Piped consists of a frontend, a backend and a proxy. The frontend is the site you see, the backend stores all the data like video information, user accounts and subscriptions, and the proxy loads the videos you watch from YT. The only thing it doesn’t do is download and store the videos, it’ll always stream them on demand.

LibreY’s “Framework and JS free” approach is an anti-feature as far as I’m concerned. If you really don’t like those for some reason then sure, but I personally prefer getting a nicer UX with a bit of JS.

I’m using Lidarr with an added Deemix script, as well as a separate Deemix instance. For the player I use Plexamp, because it’s the only one I know of that can analyse your music and generate playlists on the fly. Lastly I scrobble to Last.fm and ListenBrainz, and then import their artist recommendations into Lidarr. I’m really happy with this setup so far!

Regarding albums etc., you should probably just get used to downloading more than you actually need. If you want the same music discovery experience as on streaming services then you’ll have to download a ton of music anyway, just so Plexamp has enough content to build playlists from. Thankfully music doesn’t take that much space, so it’s fine to let Lidarr monitor an entire album or even the artist itself if you like a song.

I think you’re probably better off using something that’s build for media servers. One really nice feature is adding more processing nodes to make things go faster, like a gaming PC while not playing anything. I don’t think Handbrake can do that by itself.

I just finished setting up transcoding for my media library, and the options I found were Tdarr, FileFlows and Unmanic. They all use ffmpeg and/or Handbrake under the hood, so it kinda comes down to preference. I went with FileFlows because it seemed the most intuitive to me, and it can also process other media like photos, music, audiobooks and ebooks.

The go-to 4-bay Synology NAS would be the DS920+, as the newer DS923+ doesn’t support hardware transcoding.

Their ebook support has become quite good as well, it’s like a gift that keeps on giving!

Imo this is not enshitification yet, but I’m concerned it could pave the way! It all depends on whether they make using your own content harder to promote this, or if it’s just a side hustle to add another revenue stream.

It would be great, but no chance in hell movie studios would go along with this.

You can avoid the warmup by using an SMTP relay, and you can just use the one from your DNS provider if you’re not planning to send hundreds of mails per day.

I use a Synology NAS + Plex + Chromecast, works great.

DS video is much worse than Plex in my experience, it’s not even close. The only upside is getting hardware transcoding for free, but that’s about it.

I’m very happy with Synology C2. They have special integrations for their NAS devices ofc, but they also offer general purpose backup storage.

My NAS does a backup to Synology C2 every night.

I use a 1€/month domain from strato.de, a very reputable German hoster. They support DynDNS, provide a backup mx for when my home server is offline, and I use their SMTP server as relay for sending reputation. No issues so far.

I self host a personal Piped instance, and it works without issues for me. The videos load just as quickly as on YT itself, and the UI feels faster because it’s not as bloated. Setting it up was fairly easy too, I just had to customize and run the docker compose config they provide.

That only makes sense when you’re talking about adding redundancy imo, because multiple devices also add more sources of failure. Personally I’d rather have everything failing all at once every 20 years (with backups ofc) than something different breaking all the time.

If you enjoy researching, tinkering and customizing everything exactly how you envision it then build a custom one. If you “just” want to use the thing and run some docker containers then buy a NAS. From what you wrote I think a NAS is what you are looking for, especially the low maintenance part. Just make sure it’s not the most basic one, so it actually has the power to run what you need.

The one great thing about Synology NAS is that most things are right there in the UI or package center. You can just install them without researching 100 different alternatives, and configure them in the UI instead of config files. What’s not there can be installed just like on a custom server, because it is just a regular server after all. You also get good customer support if something doesn’t work, especially useful when you’re not as knowledgeable in everything yet.

What compromise are you talking about? My NAS runs everything I need just fine, and I don’t think adding another device would improve anything.

The only limiting factors I can think of are performance or memory constraints, but since I don’t use all the services at the same time there is no issue.

This sounds complicated, but it’s pretty standard practice and probably a matter of minutes to set up if you have self-hosted other services before. What takes more time is the stuff that’s not standard, like ominous configuration options.

I want to be able to pick a song and say “give me a playlist of similar songs I don’t know yet”, and have that play immediately. That’s just not something a self-hosted setup can do. :/