new-app

Tada, it's Tdarr! 🎉

I was trying to catch up on my 1080P movie backlog on my laptop recently, only to discover that Jellyfin would transcode the movie since the 5.1 audio track apparently won't work on modern Firefox on my modern Macbook (grr, why? )

Rather than just watching on my nVidia Shield (which plays everything I throw at it), I instead spent about 6 hours (I never even got to watch the movie!) adding Tdarr to our platform, with a mind to having a 2-channel audio track added to my existing media.

So, we now have Tdarr available! It works as advertised, although it turns out to be quite tricky to configure, and even trickier to make work with the Quick Sync Video hardware transcoding support in our 9^th-gen Intel nodes.

A few peculiarities to our implementation:

1. While Tdarr can support multiple, distributed worker nodes, we just use one worker node, paired with the Tdarr server, for easy resource isolation, and because our transcoding "scratch" volume is actually a 200Gb ephemeral NVMe-backed disk, which only exists for as long as the pod does.
2. We don't actually want to significantly increase our CPU usage across the platform - rather, we want to leverage Tdarr for spare capacity on hardware-based transcoding. Each Tdarr pod has minimal CPU, and enough RAM to run the server, plus one hardware transcode, but will crash and restart if trying to do more than one transcode in parallel (because mooar transcodes requires mooar RAM)

I've pre-configured a working Tdarr setup, so you won't be starting from scratch when configuring it, and I've added more specifics to the app page.

Get your 24h trial / subscription at the store!

Introducing Joplin Server

Today's new app is a fresh request from one of our fellow elfies.. Joplin is a 100% open-source , markdown-driven note-taking app, similar to Obsidian or Logseq. There are apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux, even a terminal app!

Joplin Server is the open-source version of the sync engine behind https://joplincloud.com, which takes you beyond simple apps, by enabling cross-device sync, sharing, publishing, etc.

Adding Joplin Server to your "Elf Stack" will let you utilize your ElfStorage (pass go, collect 100GB) for storing notes, attachments, etc.

The "publish note" feature is pretty - here's an example of what a published note looks like - it's published by joplin-server (so you can edit it with any client on any device), and it's auto-updated whenever the note is updated.

If you don't trust a seedy seedbox host with your super secret notes (and why should you?), you can enable E2E encryption in the client apps, which (like Seafile) means that all that's stored in ElfStorage is the encrypted blobs, and some metadata in the postgresql database.

Introducing Miniflux

I've been a fan of Miniflux since I publicaly ditched TinyTinyRSS for it, 6 years ago. (read all about it!)

Miniflux is part of a class of apps I'm hoping to add more of - standalone apps which leverage an external database backend (like MySQL or postgreSQL). In this class we already have Seafile and Mattermost, and I hope to add NextCloud in the near future. (and hopefully eventually Radarr and Sonarr!)

Using a "real" database (as opposed to sqlite) makes backup / migration a little tricker, but I've implemented automatic daily backups for the database component (they'll go to /storage/elfstorage/backups/<app>/), alongside whatever backup / export option the app natively provides.

See more on the app page, or perform a 24h trial / subscription at the store!

More news...

Introducing Openbooks

Today we added Openbooks, a tool which allows you to download ebooks from irc.irchighway.net quickly and easily.

Currently, Openbooks is hard-coded to save downloaded content to /storage/elfhosted/downloads/completed/books, and changing this is non-trivial, since it's a commandline argument fed to the application binary, rather than a user-configurable UI setting. If changing the download location is important to you, we may be able to effect this in future using ElfBot.

While Readarr -> Openbooks -> Calibre -> Calibre-Web would be the "holy grail", it doesn't look like we'll see Readarr integration. However, I have noticed some issues on the Openbooks GitHub repo which explain how to setup a Calibre "auto-add" directory, which would create the "slightly-less-holy grail" of Openbooks -> Calibre -> Calibre-Web. For this to work, we need to switch to the VNC-in-browser version of Calibre, which I'll try to do over the next few days.

See more on the app page, or perform a 24h trial / subscription at the store!

More news...

Introducing RDT Client

Today we added RDT Client, a web interface to manage your torrents on Real-Debrid, AllDebrid or Premiumize.

It supports the following features:

• Add new torrents through magnets or files
• Download all files from Real-Debrid, AllDebrid or Premiumize to your local machine automatically
• Unpack all files when finished downloading
• Implements a fake qBittorrent API so you can hook up other applications like Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, etc

The fake qBittorrent API is the killer feature - it means you can hook your Premiumize (etc) subscription to the Arrs, and auto-source and download directly as if you were using qBittorrent locally.

See more on the app page, or perform a 24h trial / subscription at the store!