YouTube is absolute garbage at deciding if something was “watched” or not. Sure, you can watch a playlist, but if you want to watch content in order, or if a YouTuber has a bunch of content and you want to watch all of it, often the only option is to download it and track it yourself.

That, and I’m a big fan of archiving important data. If YouTube removes a channel, or it gets hacked, or the YouTuber deletes their own content, it’s just gone. I might not feel like archiving someone’s game stream or a Minecraft tutorial, but an entertaining video I can see myself watching again? Yep, that gets downloaded.

Finally, I’m a bit of a completionist. Many TV shows have special clips they only show on YouTube, or that eventually make it to YouTube, things that don’t make it to DVDs, that nonetheless are part of the TV show; by downloading those clips, I can add it to the media I already own.

A bunch of little things for me, little steps down the road to hell:

• Google print worked, and then it died, with no replacement. So, I built a print server.
• Google music was awesome, I could upload my whole library and stream it anywhere. It was easily accessible through any Google device. Then it died and became Yahoo music, and… I can’t stream it anywhere. I can barely find it.
• Netflix went from “Share your password!” to “You need a premium account to stream above SD quality lol”. It’s awful trying to find shows these days. The last five movies I wanted to stream, I would have needed five different streaming services. I did the math, and realized it was cheaper for me to physically purchase the DVDs and rip them than to stream them. Jellyfin it is!
• I started with Vivint for smart house stuff, realized it was hella expensive and switched to Wink and Alarm. com, then realized it was still expensive and super limited, so I switched to OpenHAB.

That last one was probably the biggest eye-opener. There are so many paid services that are objectively worse than basic free self-hosted services. Wink was ok, but I can do so much more without it. And none of this was hard. I spent hours setting up Jellyfin, but it took less time than for me to work to pay for 6 streaming services. Sure, it doesn’t have the latest whatever, but so what? At least I know where to find where Stargate: SG1 is streaming!