poop
Very happy to see this, I thought they were going to be pulling away from self-hostable and more flexible solutions a few years back when they stopped developing things like Unifi Video, but they seem to have made many positive movements towards openness, true ownership and self-hostability lately.
probably a federation issue, if I go to my own post in Boost the images load after a second.
They arent all that impressive to look at though, it’s just a grid of buttons.
My main dashboard is on a little 480x480 LCD android wallpanel, so I have a template that uses a grid of buttons which can perform actions themselves or navigate to and from other pages with other functions. every page uses some variation of that template, usually 9 buttons but it can be more or fewer as needed, or nesting grids within larger grids in some cases.
This main panel is in my “theatre” aka the spare bedroom I claimed for a media room, so most of the control is based around triggering actions and flows mostly orchestrated by NodeRed but a few functions are direct to HA for simpler functions. there are other pages that bring up controls for other rooms and my original plan was to put one of these panels in every room but I never really got there… one day.
I use the wallpanel addon to run screensavers, but the LCD panels also have a sensor that turns the screen off until you put your hand near it, then it wakes up to the screensaver with the weather and any warnings until you tap the screen to bring up the main page.
main page:
example source selection grid, still working on making this neater or less ugly, maybe more nested pages based on user or type or simply culling sources never uses in this particular room, though most of the time you walk up to the panel and hit movie mode on the main page, then any other switching is accessible from the remote itself.
I need a lot of selections because just this room has multiple local devices, some on the TV, some on the receiver, then some on the main HDMI matrix for the whole house, then there are a couple of IP feeds and other devices. switching and sequencing all of those steps on each device is done in Nodered, that also sends a ping to the smart remote to set it to the right mode for what is chosen and it all stays in sync if the source is changed from the remote, since it is all orchestrated in nodered… sources like the TV and Sat tuners I am working on a round robin style selection for those so you just tap it and it goes to whichever one is free or warns you if it is being used in another room, but 90% of the time only one of those is being used at any one time so that would work OK. that way I can get them down to one button.
I also have a simple phone dashboard with climate controls, sensors, status etc. that can also bring up these control panels if needed but I mostly use the dashboard on the touch panel.
Yea, JF is getting mature enough for more people to transition.
I’ve been running it side by side with Plex for about 2 years now, and have a couple of clients (and all of my personal use) on JF, but a few users either cant run JF directly on their hardware (and don’t want to cast every time) or they are older and would struggle to learn a new app without some hands on practice with it.
The newest Plex UI update on some devices is causing some problems so I think I’ll have a few more users moving to JF in the near future.
It’s a bit of a ram hog compared to plex but that’s not a major issue.
unraid is great but on a little 4 bay mini nas with limited expandability you don’t get much advantage for the money, it’s better for larger arrays and lots of mixed disk sizes, and on systems where you can put in lots of SSDs to make a decently fast caching setup die to unraid slower non-striped array architecture.
On a 4 bay mini-NAS I’d go with the free truenas option and just make it a RaidZ1 of 4 disks.
For a beginner, OMV might be simpler, and for paid options, HexOS is probably more beginner friendly than raw TrueNas.
A free alternative to Unraid is Snapraid, but thats more of a roll-your-own solution, not an OS you can just install.
jellyfin was a fork of emby anyway, its core framework is solid.
Emby has more of the plex-like polish, but it is more closed source than I would prefer to trust with my media, so I get by with Jellyfin. It works more than well enough fro my in-home media streaming and I still run plex for my remote users as I bought a plex pass way back at the start and I’m going to use it until I simply cant anymore… which seems to be rapidly approaching.
I put of grabbing one of these when my work was clearing them out, giving them away for next to nothing.
Now when I actually need one I cant find one for less than the cost of my best damn server. and nobody seems to make a basic cheap one.
putting prototypes straight into production is the “tech startup” way!
They still push their exclusive features and services in the UI’s pretty hard, but I’m OK with that while they are making moves like this, and letting you have third party cameras mixed into their ecosystem reasonably easily.