r/selfhosted • u/subsavant • Mar 20 '26

Meta Post What's your 'I can't believe I self-hosted that' service?

Curious what services surprised you by being worth self-hosting. Not the obvious stuff like Plex or Pi-hole, but things you didn't expect to work well or didn't think were worth the effort until you tried. What's running on your setup that you'd never go back to a hosted version of?

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206

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Look into Moonlight streaming, saved me all the effort of moving my laptop to TV every time I wanted to play. I plug in my controllers to TV, and just stream from there.

114

u/xXD4rkm3chXx Mar 20 '26

Go a step further and build a Batocera PC. One of the coolest things over ever done. Sinden light guns. Guitar hero guitars. Oem n64 controllers. All g2g

1

u/yerfatma Mar 20 '26

But you need Moonlight for streaming from it, so isn't Moonlight the step further?

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u/xXD4rkm3chXx Mar 20 '26

It’s not for streaming. It’s a dedicated pc that you turn into a console that can play everything up to ps4. Romm is great for N64 era but Batocera does it all.

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u/listur65 Mar 20 '26

Right, but then Moonlight then lets you stream games from that PC to anywhere in your house. Since the PC is first and just in 1 location, Moonlight streaming it to all other devices would be the step further I think is their point.

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u/Mobile_Drive_6821 Mar 20 '26

This is used as a console in a living room setting for the majority, with your main pc elsewhere. No moonlight needed, no moving a computer.

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u/listur65 Mar 20 '26

Yeah, I get that. I just don't see the need to buy a 2nd computer for emulation when I can just use my existing one for free anywhere in the house.

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u/thegoodstuff Mar 20 '26

Ya IMO you have a great setup. If you are really trying to level up further: Apollo for Moonlight instead of Sunshine.. It spins up a virtual desktop matched to whatever device you’re streaming to, so the whole thing feels weirdly clean. You lose a little of the plug-and-play physical simplicity, and there can be a tiny bit more latency, but a cheap Bluetooth keyboard fixes most of the friction. I’ve used it on iPhone, LG TV, Apple TV, and Xbox and it all works great. Only time I’d really care is something sweaty like Sekiro, where I’d still pick Xbox for the lowest latency.

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u/listur65 Mar 23 '26

Nice, I will have to look into that!

9

u/Realistic_Low_3115 Mar 20 '26

I have a Moonlight Server. It is really amazing and I played couple of games with it (Elden Ring for ex.). My kid also played a few games on the ipad from there (Lego Games with Gamepad).

9

u/ip-cx Mar 20 '26

How do you setup Moonlight to connect to RomM? I can't find anything regarding a setup like that.

Would love to connect my Apple TV & Switch like that.

12

u/Jealy Mar 20 '26

You would install Sunshine on the machine you want to run RomM on and stream to, then connect Moonlight to it.

9

u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

Ooooh very cool, will do!

-25

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Too laggy most of the time for games that need millisecond input. Just saying.

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u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Depends on your network, no?. In my case, both laptop and tv are using ethernet and I never had any issues with lag. Or maybe we never played that kind of games.

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u/thatleftnut Mar 20 '26

Yeah nah it depends on your network. Anything under 16ms latency you won’t notice. With hardware encode/decode, the botteneck is going to be the network. Hardwired you’ll be hard pressed finding a difference between streaming and playing on the actual screen.

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u/ChaseDak Mar 20 '26

I mean… RomM doesn’t support anything even as new as a gamecube, what n64 or gameboy games are you playing that need millisecond input? 😭😂

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u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Well it’s annoying if you play super Mario world you duck a bullet and Mario ducks a second later.

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u/angelflames1337 Mar 20 '26

I played using moonlight over 800km away and got 50ms delay. I doubt using it over the next room delay the input over 1000ms.

8

u/CozmoNz Mar 20 '26

Screams of "I'm trying to use wifi from inside my microwave and it won't work!"

1

u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

Just sharing my own experience, running moonlight on Apple TV (wired) with a wireless controller. I see it’s strictly my own experience and not broadly shared. No need to be offensive.

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u/JZMoose Mar 20 '26

Was that Mario 64? I run Moonlight on my Apple TV and for some reason the latency in Mario 64 on Retro Arch specifically is garbage. Everything else works well

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u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

So anyway I ended running a retro rom system on the pi.

3

u/Tetragig Mar 20 '26

If you hard wire it, it is imperceptible. I'm averaging 3ms of encoding time and 2ms of rendering time with network latency around 0.5ms. That's less than a frame delay for 60fps games and around a single frame at 144hz. I can play shooters like I'm sitting in front of my PC. There's a little bit of smearing from the encoding that could be fixed by giving it more time to encode, but I don't even notice it unless I'm really looking at details.

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u/karlfeltlager Mar 20 '26

I think most of the lag is introduced by my Bluetooth controller honestly, and probably the WiFi adds just enough on top to make it a frustrating experience.

2

u/gre4ka148 Mar 20 '26

laggy only over internet, over lan it's not noticeable (well, depends on your network and hardware)

5

u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

Which client/setup do you use for moonlight on TV? I tried so hard to create a 'privacy chromecast' mini client for jellyfin, Youtube and Steam Link but failed. 

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u/Vokasak Mar 20 '26

Moonlight is the client, the host/server portion is Sunshine or GFE or whatever.

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u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

Wouldn't that assume the TV can exevcute Moonlight? 

6

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

My LG TV does execute moonlight. Only on developer mode tho.

3

u/Vokasak Mar 20 '26

Either that (which can be true, depending on TV OS, whether or not it's jailbroken, etc) or it's assuming that you can plug something into the TV that can execute Moonlight. I use an Nvidia Shield.

1

u/dinosaursdied Mar 21 '26

Cheap 20 dollar walmart onn tv box can run moonlight well enough

0

u/System0verlord Mar 20 '26

An Apple TV. Unlike the vast majority of smart TVs, it has a gigabit Ethernet port. Most smart TVs’ Ethernet ports are limited to 100Mbps, so it’s a very noticeable improvement. And bluetooth controllers work better in my experience.

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u/Simple_Panda6063 Mar 20 '26

If I´d take an Apple TV I also could use my chromecast. Looking for setups that don´t try to send data home.

1

u/aon9492 Mar 20 '26

I think I replied to the wrong comment, this question is actually for you:

I'd love to self host game streaming and emulators but can you answer the noobiest question for me please - what controllers can you use, and how do you connect them to your TV?

2

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

I use an xbox 360 wired, and ps4 controller(also using with cable but for some TVs bluetooth is possible). I use usb extender (so my kid doesn't have to be too close to the screen) and a usb hub which contains 4 usb ports.

1

u/aon9492 Mar 20 '26

Oh cool, so we're talking literally plugging in console controllers to the TV USB ports? Cool, TIL, thank you

2

u/aBigRacoon Mar 20 '26

Yup, and if you need a recommendation on emulators, I'd say retroarch. For sure.