I Spent a Year Replacing My Subscriptions. Here’s How.

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Wanted to build a homelab/home server but didn’t know where to start? So

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00:00 HBO Max is raising prices for all of its plans. >> Disney is increasing subscription prices for Disney Plus. >> Users will have to pay 50 for a year of updates. Still, it’s really popular and there’s lots of support around it. Now, I found one that I really liked for new hardware. Zemo OS. This one has the most normall looking interface that I found that I think would be the best start for most people. It has a really pretty, super easy to understand interface that doesn’t feel like it’s overwhelming you with information. It has support for all the big file formats, backup support, Dropbox, Google Drive sync, etc. And it even has an app like the big guys do. Android only though. And an awesome app store that I honestly I’d struggle to find missing apps for. Like this store really has pretty much everything you’ll ever need. Now Zema OS is free. However, 15:27 it only supports up to four hard drives on the free version. I don’t think most people will ever be hitting that limit. So for 90% of people, you’re good to go. But the full version with unlimited drives is 90 for a terabyte SSD again? Like it really feels like the endgame here is to make ownership of your hardware unreachable. Little 18:10 tangent by the way, but man, it’s been a really bad decade for PC parts. I feel like we just can’t win if it’s been bad for almost every single year this decade. At some point, this just becomes like the new normal now, right? Anyways, if you’re just now starting out, don’t focus on getting the perfect setup and filling up all the drives, all at once, all you don’t have to do that. My suggestion, get two 4 TBTE drives for now and then upgrade if you can down the line later. The type of hard drive also matters a lot, too. There’s usually server grade ready hard drives that are designed to be running 24/7 in a NAS or a home server. For example, Western Digital has WD reds, which signify, yeah, they’re built for extended use compared to their regular WD blue drives. Full disclosure, they were kind enough to send me these for the video because I would have had to sell my car to be able to get this amount of storage now, but they do make smaller sizes, too. Don’t don’t worry, you do not have to go overkill like this. I’ll link some in the description. Now, we should probably talk about hard drive pools for servers. Hard drives aren’t read in the 19:04 same way that your laptop or your PC would use them. It would be very slow and inefficient to store files that way. So servers use something called RAID where instead of it being like, you know, five, six, seven smaller RAID drives, they’re combined into one super big single drive that you can host your files on. And your operating system will be smart enough to know how to distribute that data for optimal speed. You usually don’t have to do anything special to do this. The setup process of the OS usually asks you what kind of setup that you want. Now, this setup is called RAID zero. However, because they’re all linked together now, if one of those drives dies, all of your data is gone. If you’re just hosting movies or TV shows or something like that, yeah, that’s fine. Who cares? You can just always redownload those. But if you’re hosting personal stuff like photos or irreplaceable documents, that’s not good. So, there’s another version called RAID 5, which is what I use. This setup still makes one really big drive out of all your drives, but if one of your drives dies for any reason, your data is still completely intact and 20:02 safe. Now, if two drives died, then yeah, you’re you’re screwed. But this setup should at least give you some time to go replace that dead drive. The catch? Well, this setup requires you to sacrifice one drive in your pool. So, if you have four 10 TB drives, you don’t get a full 40 tab to use. You get 27 TB of usable storage. Now, you basically lose an entire drives for the storage. But it’s worth it if it means that your server has some line of redundancy. There are more versions of RAID, but really those two are the only important ones to know, honestly. So, if you want my advice, do rate five. And I’ll link this calculator in the description so you can test configurations for yourself. Once you created your pool, you can usually just start drag and dropping files into it. Cool. But you can now also access this from any device on your network, too. So, for example, on Mac OS, I can just click on connect to server in the Finder, type in my server’s IP, sign in, and that’s it. Look, now it’s just being detected as some big ass external drive that you can just use it for anything. If you have a decent Ethernet connection to your 21:01 server, you can even use this as an editing drive for photos and videos. It’s really, really nice. And this isn’t just on computers either. You can even connect to it on your phone. It’s really nice. Now, this will only work as long as you’re connected to the same network as your server, but I’ll show you how we can access it remotely from anywhere later. Don’t worry. So, now we got that figured out. Let’s talk about apps for your server. Yeah. Now, this is the fun part. Now, almost all the big operating systems will have app stores, so you never have to even configure anything yourself. You can just click install and you’re done. It’s all set up for you. But the amount of apps that a store might have varies depending on what operating system you’re using. And some operating systems have like four apps total on their app store. So, I want to show how to get familiar with how to install any app that you want onto your server. So, almost every app that you’ll install is run through something called Docker. And most apps are run through Docker containers, which are just super little lightweight isolated containers for your apps that have all the right 21:57 settings, components, drivers, whatever it may need, all set up for you that is isolated from the rest of your app, so it can’t destroy each other. Now, each OS has their own Docker manager, but honestly, some of them are great and some just suck. And the variances make it really difficult to follow along if you’re just starting. So, my advice, go to your app store and see if they have Portainer. This is a Docker management app that makes it way easier to see all of your Docker apps, install new ones, and make changes to your existing one. Also, it just makes it much easier to look up installation tutorials. So, now you can just go look up how to install blank app portainer and it’s way easier now. So, now that we got that out of the way, what can we install? I want to go over a few sections I feel are essential for a lot of people, but this isn’t everything. Unfortunately, I’m going to miss some things. This video is already really long, so just keep that in mind. There’s no way I could have gotten to everything. Photos are really important to me. I noticed somewhere around my teenage years that man, like no matter how big a 22:59 memory might be for me, I somehow always slowly end up forgetting it. Memories fade, but photos photos don’t forget. So, I photograph everything. I take my camera almost everywhere, even where places where it doesn’t really make much sense to bring one. But those always end up capturing some of my most favorite memories. So, keeping those photos secure and safe is really important to me. I’ve been using Google Photos for the last, man, I want to say like 10 years now. God, I’m getting old. And I switched over for the same reason probably a lot of you guys did. Unlimited storage forever. Yeah, big fat ugly stinky asterisk on the forever part by the way. By the way, look at how big these kids were on these phones. Oh my god. And those were the good examples that they had. Well, it turns out forever actually meant six years as they no longer offer free unlimited storage since 2021. And if you want to keep uploading photos, you got to buy more storage, which sucks because I’m sure a lot of people signed up under the expectation that their stuff would just be safe there forever, right? I mean, let’s call it what it was. It it was a 24:01 bait and switch. Their plan was to get people hooked on the unlimited storage, make them move their entire life over there, and then jack up the price when they’re ready. And you’re going to see that pattern a lot in this video. So, let me introduce you to Image. This is one of my favorite apps that I found to replace Google and iCloud photos. It has pretty much everything you’d want from a photo management software. It can sort by dates, detect duplicate photos, crop images, and can even detect faces all locally offline, which is amazing. Also love sharing pictures with friends after a trip. So, that was super important for me. Thankfully, Image also makes sharing albums really, really easy. Just make a link and just text it over to your friends. And you can make users, too, so everyone in your family can have their own separate image account login and no one’s photos are all mixed up together. It even has a wonderful map that takes all the location data from your pictures and shows you where all of your photos were taken. A feature that somehow Google Photos still doesn’t have on their own desktop site. They also have a phone app, too, so you can just use it 25:01 like photos or it’ll automatically back up your camera roll and your stuff is safely backed up to your home server, not Google servers. It also has support for highlights, which I I just love that. And iOS widgets, which this is this is actually really important to me. I I love seeing where I was 5 years ago, exactly to this day. Like, that’s really cool. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Is is that the new studio space? Did did Jeff move or something? And the answer is yes, I did. I did a whole video explaining all of that on my new second channel. Ah, new second channel. Link in the description. But also, you’re probably thinking, “Image sounds great.” If you’re starting a brand new library, but I already have all my stuff backed up on iCloud or Google Photos, and it sounds like such a pain figuring out how to download and transfer all of that over to image. Oh my god, it’s going to take like 4 days to organize everything and make sure the dates are right, and I have like 80 gigs of photos of just my stupid dog. All right, relax. They thought of that, too. So, for iPhone people, Apple actually gives you a way to download all of the photos from your 25:57 iCloud account amongst other things and send them over in 10 or 20 or 25 GB sections. It’s kind of hidden, but I’ll link it in the description so you can find it. Now, this might take anywhere from a few hours to 4 days depending on how many photos you have, but eventually they’ll send over download links to all of your stuff with XIF data and live photos information attached to. This is really important because image does have the ability to detect live photos properly, which is really, really nice. Same thing for Google Photos. They have a page where you can request all of your stuff in one go. My only suggestion is when your files are ready, just download Firefox on your server real quick and download them through there. So that way you can just download it directly to your server. You don’t have to spend an extra day downloading everything to your computer, then transferring it over to your server. Now that you got your photos, you can use an app called Image Go that knows how to read iCloud and Google Photos directories and sync them over seamlessly to image. Literally everything is done for you. I have almost 15 years of my life stored on my 26:54 Google Photos. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Photos are a really big part of my life. And being able to know that all of these are stored safely back at home is a big deal to me without having to be stored in some random server being scanned for who knows what. So, there’s a lot of video game related self-hosted stuff that’s really helpful in removing dependence from outside services. A big one for sure is ROM managers. I I love these things. ROM is the most popular one that I’ve seen. If you’re one of the people that has like thousands of ROMs for emulators just sitting in a ROMs folder on your desktop or something, ROM is a much more elegant solution to that. Man, these app names are terrible to search up. Google literally thinks you’re just misspelling the word ROM the whole time. It’s a database for your ROMs. So, we can scan your folders and display all your ROMs with it matching cover art, title, release date, etc., and automatically sort everything by console, genre, and it’ll even autogenerate collections from your library, too. Just search up the game or consoles that you’re looking for, find your game, and just click download, and 27:55 it’ll just grab it from your self-hosted collection of ROMs. Why doesn’t everyone have their collection of 35,000 Switch ROMs backed up somewhere? I’m not crazy. And again, because this is accessed through a web browser, that means you can access this on your phones or your handhelds and download stuff without having to get a USB cable and a computer anymore. It’s like your own virtual VINs layer. Oh, and you can even upload BIOS files, too. So, you don’t have to check your downloads folder anymore to see where the hell did you leave that file. And you can even store save files, too. There is so much more configuration here and ways to manage this app. I’d be here all day showing everything off, but this is the craziest feature, honestly. Built-in emulator support. Yeah, ROM has a built-in web emulator that can let you play your ROMs right in your web browser from anywhere. It supports consoles all the way up to PSP, which is crazy to me. So, in theory, you could hook up a controller to your laptop or your phone, boot into ROM’s game mode, and just pick the games that you want and start playing. Currently, it supports all the way up to PSP, which I mean, I mean, 28:53 it’s still bonkers to me. I know it’s not a hard device to emulate anymore, but dude, this is being streamed and played on my NAS of all things across the internet. And since this is running on your server, that means you can invite your friends so they can also download and play from your collection legally, of course. And I’ll show you how to connect your apps to the outside world later on in the video. Don’t worry. This is a crazy customizable app that lets you do so much with your totally legit, completely legal ROM collection. However, the devs have acknowledged this to me. The file structure to get this running is very finicky and the database itself is kind of difficult to set up. So, I do want to mention an alternative. Retrom. It does almost everything ROM does. So, it lets you categorize your games, lets you download them, console mode, built-in emulators, etc. But I just personally really like the user interface a lot more compared to ROM, and it’s a bit easier to set up the folder directories for your games. Totally subjective though, I know, but I did figure I should mention it. Not many people know 29:48 about this one, which sucks because I think it’s really, really great. If you want to keep it alive, go give it a try. I’ll link in the description. Another amazing app that I would suggest is Application Management Panel or AMP. again. What What is it with these names, dude? I This app lets you make one-click game servers for any game that you can think of. Minecraft, Counter Strike, Power World, GMOD, even TeamSpeak servers if you want. So, if you want to start another twoe Minecraft phase again with your buddies, instead of paying another eight bucks a month for a Minecraft Realm server, you can just create a new instance, pick Minecraft, and that’s it. You’re up and running, and your Minecraft server is live. But this is only a local IP, though. It’s only accessible in your network. So, how do we get this out into the public internet? All right. I remember back in the day, we would have to learn how to port forward from some YouTube tutorial from a 12-year-old with a Bandicam watermark on the screen. And those who didn’t want to deal with that used to log me in Hamachi. Yeah, there’s like 30 people right now watching that just sat 30:44 up hearing that name again. Yeah, I know what you were doing. I know what you were. Thankfully, we don’t have to do any of that anymore because now we can just use a service like play.gg to expose your servers to the internet. Oh, and don’t worry. They have a paid plan, but like you don’t need to pay for what we’re using it for. That way, we can take any of our server IPs, route it through their service, and then publish it out into the internet safely, so you’re not just exposing your IP willy-nilly. Then they give you a link that you can give to your friends. And look, now anyone can use this link to join your server, and you don’t have to go into your router settings anymore. You got me feeling like Sky does Minecraft over here. Whatever happened to that guy anyways? Oh my god. Jesus Christ. Now, I should mention that this app is great, but it’s not free, but it’s not crazy expensive either. A pro license is 20 bucks, and that’s for a lifetime license, which is awesome. 20 bucks for 15 of your servers for any game that you could possibly want compared to 2 and 1/2 months of a Minecraft Realm subscription. Come on, 31:41 that’s that’s totally worth it. Plus, you get to be the cool friend that can set up servers for game nights. So, that way, no one’s got to pay for a server anymore. Figure out poor forwarding. You got to stock up on RAM, though. Game servers tend to really like RAM. If you want to host multiple servers at the same time, you’re gonna want to get as much RAM as possible. I’m going to link some cheap sticks in the description so that you can Huh. Oh, and before I forget, quick shout out to this app that I’ve been actually personally helping contribute to, Fire Share. Think of it like Google Photos, but for your game clips, so you can upload your game clips to it, and it’ll automatically detect the game, date, etc., so you can keep them organized and generate a link to send to your friends so they can watch it, too. You can even open up your server for any of your friends to upload and have it be a really great big group database for all of your friends to share their clips together in one spot. So, anyone can access it whenever. It also has really great transcoding options. So, as soon as you start uploading, it can start 32:35 making 1080p, 720p, or 480p versions of your clips so they can load faster for your friends with slower internet connections. I personally have mine set up with sync thing so every time I clip something with shadow play when I’m playing games, it automatically gets sent over to my fire share folder and it can get scanned right away and start detecting the game date thumbnail and transcoding the video in 1080p and 720p versions. I’ve kept a lot of old game clips over the years dating all the way back to like 2014 and having a decent interface to be able to document them and keep them organized is so nice. Now, I want to be clear, this is not my project. The devs working on this have done a phenomenal job making a usable database to organize everything. But I noticed that their interface was kind of lacking to put it nicely. But before YouTube, my background was actually in graphic design and UX design. So I know that there’s places where my experience can help. And that’s how I’ve been contributing. Seriously, I’m really proud of how much this app has grown in just the last few months. And I could like personally say that I contributed 33:35 to that. I’m so proud of that. Please go download it, check it out. I would really really love some feedback from more people to make sure that we’re on the right track. Okay, so what about movies and TV shows? I was going to explain why you should switch over to self-hosting your own media, but honestly, I don’t think I have to. Probably because odds are you probably already experienced it. Streaming subscriptions are constantly going up that it’s become a yearly thing now at this point. And it’s not just one platform either. All of them are doing this. Dude, I remember a Disney Plus launch in 2019 for $7 am o n t h w i t h 4 K an d a ll o f t ha t . A n d ye ah, II b o ug h t in t o i t . I tw a s a p re tt ye a sy w a y t os h u t u pt h e l i ttl es ib l in g s . Y o u kn o w, w h y n o t ? N o w D i s n ey Pl u s i s 12 b u c k s f or t h e a d s u pp or t e d v ers i o nan d$ 19 for the adree version. So now you pay more than double compared to when it first launched and you still see ads. No joke. In just the last couple months of 2026, four streaming services increase their prices every single year. That is unacceptable. Then there’s the other stuff like having to chase down a 34:37 specific streaming service because it’s on Hulu now or now it’s on Netflix or Paramount or whatever. Honestly, nothing proves my point more than this official chart from Pokemon that shows you where to watch the entire Pokemon series from start to finish. Seriously, pause this for a sec and just read how ridiculous this looks. Feel like you got to have like a PhD in this stuff. And of course, services just outright removing your movies and TV shows off of their services after a few months and sometimes even a few weeks. The Twilight series is my favorite example of this. They have some of the shortest licensing deals in the market. And you know the crazy part, right around fall autumny time, the Twilight Saga movies will actually get pulled entirely from streaming services or move exclusively to one specific streaming service. You know why? because they know once fall hits, people are going to be more likely to buy it or rent it for full price. Like, that’s creepy knowing that not only are publishers aware of what fans like to do, but they also use that to extract more money out of them. That’s h that’s so gross. So, let’s say enough of 35:37 that and keep our own library at home. I’m going to show you two options. One of them is paid and one of them is open- source. This is Plex and it’s by far my favorite app out of the whole self-hosted ecosystem. This app is your new interface for all of your legally downloaded movies and TV shows. It scans your folders and can automatically pick up all the metadata for your movies and TV shows, episodes, cover art, actors, even the old special feature bonuses. And they have clients for pretty much anything that you want. Roku, LG, Apple TV, iOS, Android. So, you can access your stuff from anywhere really easily. And I honestly just really love the look of the interface, too. And because you have a bunch of storage now, that means you can store really high quality rips of your movies and TV shows. And it does make a difference. 4K Netflix and 4K local is not the same thing. Now, they do have a paid membership that does offer some really cool features like skipping intros, remote watching, so you don’t have to set anything up to be able to access your Plex library outside of your network, real-time hardware transcoding, so you can stream 1080p or 36:39 720p versions of your content, and downloading from anywhere. No setup required. They also have an awesome music client called Plex Amp that’s meant to be your self-hosted Apple Music or Spotify, and I love it. I wanted to do more coverage on music, but I think that deserves its own video topic, so keep an eye out for that. Now, this price is a bit steep, but it is a lifetime membership and you never have to pay for it again. Now, I want to be upfront. I see a lot of people having complaints about Plex, not only because of the price, but also because it seems like they’re heading in the direction of being more of a live internet TV kind of company as opposed to a proper self-hosted type of company. If that bothers you, I totally understand. But you can always disable all that stuff and just keep the media section visible. That’s what I do. But if you don’t want to pay for something like this, there’s a really great alternative called Jellyfin. It’s basically Plex, but open source and completely free. It can do transcoding right out of the box. You can create profiles for your family and it has plug-in support so you can change 37:39 the look or the functionality of your Jellyfin server. It’s a wonderful app. Don’t don’t get me wrong. And if you’re looking for something that’s open source and free, it’s a no-brainer. Go use Jellyfin right now. There’s just two things that kind of bother me that keeps me from being able to use it. Number one, it doesn’t have remote streaming built in. So that means if you want to access your jellyfin from outside of your house, you got to expose your ports and do port forwarding on your router or run it through a reverse proxy, which we’ll talk about later. But point is, it’s not plug-and-play. And the second thing is that client support isn’t great. Like there’s a Jellyfin app on all the big platforms, but they’re not really good. The iOS one is literally just the web app version of Jellyfin. Now, there’s a bunch of thirdparty clients that have been trying to fill in that gap like Infuse, which are kind of good, but man, it’s just it’s not going to be a native experience at all. Still, if you’re looking for a free and open source option, nothing is going to be Jellyfin. And the most important part with both of these apps, it’s all local. 38:35 It is all housed at your house. It cannot be taken away from you. Now, this is all great, but if everything I’m downloading is local, how do I find recommendations and stuff for movies and TV shows? I don’t want to be cut off from the rest of the world, you know, like I’d still want to know what’s going on outside. Well, that’s where an app like Seir comes into play. It’s a wonderful app that helps you discover and find all the stuff that’s playing right now across all the different streaming services. You can sort by movies, TV shows, trending, studio, even sort by streaming services so you know what’s popping over on Disney Plus or Hulu or even Cinema. Oh my god, it’s all important. And when you want to request something, you just hit request and it’ll sync up with your download clients and automatically grab it for you. It’s really, really nice. Download clients. Is that how we’re getting our movies? Well, maybe we should talk about that. And now for the stuff that no one tends to talk about in their videos. Where to acquire this content? And it’s because while yes, you absolutely should be legally ripping your physically owned 39:30 copies of your movies and TV shows, a lot of the conversation here tends to stir around piracy. And I do not advocate nor condone piracy. I am always an advocate of being able to purchase things legally in the right way whenever you can. So unfortunately I can’t tell you anything about the piracy side of the situation. I’m I’m I’m sorry. I can’t tell you anything about how to get started, where to go, what apps to. None of that. Unfortunately, in fact, I would like to tell you about I had three different apps in order to download content. An app that scrapes for downloads, an app that actually downloads the files, and an app that can play the files like Plex, for example. I would love to tell you more about download clients like SAP NZBD and Cuba Torren that are completely legal, completely free to use download clients and are both available as docker container apps for your home lab servers. And I also don’t know anything about completely legal file hosting servers such as real brid and usenet providers and how to find those provider to be able to power those apps. So I can’t be helpful with that either. Oh, 40:23 and here’s a list of apps I’m also not allowed to talk about. Again, super duper sorry. I would love to talk about these things, but I just I I just can’t. I’m I’m I’m sure you’re just as upset as I am. Okay, so all of these apps are great, but this is only cool if I’m at home connected to my network. What if I want to access this stuff from, you know, where it’s actually going to be useful? I’m not going to be telling my friends to go, you know, yeah, bro, come through to my server. Go do whatever you want. Check out my services. So, if you want to access your self-hosted stuff on the outside internet, you have some options. I’m going to show you two that I’ve been using. The first one is going to be tail scale. I heard so many people mention this when I started self-hosting, but never really explained to me what it was or what the problem is that it’s supposed to fix. So, I I got to be the one to do it. So, you know how your server only works if your device is connected to your home network? Well, what if your server and your device were on a pretend network? That made it look like they were still within the same 41:14 network even if you’re not home. And it could be from any device as long as you’re on the same pretend network. Yeah, that’s what tail scale does. It basically creates an extra network between your devices and your server so they can be phone home from anywhere and still be in the same network. It’s really easy to set up. You just install Tailscale on your server, sign in, and that’s it. You’re done on your server. Then on whatever device you have, you just install Tailscale. They have clients for basically anything that you want. And that’s it. You’re done. Now your phone or laptop looks like it’s on the same network as your server, even if you’re at a friend’s house or a coffee shop or something. So now instead of going to your typical server IP, you can just copy paste the Tailscale IP address of your server. And look, you’re accessing your server from anywhere. Add a port and now you can also access your apps, too. It’s literally so easy to set this up and it’s free. I use it all the time to access my stuff back at home. But here’s the thing. This only works if your device has Tail Scale installed on it. What if you want anyone to be able 42:09 to access it without having to install an app like Tailscale? Well, it sounds like you want a reverse proxy. Don’t worry, it it sounds scary, but it’s it’s really not. A reverse proxy is just something in between your personal IP address and the access to the outside internet world. So, when someone on the internet wants to access something from your apps or your server, they only talk to the middleman, not directly your server, which could expose your IP address and ports and stuff like that. Now, there’s a lot of different options for a reverse proxy. Some people even set up their own, but for me, Cloudflare has been super simple to set up for a reverse proxy, and it’s free. Only thing is though, don’t use it for streaming Jellyfin. It’s against their terms of service. You’re going to need a domain to set this up though. So, you know, damn it Jeff.com or.io or something. You know what I mean? You can buy a domain from a lot of different places. Personally, I was taught in college to always use pork bun because they’re really, really cheap. Even cheaper if you’re okay with not having a com URL. Look at that. Three bucks for your first 43:03 year. That’s Yeah, that’s less than a chicken at this point. These are the only two things you need at this point. A domain you bought and Cloudflare. I’m going to link a really great tutorial on how to get this set up in the description because I can’t cover it all here. I promise it’s really really easy and once you’re configured, you can point any of your self-hosted network apps and give the links to your friends or strangers. I don’t know. It’s it’s your business. I don’t I don’t ask questions. For example, I have the URL photos.chrome.com to point towards my image. So now I can send links to my friends without them having to install Tailscale or something. And this is great because now I can take this domain, plug it into my image app, and I can upload photos to my server from anywhere, completely safe. So, if you’re wondering how the heck do people access this stuff outside, it’s usually one of those, a tail scale or reverse proxy. There is so much more I wanted to cover here, like security and home surveillance systems, home assistant management, and a lot more. But this video is already like half an 43:56 hour long, and I couldn’t get to everything in time. So, maybe I’ll make that its own dedicated upload. I’m I’m not too happy with the state of cameras right now either, especially with the shenanigans that Ring has been pulling. Self-hosting as much as you can is one of the best decisions you can make to remove your independence from external services. Recently, it really feels like they’re trying to pull away as much ownership over hardware and software as possible. Like they’re getting really aggressive about it. And that I will lie, that kind of worries me. So, I want to make sure that you guys are prepared and armed with the proper knowledge to take back control from these companies. I think people forget having knowledge like this is an incredibly valuable skill, especially in weird times like this. It means that you’re not super rellying on someone else deciding if your stuff is going to turn on a model or not. It’s also kind of why I think it’s stupid when I hear people say stuff like, “Oh, Jeff, just stay out of politics and keep making jailbreak videos or stick to the modding videos.” Bro, it’s like, have you not been paying 44:52 attention? Technology and its effects are deeply intertwined with politics and it’s stupid to think otherwise. showing you how to modify and reuse your devices so we can use them on your terms and not a company’s terms is a political stance. Yeah, we should be able to physically back up our own legal copies of our games without Nintendo meddling is a political stance. I should be able to own the books that I purchase without Amazon changing the terms of sale after the fact is a political stance. Spotify shouldn’t be allowed to remotely brick my device and have to mod it again in order to get it to be functional is a political stance. If that’s not clear to you, dude, I I don’t know what you’re doing here, honestly. And while no, it’s not entirely possible to remove all services entirely from your life, I want you to know that there is a choice. And taking back ownership in places where you can by self-hosting is a great way to remove the reliance you have on outside services. You don’t have to replace your entire lifestyle at once. You just have to start. I really hope you enjoyed this video. I know this is a really daunting hobby to get into, so I 45:51 wanted to make sure that I covered as much as I could for normal people to get started. If you took anything from this video and learned something that you were confused about in the past, please consider supporting the channel on Patreon. You’ll get early access to videos long before they’re posted, and it really helps support the channel financially. And all the money of that Patreon actually goes towards paying um some more recent expenses. And if you want to know more about why I finally moved to a proper studio, I made a whole video about it over here on the second channel. Go check it out. It’s really, really cool. You get to see everything still kind of being set up still. Click over here to check it out. And thank you for watching.

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