This was me until recently, but then 1337x started blocking some VPNs exit points and FENiX disappeared from it so I moved to a different (but similar) site. Also I’ve been sailing the high-seas for 3 decades instead of 2. All the rest is exactly the same.
Mind you, I used to watch my pirated material from a TV Media Box which basically showed a file browser I used to select files to play (which were shared over SMB from my home NAS), but 2 years ago I finally upgraded to modern media player interfaces and now have a Mini-PC with Kodi.
Well, my mini Mini-PC with Kodi also doubles down as the home NAS so technically I’m not really using SMB for the videos and music anymore, though those files are also shared over SMB if for some reason I want to copy them elsewhere.
That Mini-PC has an N100 CPU which does the decoding in hardware, so it has no issues whatsoever doing it (CPU usage when playing 1080p is less that 10%) hence there really is no point for me in decoding the video files elsewhere and sending over a ton of data raw data over the network - it might even have worse performance.
In fact that Mini-PC is also my bittorrent server with an always active VPN and it’s connected to the fiber router with Gigabit ethernet, which on the other side connects to 1 Gbps fiber to my ISP, so the whole thing is pretty performant (and even with all that CPU usage is still pretty low).
Streaming can make sense if you have multiple TVs or devices and you want to share sessions across (i.e. watch a bit in one and then continue watching in a different one from where you stopped), but for a single device setup, not so much IMHO.
This was me until recently, but then 1337x started blocking some VPNs exit points and FENiX disappeared from it so I moved to a different (but similar) site. Also I’ve been sailing the high-seas for 3 decades instead of 2. All the rest is exactly the same.
Mind you, I used to watch my pirated material from a TV Media Box which basically showed a file browser I used to select files to play (which were shared over SMB from my home NAS), but 2 years ago I finally upgraded to modern media player interfaces and now have a Mini-PC with Kodi.
i also used smb share with a mini pc, but then i learned about jellyfin and that’s been pretty solid
Well, my mini Mini-PC with Kodi also doubles down as the home NAS so technically I’m not really using SMB for the videos and music anymore, though those files are also shared over SMB if for some reason I want to copy them elsewhere.
That Mini-PC has an N100 CPU which does the decoding in hardware, so it has no issues whatsoever doing it (CPU usage when playing 1080p is less that 10%) hence there really is no point for me in decoding the video files elsewhere and sending over a ton of data raw data over the network - it might even have worse performance.
In fact that Mini-PC is also my bittorrent server with an always active VPN and it’s connected to the fiber router with Gigabit ethernet, which on the other side connects to 1 Gbps fiber to my ISP, so the whole thing is pretty performant (and even with all that CPU usage is still pretty low).
Streaming can make sense if you have multiple TVs or devices and you want to share sessions across (i.e. watch a bit in one and then continue watching in a different one from where you stopped), but for a single device setup, not so much IMHO.