• 22 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2024

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  • OK, I’ll bite.

    Even Value has tried to argue that Steam is a subscription service and that you don’t own Steam games but rather licenses to games on Steam.

    If you open a printed, physical book, you’ll likely see something like this printed on the first page: “copyright [author name], all rights reserved”. If the book was printed in the last year, it might also include language explicitly forbidding AI training and other forms of data mining.

    If you look at the back of the packaging of physical movie releases (so for example a DVD or Bluray case) you’ll find find something like “this movie has only been licensed for personal used. Public exhibition is not permitted”

    Because media has always been licenced. The question therefore is less about license vs ownership and instead about what makes a fair license. SKG argues, that the licensing as it currently exists is deeply unfair. Unfair enough that it possibly already violates EU law. That’s what the lawsuit in France is about.

    A group could take SWTOR, add content, and have people donate/pay for it despite the IP holder not wanting their IP used that way.

    Not really. The game has, as you yourself noted, been licensed to you. The granted rights don’t include commercial activity. Publishers could even put the videogame equivalent of the language from the movie cases into their licenses to spell that out.









  • I assume, you are asking how to allow remote (as in outside of your network) access. There are multiple options to achieve this goal:

    1. Local reverse proxy and port forwarding: You essentially poke a hole through your firewall to expose your Jellyfin to the internet. Only works if you got a static IP and your router allows it.
    2. VPN: Sometimes your router has a VPN option built in. Otherwise Tailscale is a simple option. Requires some setup on the playback device. Not recommended if your users are using a lot of non-Android smart TVs
    3. Tunneling to remote reverse proxy: generally the recommended option. Pangolin and netbird are two providers of such services. Your users connect to their servers and then they are automatically redirected to your server. Both services are also open source, so you can selfhost that part of the setup as well, if you want (that’s what I do)




  • Hardware

    A mac mini is probably overkill for what you want to do. We are talking standard blu-ray after all, meaning your videos are going to be limited to 720p. Most hardware will have no problem dealing with that. The cheapest solution that’s fit for purpose is a refurbished thin client. They aren’t powerful or anything, but you don’t need powerful. You need quiet (passively cooled) and low on energy consumption.

    Thin clients can be had on eBay for less than 30 Franks.

    Software

    • Kodi: originally known as the XBox Media Center (XBMC), a TV friendly menu to pick the movie or TV show you want to watch
    • LibreElec: A Linux distro, that preconfigures and auto starts Kodi, not the best choice if you plan to use anything besides Kodi
    • Jellyfin: A media server. If you got multiple TVs you might want to look into this one. It essentially let’s you operate your own Netflix, complete with a web frontend and apps for phones and TVs, integrates with Kodi













  • And if you don’t have an unique public IP address, for example because you are behind CGNAT, you can use Pangolin. It tunnels all traffic from your homelab to a VPS via Wireguard and exposes your services via a Traefik reverse proxy. Pangolin also automates the Traefik setup and provides a webui to configure the individual proxies.

    For a VPS I recommended ionos, because they offer servers with unlimited traffic starting at only 1€ per month with server locations in both Europe and the US.