brawndo

Just because you pay a subscription to avoid ads does not mean your data is not still being harvested and sold. The big exception is now they have a payment method tied to a specific person not just an ad profile.

This is the way all corporations work.

1. Gain market dominance.
2. Cut costs.
3. Use lawyers to stifle competition.

Step 1 requires creating a product or service that is better than other options. Step 2 Enshittify the product or service. Bonus points for increasing the price at the same time. Step 3 Either sue or aquire competition to maintain market dominance.

Repeat steps 2 and 3 until the wheels fall off.

Intel did this until the wheels fell off. Then AMD took the top spot. Now AMD will do it until it all falls apart. Then Intel or perhaps a newcomer will regain top spot.

I started with a Raspberry Pi connected to an external hard drive. As my collection grew I built a server. It has NAS rated drives in RAID with a low end CPU and modest GPU. Now I have a large collection and everything is transcoded on the fly.

I also use the server to host Immich. So I no longer need to use Google photos or drive.

I wrote a bash script to check for updates to channels I like. It runs nighly via cron. If there is a new video it automatically downloads it using yt-dlp to my Jellyfin library. There is a yt-dlp flag that incorporates sponsor block. Since I download videos overnight large channels have already been included by sponsor block. So I get videos completely ad and sponsor free.

Everything is done behind a VPN. This approach allows me to completely bypass using a browser further protecting me from tracking.

When I wake up in the morning I have all the new videos from my favorite channels ad and sponsor free. I can watch from my computer, phone, or TV. If I’m away from my home network I use Tailscale to stream to my location.

The only downside I experience is not getting to watch the video until the day after upload.

Does anyone know a VPN that allows port forwarding that also is truly anonymous? I’m looking for something like Mullvad that does not require email and accepts monero.

I’m also open to recommendations for a seedbox that accepts monero.