I'd like some streaming help please.

I've got a linux mint laptop, a windows pc, an nvidia shield and films that I'd like to watch from anywhere. Can you suggest a best way to do this, or any 'best' method that I can adopt?

I'll add that I'm not great at Linux, and all these devices will be on sleep mode when I'm away from home (apart from my nvidia) - which I believe is always on.

If possible I'd like to keep costs down, but I'm open to learning some new stuff.

Thanks for any help.

Edit: tarted up text.

This may not be the correct place for this, if so please point me elsewhere.

My other half doesn't have broadband, so I'm looking to write dvds so we can watch then on a dvd player.

To this end I've gotten a copy of ashampoo and downloaded some films (.mkv files) and I'm now looking to copy them onto dvds. Now I know I can't just copy the files on, and the software's asking for mpeg files only.

Has anyone come across - or know how to actually convert and write properly? A guide perhaps?

I know it's old technology, but it's gotta be better than just watching the crap on free tv. TIA.

Edit: many thanks to all for the great - and varied answers. Certainly lots of info to 'chew' on.

I've just found Syncthing and I'm blown away by this app. So, I'm interested if any of my other apps can be replaced by foss equivalents that can be synced.

My first suggestion is Obsidian - which, at first I had problems syncing with paid solutions, but syncs flawlessly with Syncthing.

Does anyone have any more suggestions? Ideally looking to sync between android devices, but any info is much appreciated.

Update : many thanks for all the suggestions - some good ones. Hopefully we can keep adding the ones we find that can be synced from local folders.

Is it possible to get sync to clear the cache? As someone who has ocd I'd like the option to leave everything behind me clean when I leave.

Edit: added words.

Does anyone know of a foss android app that will notify me if I load certain apps that I also need to use with vpn on?

I don't need my vpn always on, but I do for some apps. Ideally I'd like to be able to toggle the apps I want it to monitor.

If it could switch the vpn on as well that would be top.

I'm seeing this happen more of late: the message 'View more (1)' appears in-between a thread (the number varies by the way), when I click to expand the comments a message 'loading' appears followed by 'no comments added'. Why does it think there are more comments and why can it not retrieve and show them?

I'm using Sync for Lemmy.

I downloaded fedilab from fdroid and it looks on the surface as though it can access instances of the fediverse as well as lots of other stuff - like I can see lemmy.world and lemmy.ml but not lemmy.ee but I'm not sure how to see individual communities - unless there's a post I can see to follow.

So my basic understanding of all this - coming from reddit, is that these instances all federate together - as one, so to speak.

I'm just getting a little confused here. So can anyone explain just how this piece of software works please?

Thanks.

Trying to setup obtainium and I'm forgetting just where I got some of my apps from. Does anyone know if I can get a list of all the apps that I've installed by repo? This could be just a way to achieve this or an app itself - not too fussed, but I feel updating my foss apps is getting on top of me. Thanks.

Is there a way to cast from my phone to a first gen chromecast without using mobile data? I thought I could do this by downloading films to my phone and then stream to cc, but it seems to throttle my tethering data.

So I'm not sure if I'm understanding the way this works: I thought it would just cast from phone to tv - but it's using huge chunks of data for small films and my plan is limited.

Any advice on this or better ways to do this?