.
It’s easy enough to setup wireguard for roaming systems that you should. Make a VM for your VPN endpoint and off you go.
I’m a big fan of automation. Look into ansible and terraform. At least consider ansible for updating all your systems easily - that way you’re more likely to do it often.
One rule one system is very bad practice. You should run a bunch of services with docker compose. If you have enough resources to warrant 3 VMs you could setup a swarm.
Tailscale just solves so many these types of problems.
With a virtual network, you mo longer need tools that work over the internet - just use the same tools as you would on a LAN.
I’ve used Hamachi this way on windows since about 2006. I’ve waited for an Androidi/iOS client, but it never appeared. Glad to see Wireguard/Tailscale step in to fill that gap, and it’s self-hostable!
Unfortunately, the only people who would actually want to see my home videos (family) live several thousand miles away. I’m also not sure they would even know what to do with an external HDD. Not a bad idea, though.
The problem about the “automatically adjust resolution and bitrate” can be done in two ways:
Using a GPU to transcode the 4k video in real time (generally unavailable on VPS)
Encoding the video in multiple resolutions and bitrates, using much more disk space
Both solutions are expensive on a VPS.
In this case when I need to share stuff in 4k 60 (basically never) I just host on YouTube unlisted and having Google foot the bill. Maybe think like this: the content really deserves to be 4k 60 fps? Home videos that I share with my family are downgraded to 720p as anyway they will watch it horizontal on a vertical screen
I honestly didn’t know that Youtube “unlisted” was even a thing; I’ve never posted a video to Youtube before, but this might be a promising idea. I’m assuming they still inject ads into unlisted videos, which is a major barrier for me… I hate ads.
I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to video and audio quality; 4k/60 might be overkill, but I think at least 4k/30 has some merit in this case. Most modern phones and tablets (and TVs) are at least greater than 1080p, so assuming they’re watching the video horizontally, 1080p video would still result in a loss of quality. Would they care? Almost certainly not, but the idea of watching a UHD video source in a lower resolution bothers me far more than it should.
It definitely seems like VPS hosting is out of my budget. I think that hosting multiple version of the same video (and paying for more HDD space) would probably be cheaper than a VPS with a GPU resources, but the recurring fees are probably more than I’m willing to spend.
Maybe Jellyfin, where I believe you can force a low bitrate for every remote client. It wouldn’t be “adjust to internet speed” but you could minimise buffering that way.
Of course. Youtube and the like “pre-transcode” it so that would be one way for Jellyfin to better solve it, at the cost of a significant amount of disk space.
You can get an intel arc a310 for ~$90 and it has absolutely insane transcode performance, so depending on how large your library is it might even end up cheaper than buying more storage to just live-transcode everything.
I suspect the delay would still be longer than a Youtube like implementation which may need to switch transcodes multiple times, but that’s probably unrealistic at this point anyway.
Transcoding everything to AV1 could be a solution too, since high resolutions can look quite good at low bitrates, so you could limit it to 5mbps or 10mbps for any resolution and be done with it. But I’m not sure Jellyfin supports that, and at least from the UI it doesn’t give you particularly fine grained control over resolution/bitrates. Perhaps having a secondary library of just AV1 transcodes that you handle manually (perhaps even using a software encoder) could be an option for some.
The client side is also an issue, with not that many devices supporting hardware decoding (although I’ve found it’s fast enough in software with most modern smartphones at least).
if you’re switching between formats yeah it’s going to need to start over on the transcoding. If you don’t it’s actually better because it just caches it on disk. From that point it’s basically native.
Jellyfin does support limiting external network speeds, and individual client speeds, so if you setup your transcoding correctly, and the clients support those codecs, it’ll work.
I’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I run it at home with a dedicated Nvidia A2000 for hardware transcoding. It’s able to transcode multiple 4k streams with tonemapping faster than they can play.
As much as I’d love to use Jellyfin, there are two major issues: My internet connection is so slow, that I’d be lucky to stream 720p at a low bitrate. I’d spend the money on a faster connection, but I live in an area that doesn’t even get cell phone service. My options are DSL and Starlink, and I have both; the DSL is just slow, and Starlink uplink speed isn’t much better, plus I have plenty of obstructions that make it somewhat unreliable. The second problem is that Jellyfin has too steep of a learning curve. Telling my relatives “oh, if it starts buffering, just lower the bitrate” isn’t an option. Not to mention, I’d have to run it on a VPS, and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.
Have you considered keeping them on YouTube but unlisted, so that they don’t show up on your profile nor in youtube searches?
Otherwise, you could create a Google Photos album, but either quality suffers, or the videos will take a lot of space.
All the other options I could suggest either call for a recurrent payment, but trust me, it gets tedious after a while (ie. VPS with Peertube or similar), or call for losing quality by a lot (ie. Whatsapp or Telegram channels/groups), or quickly become unpractical (ie. Mega, Dropbox…)
There are plenty of choices, and if you’re 100% sure you’re fine with recurring payments and having to constantly mantain a system/keep it updated and secure, then go ahead and make a VPS, but if you’d rather have it be convenient, look into additional YouTube settings or common alternatives like Vimeo.
Yup, this is the answer - if they need to be able to open the video with just the link, there’s functionally no difference if it’s self-host or YouTube unlisted. Just a lot less effort.
Another option is to make the youtube video private. Then you have the option to only share it with specific people. If it’s unlisted, then anyone with the link can view it.
Hosting on a VPS will get expensive. 4K video takes up a lot of space. If you want adjustable quality, then you will need to store multiple copies of the video at various resolutions and bitrates. A cheap VPS won’t have a GPU to do real time transcoding.
That wouldn’t surprise me. I’m sure they don’t want people using youtube their own private video archive. Storage isn’t free after all. If they didn’t want people to set videos to private, they would have removed the option though. Just don’t expect the videos to stay there forever.
If it is encoded properly, NextCloud links will just play. I’ve sent video to my “Which one is the right click?” Mother.
Mkv won’t play out of the box, but most mp4’s do. I self host, but I have a higher upstream than you do. (I get about 12. Slow, but it does generally work.)
The more replies like this I get, the more I’m inclined to set up a second computer with just TrueNAS and let it do nothing but handle that. I assume that, then, would be usable by the server running proxmox with all its containers and whatnots.
If you want to learn zfs a bit better though, you can just stick with Proxmox. It supports it, you just don’t get the nice UI that TrueNAS provides, meaning you’ve got to configure everything manually, through config files and the terminal.
You can run Virtual Machines and containers in TrueNAS Scale directly. The “Apps” in TrueNAS run in K3s (a lightweight Kubernetes) and you can run plain Docker containers as well if you need to.
TrueCharts provides additional apps and services on top of the official TrueNAS supported selection.
I have used Proxmox a lot before TrueNAS. At work and in my homelab. It’s great, but the lack of Docker/containerd support made me switch eventually. It is possible to run Docker on the same host as Proxmox, but in the end everything I had was running in Docker. This made most of what Proxmox offers redundant.
TrueNAS has been a better fit for me at least. The web interface is nice and container based services are easier to maintain through it. I only miss the ability to use BTRFS instead of ZFS. I’ve had some annoying issues with TrueCharts breaking applications on upgrades, but I can live with the occasional troubleshooting session.
I need everything to be fully but securely accessible from outside the network
I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. Who is going to need to access it from outside the network? Is it good enough for you to set up a VPN?
The more stuff visible on the internet, the more you have to play IT to keep it safe. Personally, I don’t have time for that. The safest and easiest system to maintain a system is one where possible connections are minimized.
I sometimes travel for work, as an example, and need to be able to access things to take care of things while I’m away and the girlfriend is home, or when she’s with me and someone else is watching the place (I have a dog that needs petsat). I definitely have the time to tinker with it. Patience may be another thing, though, lol.
Tailscale would allow you access to everything inside your network without having it publicly accessible. I highly recommend that since you are new to security.
It’s not clear to me how tailscale does this without being a VPN of some kind. Is it just masking your IP and otherwise just forwarding packets to your open ports? Maybe also auto blocking suspicious behavior if they’re clearly scanning or probing for vulnerabilities?
That’s exactly what it is. I haven’t looked into it too much, but as far as I know it’s main advantage is simplifying the setup process, which in turn reduces the chances of a misconfigured VPN.
I’ve been running Teleport for a while now and it’s been great. It can even manage access to things like Kubernetes clusters which is fantastic in my use case. I’ve been using their free community edition and no complaints so far.
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