Selfhosting fun

[Mercutio]

It took me about 90 seconds to get Copyparty running and about ten minutes to get it running with what I feel is a reasonable config with limited security and correct volume mapping. The main advantage I see to it at this point is that it's much, much faster for access on my Android, ChromeOS and MacOS hosts than using SMB clients on those platforms. It's perfectly happy opening a directory with 25,000 images, which takes even an M4 Mac Mini with a 10Gb NIC a couple minutes (this speaks more to how god-awful Finder is with SMB, I think).

My partner says it's working well for her over Tailscale and Hamachi, so as far as I can tell, this really is a fire and forget setup for improving file access on platforms that don't have convenient access to decent SMB clients.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, most Linux file browsers choke on even SMB or in some cases even NFS shares/directories with lots of files. In NFS's case it seems to be more an issue of these file browsers trying to thumbnail everything. Turn that off and it gets much faster. But NFS is very much a second or even third-class citizen on Windows. My Windows stuff is extremely unhappy accessing my NFS shares directly, it got a lot more performant when I bridged them to SMB.

I might have to toy around with this myself. You mention Tailscale/Hamachi -- so this is another service I'd have to be VPN'd into my LAN to access? I was hoping for something a little closer to OwnCloud. Not that popping my VPN is especially onerous, it's just Another Thing To Launch when I'd prefer it just be available without having to think.

 

[Mercutio]

I've tested it over OpenVPN, Wireguard, Tailscale, Hamachi and Zerotier. They all work fine, though Tailscale seems to be the fastest option, at least for moving the same 15MB .CR3 file back and forth.

I'm hesitant to try access over a Cloudflare tunnel since they do tell free tier users there's a maximum file size on data transfers and that's not something I'd want to mess with, but you can certainly cook something up with some other reverse proxy if you need it accessible from the open internet. Maybe host Pangolin on Oracle Free Cloud?

 

[Mercutio]

Another tip for stupid selfhosting tricks:
TDARR is a tool for intelligently batch re-encoding video data, but it's mostly just a wrapper for ffmpeg. If you have a bunch of old-ass camcorder or DV video for whatever reason, it's fairly trivial to set up a JSON template to use neural upscaling from either nVidia or full-fat Intel Xe cores to take those old 240, 360 or 480p videos and make them 720p or 1080p.

I thought it would take a while for me to set up since I have files from both already re-encoded as low resolution h.264 and mixed together in the same folder structure, but the relevant JSON settings just look like the following for me, using a Blackwell GPU:

DV
-hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda <io> -vf "yadif_cuda=mode=1:parity=1, scale_cuda=1920:1080:format=nv12, super_res=mode=1" -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset p7 -tune hq -cq 22

Analog Source
-hwaccel cuda -hwaccel_output_format cuda <io> -vf "yadif_cuda=mode=1:parity=0, nlmeans_cuda=1.0, scale_cuda=1920:1080:format=nv12, super_res=mode=1" -c:v hevc_nvenc -preset p7 -tune hq -cq 20

The main distinguishing characteristic is that the analog video will be progressive scan.

If you're doing this now, instead of 20 years ago, something that'll really help with this process is one of these HDMI scalers (they go in and out of availability on Amazon, but that's where I got mine) that can directly upscale to 1080p from a composite or Svideo source. Ideally, you'd want an SVHS VCR if you have a tape format that can be played that way; the last units that could do that were made in about 2010 if you don't already have one.

This is actually kind of a big deal since videotapes do demagnetize over time, and most people who have them probably aren't taking the best care of what they have.