I mean, the kids don’t need to log in YouTube to view Shorts. What’s the purpose of setting up anything account related? I missed anything.

Don’t think you need a Google account to view Shorts, though?

I feel like I’m doing something illegal by calling my home a lab. Might be thinking too much ;) Jokes aside, I’m not really testing or inventing anything so I genuinely don’t understand where the lab part comes from.

Without technical know-how or experience in general using NAS, Synology is a good first-time option. All apps are ready for immediate use. And don’t forget the majority of computer users don’t even know what a NAS is and they simply want to store files for remote access.

You could ask the question for video gaming. Can a used computer do the job? Yes, but you may not be able to play cutting edge / demanding games if your computer lacks the appropriate hardware. It really depends what kind of things you want to do, for choosing hardware that’s powerful enough.

Jellyfin? You need to consider if you need transcoding. Transcode or not makes quite a difference on the hardware needs.

To answer your question, most people don’t have just one device. Do you have only one device? You must have at least a desktop computer and a smartphone? What if you want to have something stored in your computer when you are not at home?

Music for example. If I don’t want to pay Spotify or whatever, and I want to listen to my music on my phone at work and on my computer at home. Other than making two full copies of the entire music library, I think I have to store them on a 3rd location then share it to my two devices.

If I don’t listen to music at home, then you’re right, there’s no reason to self host anything. I can just store all songs on my phone.

There are three reasons that I can think of:

1. Privacy
2. Collaboration
3. Accessibility / cost

Privacy. This is obvious. People don’t want their private information to be sold by corporations or scraped by AI.

Collaboration To share information with others, while maintaining point 1, people have to self host. Say, you want to archive a bunch of photos for personal viewing then you can store them anywhere you like. But if you want to share them with family, a self hosted solution is the way to go.

Accessibility / cost People want to do things for free. Many applications offer free version or demo, but features are often limited and you can’t really customize them to your own needs. In addition, applications often adopt a subscription model these days and people don’t like that.

I don’t think it checks if the video is watched in Jellyfin.

Just curious if there’s a setting in any of those applications that removes downloaded videos which have been watched at least once, and after x amount of time? It’s sort of like a watch list. If watched, I don’t want to keep the video. But if I do, I can add it to a playlist and let PinchFlat download it for archive.

I know this is not the theme of this post, but I wonder if there’s an LLM that doesn’t hallucinate when asked to summarize information of a group of documents. I tried Gpt4all for simple queries like finding out which documents mentioned a certain phrase. It often gave me filenames that didn’t actually exist. Hallucinating contents is one thing but making up data source is just horrible.

You have to use the ‘OS’ version though, or is it my wrong understanding?

Agreed that there’s no all-in-one solution to play local music and music on Spotify (if I’m a premium user). I vaguely recall there’s a solution to automate playing Spotify music and record it in real-time (since you cannot download music directly) but it seemed too troublesome, so I eventually chose spot-dl4 to download music from YouTube using Spotify playlist, then the folder got imported into Lidarr/Navidrome, then my Symfonium on Android connects to Navidrome to get the songs.

It’s quite a bit of manual work to add songs to a separate playlist if I like something on Spotify then use spot-dl4 to do the download. At least, I successfully keep a copy of my favourite songs on my server.

It’s a headache most of the time so you might consider purchasing a local SIM card for 4/5G connection instead (and share connection via mobile phone) in the future.

Depends on the application really. For example, I don’t need to update Jellyfin and the arrs as soon as the new updates drop. They work just fine and I’m not waiting for any particular fixes.

Between Tube Archivist (TA) and Pinchflat (PF), it seems TA is a better choice (because you want to delete the downloaded videos). TA has a built-in interface to watch and delete the video. But if you are like me, who watches the videos in Jellyfin and don’t plan to delete them afterwards, then PF is a solid archival application.

Maybe you could try Pinchflat. I haven’t yet tried it though I do plan to do it some time soon.

I suppose you are using the plugin at https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist-jf-plugin. Very rarely I had the same problem. But if I ignore it, the data sometimes fixes itself after another update. If not, you could try the manual trigger. Frankly I have no idea why it fails sometimes.

Does PF have a browser extension? TA has it, which makes it simple to download videos on demand.

Omg, my previous company did the same. But you missed a part. If you accidentally left out a real email, thinking it’s a scam, then the client will file a complaint.

Thanks so much for the advice. Easy of use is a major concern for family members, however. My plan is to open the web page on a tablet and put it in the living room then the family doesn’t need to use a phone. I’ll look into both options.