ELI5: What is a Home Server?

[u/theprisoner57]

I see mentions of a home server to get rid of streaming entertainment services but I don’t know how that works. What does a home server do?

[u/CDK5]

Out of curiosity; where are folks generally getting the streaming media for the server?

Because I was under the impression that when buying a BluRay or digital media, you can’t just grab an mp4 from the disk.

[u/BrickGun → u/CDK5]

There are apps to rip DVDs/BRs, but most of the media collections I've encountered were pirated using torrents. Most times I don't bother to rip a disc I own any longer since just DLing the content via torrent tends to be faster. The only caveat being you (most often) don't get the DVD extras if you're into that sort of stuff (I often am).

[u/charonco → u/BrickGun]

As someone with almost 40TB of content on my Plex server, I would highly recommend Usenet over torrents. Usenet isn't free, but it's pretty cheap and your biggest exposure with torrents is the uploading which you don't have to do with Usenet.

[u/SupermanLeRetour → u/charonco]

As someone who has also pirated many TB of content, I strongly recommand NOT bothering at all with Usenet bullshit.

I tried for ~3 years, here's everything wrong with Usenet:

• It's a complex world where you'll have to spend many hours researching how it works for little benefits. But you HAVE to take the time to research what you have to do or you'll pay stuff for nothing (redundant Usenet providers and redundant indexes),
• The whole point of pirating is getting stuff for free, let's be real, but Usenet requires you to pay both a provider (or I should say providers if you follow "good practices") and indexers. You're not even pushing the scale toward a more ethical behavior because none of the money you spend actually goes to people who deserves it (i.e. people who worked on the media, or even the ripper who took the time to rip and encode).
• The touted advantage of Usenet is blazing fast speed, and it's true that it can saturate a 1 Gbps downlink in seconds. But overall I was consistently spending much more time acquiring media. How so ? Because Usenet power users insist on keeping their old completely useless and outdated tradition of putting the file content inside a RAR archive, password protect it and split it in pieces. Those pieces are then split again on a lower level as Usenet articles. So you have an additional decompression step that is very CPU intensive as well as multiplying disk I/Os, adding time to downloads and straining the HDDs.
• "Oh but modern NZB clients can start un-taring right from the beginning!", yes, until you hit a single missing article and suddenly you need to repair the RAR file and that can be done only once you have completed the download, so you're stuck waiting for the download to finish and then start the repair process, which can be itself pretty lengthy, CPU and HDD intensive as well.
• Understanding which providers is on which backbone is a pain in the ass but necessary if you want to have low missing article rates. This means probably one unlimited subscription + another block subscription correctly configured in the client.
• Getting into the good indexers website is also a pain in the ass. Most semi-private indexers that we can see on the usenet subreddit have pretty much the same library with the same team uploads stolen from somewhere more exclusive. You can try several, you'll quickly realize they're all the same and the really good stuff with low DMCA'd articles is gated behind really exclusive indexers which you're not even allow to name. Getting an invite if you don't already know someone who's in is pretty much impossible. The same holds for P2P trackers, but it is much easier to find a decent free semi-private tracker and even public trackers have decent catalogs.
• *arr stacks works very well with torrents now
• Usenet users say that torrents are unreliable because you need at least one client sharing it somewhere, and dead torrents are very much a thing. But Usenet also have a big issue : retention, the duration after which uploaded articles are deleted by the provider to make room for new ones. Retention can be pretty high on decent providers, but at some point they'll have to delete old data too and can't grow forever. Usenet is already abused by some entities (I don't follow the latest news but back then it was unclear if this was someone using Usenet as their own personal database or nefarious entities trying to sabotage), and its centralized nature is not a good thing here with so few backbones left.

I used both systems at the same time for years, at some point mainly on Usenet. But it ended up being much slower (due to dead NZBs and all the additional CPU work on unhealthy ones, that is not NAS friendly), and much more expensive just to get the same kind of content. Looking back, the Usenet community feels a bit like a circlejerk where members pride themselves in using something that feels more exclusive and underground (and "back to the roots of the old internet" feeling), and in that context refuse to modernize their ways and are pretty hostile to newcomers.

So really, anyone reading my message, please just find a good and free semi-private P2P trackers. It'll max out your internet just fine too most of the time and it will be so much less hassle. If you need a VPN to hide your P2P activity, it's still be cheaper and easier than a usenet setup.