Download Movies from streaming services

[MuttMutt]

On 4/17/2022 at 11:09 PM, YOLO said:

@MuttMutt  Thanks again for all of the raspberry pi information.  Once I started to research this hardware option to play movies, I wondered if there might not be a cheaper solution.  As it turns out, there are some small and cheap media players where uSD or USB files can be played.  I wonder if you ever tried something like this?  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WPY8VKL

Since I am only taking the Chromebook on the cruise to play movies, as smaller solution like this would be awesome if it worked.

FYI, Your media server is a beast!  Sounds like fun stuff.  For me I have 4 Synology NAS boxes.  1 main, 2 backup, 1 portable.  Since I do not do any transcoding - I play the files in full resolution.  My NAS media server can do that just fine.  I use Plex on my NVIDIA Shield to play my movies - all of which are hardwired together.  It works.

Nope never tried something like that.  It's a bit odd as well because they are not supporting H264 but are H265 and a bunch of lesser stuff.  So if you have media already available you will likely have to transcode it for it to be right.  It's not a major issue unless you want to take a lot of stuff.  I bought my Pi 4 over a year ago and it's mainly just to tinker with when I am in the mood I do a ton more with ESP8266's and ESP32's but that is a completely different subject, LOL.  And there are many ways to deal with it, I do my best to not have any need for internet access as I also plug my Pi into hotel tv's or wherever else I happen to be so constantly trying to connect to wifi is a PAIN to deal with every time.  But as I probably said pretty much anything with a HDMI output should work but there will be varying levels of success with the media on some stuff.  I know the Pi4 supports what all my content is already which is H264 MP4's with AAC5.1 audio.

I know a ton of people use the synology boxes and all that stuff but I have no faith in them.  They like to use a filesystem called btrfs but it is still heavily in beta for functions that include more than Raid 0 or Raid 1 or even worse they use hardware raid which for a home user really has no benefit, hardware raid locks a drive to only that controller and can even potentially fail with revision changes so if a controller goes out you may be SOL.  My server uses ZFS and particularly RaidZ3 so I can have any 3 drives in a vDev fail and all my data is fine.  I have actually had a drive start throwing errors and I pulled it out and shipped it back to be replaced and kept my system running.  It's a little overkill but my pool will end up with 3 vDev's and if you lose a single vDev you lose the pool so having multiple drives that can fail when you run a total of 33 drives in a system you are much better off.  Then again I also have L2ARC (ARC is Ahead Read Cache and is in ram as well) on an SSD and I have considered setting up a few other things but just having the multiple vDev's will be a huge boost when I get more drives.  I already am able to read from the pool at around 300 MBps with a file that is not in ARC and when it is I can read at around 600 MBps, notice the big B, that is Megabytes not Megabits like internet download speeds.  I can literally transfer a 2GB file in a few seconds to my desktop.  With 3 vDev's I should be able to push the uncached reads to around 900MBps at which point I will be striping a couple SSD's for L2ARC.  I built my system after having multiple drives fail in an XP box and wanted stability over everything, the read speeds and other stuff I can do are just icing on the cake.