Americans who host media servers for friends & family and are forced to use a cable-based ISP, what is your upload/download setup? Also, what is your rationale for your speeds?
Xfinity is not cheap, upload speeds are garbage and although I want my users to have a great experience, I don’t want to spend tons of money to host this?
Do you make your users pay for access? That seems pretty shitty imo but I’m hosting encodes (no remuxes) but between my various non-local family members and a couple buddies from college, I’m maxing out my upload speeds and need to figure out what to do.
If you’re only at 10mbps upload you’ll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn’t bother. If you’re not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you’ll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.
You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I’d still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you’ve got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I’m not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you’ll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I’d probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won’t be able to transcode video, so you’ll have to be a little careful about what everyone’s playback devices support.
Edit: Also, if you’re not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it’s hard to sleuth out who’s doing a good job and who’s just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don’t even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.
Just saw your edit. Yeah, all of those are familiar to me. Most are on the “banned groups” list lol. I actually have spent the better part of this year, building my own encode library with AV1. It has been more of a fun, educational thing than anything else, but after about 4-6 months, I’ve finally got my settings where I am happy with the size/bitrate/qualitiy tradeoff.
I only download full quality remuxes and then go from there. The encodes are what are shared to F&F while I watch the remux version locally because, why not? I usually delete the remux version once I’m happy with the encode quality.
But some movies, like Traffic, just don’t lend themselves to an AV1 encode yet. So while it works for most movies, it doesn’t work for all of them. Nevertheless, it’s been a fun project.
Doing your own encodes is also really cool. I’m not too sure what the AV1 compatibility of your friends’ players would be, but yes AV1 encodes are a very efficient way to microsize. If you happen to be on PTP, there’s a giant AV1 research thread with people testing stuff out. It looks like they prefer SVT-AV1-PSYEX as of the latest posts, though I don’t know enough to understand which encoding settings are the most impactful.
I would love to be in PTP. Hopefully one day. Just in the mids now like ATH and BLU.
The PSYEX fork of AV1 is what I’m using too. It’s a big improvement over the stock AOM fork.