[HN Gopher] A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates
___________________________________________________________________
A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates
Author : speckx
Score : 185 points
Date : 2024-03-23 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.audioholics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.audioholics.com)
| stevekemp wrote:
| My wife has churned through a few video services, netflix,
| amazon, disney, etc.
|
| I've seen her frustration as series come and go from the
| catalogs, and the lack of things that we can watch together. So
| recently I've gone back to DVDs.
|
| Many local shops sell used DVDs for EUR1 each, and I recently
| discovered a store in Helsinki which is lined with DVDs basically
| from floor to ceiling - a little more expensive, but not much. It
| was fun spending an hour browsing around looking for things I
| remembered or wanted to see for the first time.
|
| Sure DVDs won't last forever, but I think having TV shows, and
| films, on disk is going to keep me going for the next 10+ years
| quite happily. Maybe after that I'll switch to something else,
| but I struggle to imagine it.
| verwalt wrote:
| Now rip them to a Plex server and have something like your own
| streaming service.
|
| And by ripping I of course mean "create a private backup".
| TylerE wrote:
| The thing that's really stood out for me of how the vast
| majority of things produced for these services - often at great
| expense - are just flat out garbage.
| t-sauer wrote:
| I don't necessarily need 4k Blu-ray quality myself but DVD
| quality is unbearable in my opinion.
| tylerflick wrote:
| Agreed. On modern TVs 480p looks rough.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| I don't mind 480p upscaled with a decent filter. Depending
| on the content, even 240p can work. What kills watchability
| for me is 480i. Maybe I just don't understand how things
| are suppposed to be done on modern setups, but it seems
| like the combination of deinterlacing plus upscaling is
| something that used to "just work" ca. 15 years ago and now
| it's almost impossible to get good results without either
| hooking up an old DVD player or getting a Ph.D. in ffmpeg.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I never got this. Yes, higher res looks better but I watch
| movies/shows for the story.
| verwalt wrote:
| I mean, I totally get your side, but DVD is 1/24 the
| resolution of 4K and actual 4K with HDR on an OLED is
| simply another dimension of immersion for me.
| toast0 wrote:
| As with all compressed media, resolution takes a backseat
| to quality of mastering / compression.
|
| I've yet to see a poorly mastered Blu-Ray, and only
| watched a couple Blu-Ray 4k discs, but online streams at
| 1080p or 4k are sometimes rather bitstarved so...
|
| With DVDs, some, perhaps many look just fine on a larger
| screen, but there are some whose mastering is very poor,
| and those will look really bad on a larger screen. My
| copy of Forest Gump features closeups where the
| characters face translates around on their head. But most
| of the other DVDs I've watched are fine. Yes, Blu-Ray
| would be better, but not so much that its worth rebuying.
| verwalt wrote:
| I myself saw "Road House" on Thursday, 4K stream. A lot
| of dark scenes, perfect for OLED. But also very
| vulnerable to bitrate related quality problems. And it
| was fine.
|
| But other examples, like the first season of "Reacher",
| look like shit in 4K. Many artifacts resulting in
| skintones that get pushed into green or red. Super weird.
|
| Good encoding comes a long way, and not all services go
| the extra mile.
| diggan wrote:
| Matters a lot depending on what you're viewing it on. If
| you're watching something bad quality on a big 4K OLED
| panel, you'll be a lot more distracted compared to watching
| the same on a small smartphone display.
| circusfly wrote:
| > Sure DVDs won't last forever
|
| "No termination date. I didn't know how long we had together...
| Who does?"
| tombert wrote:
| FWIW, a USB DVD or Blu-Ray drive can be had for a very
| reasonable price, and MakeMKV is pretty straightforward and
| works pretty much perfectly on the big three OS's (Windows,
| Mac, Linux). If you're afraid of the DVDs breaking, it's not
| necessarily a bad idea to just keeping a digital backup
| somewhere.
|
| Of course, if you're not careful you end up like me having
| spent multiple thousands on disks and servers and data tape
| backups, so be less dumb than me.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| It's frustrating to me how every studio / network feels it needs
| its own streaming service, one where they control the entire
| experience. It's stupidly user hostile and yet there's no
| alternative other than physical media (with all its negatives) or
| piracy.
| rolobio wrote:
| Agreed. When Netflix had just about everything, piracy took a
| big hit.
|
| We need a return to Blockbuster-like selection, but streaming.
| A streaming service should purchases however many copies they
| are streaming, and replace them on a schedule as the copy
| "wears out", like Blockbuster.
| cdchn wrote:
| What they could even do is buy physical Blu-Ray and mail the
| out to people who would return them after a few days, for a
| subscription fee.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If that was profitable, the service you describe would not
| have shuttered.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't think that's true; it might be the case that
| mailing out dvds is profitable, but too low revenue for
| modern Netflix to bother with. I mean, it was possible to
| build a business on it at some point...
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I don't think that's true
|
| Easy to find out by coming up with a business plan, and
| then pitch it to investors. If you are right, then you'll
| be the next Reed Hastings. If not, you'll just be another
| person with an idea nobody else believes is worth
| investing
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I think your are missing the GPs point. Netflix, of
| course, started with mailing dvds and recently ended it.
| As far as I know, it was always profitable. Unfortunately
| being profitable is not the same as "worth investing",
| investors are chasing the highest returns and won't
| invest in something with a low return on investment.
|
| You are kind moving the goal posts with your first
| statement "If that was profitable, the service you
| describe would not have shuttered." and this one.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, I'm not missing the point. Yes, I said profitable.
| But let's all agree that profitable doesn't just mean
| making one dollar more than all of your expenses. By
| definition, that's making money which is technically
| profitable, but that's not what anyone would consider a
| profitable business. So while technically right might be
| the best right, it's technically useless in this
| conversation and does nothing to actually move the
| conversation in a positive direction.
|
| Saying that a company is profitable but not worth the
| investment is not going to solve the streaming is our
| only option. We are looking for a solution other than
| streaming that is still legal so that people do not have
| to resort to pirating. If you are suggesting that a
| service providing shiny round discs through the mail or
| any other brick&mortar Blockbuster or mom&pop video
| rental solution is going to be profitable to the point of
| sustaining a business, then there's a bit of realism that
| needs to be brought back into the conversation. This
| seems to not be wanted and instead point back to me not
| understanding what words mean.
| andsoitis wrote:
| The trend has been clear for a long time. The future is a
| streaming, not physical media. Profitability is necessary
| but not sufficient to be a successful business over the
| long term, you also need to grow and change according to
| market dynamics, otherwise you will find yourself dead.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I disagree that that is necessary to run that experiment,
| somebody already did it, proving that it is possible.
|
| Also I don't think suggesting a giant task like starting
| a business is anything but a bad faith rhetorical tactic.
| I'm not going to pitch a DVD mailing company to investors
| for reasons that have nothing to do with whether or not
| it is viable (I'm a programmer, not a businessman, and I
| don't care to run a business, for one thing).
| dylan604 wrote:
| Of course I wouldn't expect some person as a programmer
| become a CEO of a physical media shipping company. I
| always forget that I must be explicit in these types of
| forums where the _you_ is never considered as the royal
| you. Everyone takes things so personal.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems a little unnecessarily confusing to have "you"
| refer to different people in the same sentence.
|
| But anyway if you meant "you" as just a hypothetical
| person, we've already got one, Reed Hastings.
| dylan604 wrote:
| right, and Mr Hastings has decided it was no longer a
| viable business and shut it down. what's confusing about
| that, and how it was applied to this conversation?
|
| it's like we just want to argue and not actually have a
| conversation
| blendergeek wrote:
| CafeDVD [0] is still going strong.
|
| [0] https://www.cafedvd.com/
| cogman10 wrote:
| It may actually be profitable again. The entire reason
| media rentals ended up dying is because of Netflix coming
| out with just about every bit of media available for
| streaming.
|
| Now that everything has fractured into a million pieces,
| media rental once again seems like it may make sense.
| Redbox is still around still lending out blurays. It
| wouldn't shock me if that model made a resurgence.
| dylan604 wrote:
| redbox isn't nearly as convenient as having it delivered
| to your house.
|
| however, it does make me wonder if
| owning/operating/maintaining all of the boxes is more or
| less expensive than paying the USPS to deliver and
| collect on behalf of your service.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > When Netflix had just about everything, piracy took a big
| hit.
|
| So never then.
|
| (Also if this is circa 10 years ago every study suggests
| piracy is lower today than it was then.)
| dgfitz wrote:
| Because people don't know how to pirate anymore. Circa 2000
| everyone I knew was pirating everything. There is no Kazaa
| or bearshare or Napster anymore.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And even I'm kinda warry of using bittorrent... Usenet is
| fine from legal stand-point for sourcing my linux
| distros. But networks where you share got enough legal
| trolls to make want not bother. And I don't consume
| enough linux distros to make any special setups.
| briffle wrote:
| They all have their own streaming platform, that doesn't always
| have their own shows. I remember being so frustrated trying to
| find the actual correct spot to stream Yellowstone. (Been a few
| years, trying to remember)It was on the paramount channel, but
| not on paramount plus streaming. It was apparently on the
| peacock streaming service, but only on their most expensive
| tier, and my tv didn't work with peacock tv at the time...
| crysin wrote:
| It's getting even dumber because these studio curated streaming
| services don't even have their entire library available on
| their dedicated service. Want to watch 2007 Transformers in the
| US? Well too bad, no one is actively streaming that one. Want
| to watch Transformers 2? Better have Max! Super frustrating as
| a customer.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > It's stupidly user hostile and yet there's no alternative
| other than physical media (with all its negatives) or piracy.
|
| Physical media isn't always an alternative either. Movies
| usually still come out on physical media, but TV shows
| increasingly often don't.
| suddenclarity wrote:
| Partly because no one wants to be dependent on another company.
| Look at what happened to Reddit apps when they began charging
| for their API. Netflix with a monopoly and their own movie
| production would be an impossible negotiation position for
| production companies in another 15 years.
| izacus wrote:
| The fact that we never legislated to force providers to allow
| any client connect to their streaming API (keeping software
| like Winamp, VLC, relevant for new world) and instead doubled
| down to allow complete control of content providers over our
| culture is one of big societal mistakes of last decades.
|
| Following the example of Hollywood which forcefully split
| content studios and cinemas would create a much much healthier
| market.
| thfuran wrote:
| We should just shorten copyright back to 14 years and not
| grandfather anything.
| izacus wrote:
| This.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and nothing of value will be lost
| novok wrote:
| It's their version of cutting the middleman.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Services like Popcorn Time and the many spin-offs will just
| continue to improve and show what 'streaming' can be like if not
| for the futile attempts at trying to contain the technology. When
| commercial streaming took off there seemed to be a sigh of
| relief, finally the industry has gotten the message than people
| _are_ willing to pay for 'content' just as long as the user
| experience is up to par. Well, the message seems to have entered
| one ear to escape out the other and the high seas have started to
| look quite inviting again. Arrrrr, matey!
| r0ze-at-hn wrote:
| For those that have not visited your local library lately. Along
| with books, I regularly borrow audiobooks, whole tv series,
| movies, switch and ps5 games. And they give me access to yet
| another movie and music streaming service that they pay for. Once
| I add in the library system and requesting stuff from other
| libraries it is rarely that I can't get access to something I am
| interested in.
|
| This isn't the library I went to as kids that had a tiny rack of
| VHS tapes in the back. They seem to have fully embraced the
| digital era.
| thayne wrote:
| That depends a lot on the library. My local library has a
| pretty limited digital selection.
| TylerE wrote:
| Some have, but this is far far from universal and it's a bit
| annoying when people insist that it is all libraries.
| duneisagoodbook wrote:
| it's possible! encouraging people to go to the library is a
| net good on society.
| darby_eight wrote:
| It's insane to me anyone would downvote this comment (edit:
| or flag my disbelief for being somehow irrelevant to
| conversation). The public library system is quite possibly
| the best thing this country has ever invented.
| jtriangle wrote:
| The library system and national parks are both absolute
| bangers.
| mopenstein wrote:
| I don't see a societal benefit in people borrowing video
| games and watching DVDs that aren't educational. At least
| non educational books might expect the reader to expand
| their minds, and to a lesser extent movies.
|
| But the majority of video games and movies being produced
| are empty wastes of time. It seems to me loaning those
| items is just an attempt to stay relevant lest libraries
| become vacant and useless. What other value is there in
| loaning out PlayStation games?
| deadbunny wrote:
| Because like books, games, films, TV, etc. are culture
| and everyone should have the opportunity to experience
| culture no matter what.
|
| Trying to limit libraries to "educational" content is
| preposterous.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Many have streaming digital checkouts, too. Either through
| themselves or through broader networks.
| bibliotekka wrote:
| Add on: ask your local library if they have: Libby, Kanopy or
| Hoopla
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Kanopy is great, and very nearly as good as the mainstream
| streaming platforms in terms of selection and software
| quality.
|
| Hoopla, however, is abysmal both in selection (though this
| depends on your local library) and in software/service
| quality. The search is broken, and it has some of the most
| confusing UX I've ever experienced. It's as if it actively
| wants to prevent you from watching anything.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| That's just what the internet was like many years ago,
| slow, bad search, clunky, jerky not smooth, and with lots
| of right angles.
|
| Hoopla is just based off a relic.
| dublinben wrote:
| Libby / Overdrive for ebooks are a racket. The publishers
| sell 'disposable' licenses that expire after something like
| only 20 uses or a few years, whichever comes first. Support
| your local library, but don't support greedy publishers.
| jtriangle wrote:
| My library has this too, and a ton of ebooks, and a 3D printer
| that you just have to cover the cost of material to use, and
| they occasionally have free museum passes, national/state park
| passes, etc.
|
| Far cry from what they used to be, and, well, you're paying for
| it anyway via taxes so silly to not use it.
| mch82 wrote:
| Anyone know how to donate a movie or audiobook to a library (in
| situations where they don't have them)?
|
| I'm interested in the concept of donating media to the library
| instead of buying it for myself. However, it doesn't seem like
| there's a simple way to do that...
| thfuran wrote:
| They don't get to use regular consumer digital media. They
| have to use specially licensed extra-expensive versions that
| permit lending.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| A couple of things: Most Blu-ray discs require an internet
| connection to play on most players and PCs. (don't really know
| why, but discovered this at work.) In order for this to happen,
| the DVD and BR makers are going to have to ramp up quite a bit.
|
| Personally, I like the disc options because of no commercials.
| However, it does take us back to the storage problem and surely
| they will start putting commercials on the discs.
| GloomyBoots wrote:
| Is this true? I'm not saying it isn't, but I buy Blu-ray's
| pretty regularly and my player is offline but hasn't had any
| issues. I mainly buy older films, so maybe I've just been lucky
| in avoiding protection used for new releases.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > Most Blu-ray discs require an internet connection to play on
| most players and PCs
|
| No they don't. It's not even in the spec (it is in the BD+ and
| UHD Blu-Ray specs, but no disc has ever been released that used
| it for anything other than interactive extras).
| haunter wrote:
| >Most Blu-ray discs require an internet connection
|
| That's only for BD-Live which is very limited for a few
| releases. Most studios only released a couple of films that way
| and ditched the whole thing years ago
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BD-Live
| fomine3 wrote:
| Discs don't require internet connection, but genuine BD player
| app on PC requires frequent AACS keys update to play latest
| discs.
| porphyra wrote:
| bluray also just has better image quality and it is a little sad
| that the image quality of the average movie watcher has decreased
| slightly from bluray to streaming.
| tombert wrote:
| I noticed with Fight Club. It was available for streaming on
| Hulu in 4k, and I had a blu-ray in 1080p. Comparing the two
| versions, the blu-ray looked a lot better. The resolution
| wasn't quite as high, but the colors were much more saturated.
|
| I guess it comes down to bandwidth considerations; a blu-ray
| has between 25-50gb to play with and there's basically no
| reason not to fill up the disk. With streaming, there's a
| direct advantage to reducing bandwidth costs.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's also a guaranteed play rate - if it's playing, it's
| playing at max bitrate.
| altairprime wrote:
| The cost of being able to watch a reasonable cross-section of
| media has risen faster than wage growth. All of the diffuse
| streaming services without sharing agreements have, in their
| greed to not share the pie, put themselves into competition with
| _grocery stores_. Being able to afford two streaming services --
| or one, based on Netflix's hostility to account sharing! -- is a
| luxury that fewer can afford each year. They can scrabble all
| they want for the shrinking pie of available money to spend on
| entertainment, but unless they stop siloing and start accepting
| cross-membership across the board, they'll all go bankrupt once
| someone realizes that the Blockbuster store model with its $2
| rentals and the collapse of commercial real estate is about to
| become viable again.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I just use streaming sites from Asia... ad-block ftw
| beoberha wrote:
| I think at the end of the day the economics of streaming just
| aren't there. Rights holders saw how much Netflix was making off
| their content and realized they could get way more if they cut
| out the middle man. But the cost of creating quality content
| requires selling it for way more than a monthly subscription that
| people are willing to pay (or else you get ads). There's a reason
| movies cost 5 bucks to rent on Amazon or 15 bucks to buy
| outright.
| mstipetic wrote:
| What natural law mandates that DiCaprio has a 50-100 million
| salary per movie? You think if the amount of money is reduced
| actors won't act anymore?
| beoberha wrote:
| I don't understand your point. The natural progression of
| things is how we got to this point. You'd need some massive
| shock to the system (like a legislative law) to change it at
| this point.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or a crash in market. Where they simply run out of the big
| money. So the big ticket items like stars simply do not get
| hired and everything is done with less people and less VFX.
| badpun wrote:
| Stars are hired because they make the studios money (as a
| marketing vehicle), not on some money-wasting whim.
| mstipetic wrote:
| They'd still do it for less money if there's less total
| money in the market. It's not like a bridge where a pound
| of steel costs X and not much you can do about it
| mstipetic wrote:
| Argument is that making these things is inherently very
| expensive, but the actor salaries tell me there's plenty of
| left over once production ends. There's static costs and
| there's more fluid ones
| asveikau wrote:
| If DiCaprio asked for such a price and the companies didn't
| think they could make it back, he wouldn't get it. He is able
| to set that price due to demand for DiCaprio specifically. I
| don't necessarily agree with it either but they do consider
| these things, and they wouldn't pay him that much otherwise.
| andruby wrote:
| If a movie with famous actor makes 100M more than without
| them, why shouldn't they get a significant portion of that?
|
| Is that DiCaprio number salary, or profit/revenue sharing as
| a producer? Looking at [0] it seems like his highest salary
| was $30M. He made more on Inception and Titanic, but that was
| total income, not salary.
|
| Anyway, when thinking about it as cost and value, then it
| makes sense in our economic model.
| asveikau wrote:
| I started picking up blurays and DVDs at record stores that also
| stock them. I got into record collecting during the pandemic as
| many did and more physical media is not a big leap from there.
| You can find good movies sometimes for cheaper than on Amazon or
| itunes.
|
| I was just learning to rip blurays onto my disk server. I did
| this a lot during the DVD era, but the tooling is now slightly
| different. (Still ffmpeg or mencoder and the like, but now
| libaacs. And matroska is much more of a thing.) Sometimes I'm
| picking up higher res copies of stuff I already collected from
| that era.
| tombert wrote:
| I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies
| now, about 40 complete series). I almost never _watch_ blu-rays
| directly, because I don 't want to muck with physical discs.
| Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV,
| and put it onto a Jellyfin server.
|
| I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM
| of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not
| distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch
| them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for
| anyone to demonstrate any _damages_ from my habits.
|
| Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but
| it's also objectively horrible for a company to be able to
| arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a
| physical copy, so it's more failure-proof.
|
| That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and
| it's something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a
| software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and
| I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things
| when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going
| through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has
| gotten _only worse_.
|
| Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore, so I suspect that
| the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being
| piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large
| media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.
| dfee wrote:
| How big of a NAS do you have?
| compsciphd wrote:
| a single 1080p bluray movie (not including extras on the
| disc) is generally going to be in the low to mid 20GBs to
| 40GB range. Lets take 40GB for a fairly conservative measure.
| a single 8TB drive can therefore fit 200 (or possibly more)
| movies (or double for 16GB drives).
|
| i.e. one doesn't need "crazy" (i.e. more than a handful of
| consumer hard drives) amount of storage to store a lot of
| bluray movies and tv shows and keep them online available to
| you.
| vondur wrote:
| I compress mine using Handbrake. It gets them down to the
| 2.5->8GB per movie range.
| tombert wrote:
| I used to compress them and generally that's fine, but
| honestly storage has gotten cheap enough to where I don't
| bother. Every now and then the compression would
| introduce artifacts, even at a relatively low CRF level
| in ffmpeg, and just for peace of mind I decided to keep
| the raw movies.
|
| That said, since I have an elaborate tape backup system
| now, I've debated keeping the "masters" as archives on
| the tapes, and keeping compressed versions for streaming,
| but laziness has kind of won out on that.
| extragood wrote:
| Agreed on your points about cheap storage and compression
| artifacts.
|
| I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for
| my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from
| your experience?
| Retric wrote:
| Why bother? You're spending time saving ~50 cents per
| blue ray and you get some artifacts.
|
| You could just buy DVD's if you want to save space and
| are willing to take a hit to image quality.
| tombert wrote:
| Keep in mind before you read this: I use my server for a lot
| of stuff other than movies so it's really over-provisioned. I
| play with LLM models sometimes, and I also have a Kafka
| server with tons of stock-trading info being written to
| nearly all the time taking a lot of space.
|
| That said, I have 24x16TB hard drives in ZFS RAID. It's three
| separate RAIDZ2's, so the amount of space on there is
| 18x16TB, so about 288TB. It's a fairly expensive amount of
| waste, but it's nice to be able to lose up to six disks at a
| time without having to worry. I could fairly easily get
| another 8 drives in there if I really needed it, but thus far
| my total consumption is only about 50TB in total, and I
| delete actually stuff when I'm done with it.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Ok, now I need a description of the setup.
|
| Specifically:
|
| - What hardware caters to 32x disks (24+8)? (I'm picturing
| enterprise gear)
|
| - What software are you using to coordinate it? TrueNAS?
| davidzweig wrote:
| You can fit a SAS card (like LSI 9207-8e) and hook up
| external disk shelves (like ds4246). This gear is on ebay
| and is mostly plug and play on linux.
| m463 wrote:
| > 288TB
|
| that is a lot.
|
| maybe it (and this comment) will be subsumed in the next 10
| years, but for now it is spacious and amazing.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| It's not ~too~ geeky to maintain a NAS. I got a Synology. It
| has 5 drives, and the ones I have are fairly quiet so the
| thing goes under the TV counter.
|
| However, if you want to rip 4K blurays, you've got to flash
| the firmware on your bluray drive and then run MakeMkV +
| handbrake (or much harder CLI stuff) to process a disc into a
| useable media file which can THEN go into Plex. All of that
| takes time and effort, and usually some trial and error.
|
| I also keep a bluray player next to the NAS. Simply because
| it's too much of a pain to deal with ripping sometimes. I
| still have to get through my 30-disc Ingmar Bergman Criterion
| Boxset that I bought 2 years ago. Much easier to pop a disc
| in the player!
| sroussey wrote:
| Details of the flash firmware?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Probably LibreDrive for use with MakeMKV.
|
| https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, I actually have one of the drives that's ostensibly
| flashable to be 4k compatible, but I haven't been able to
| get it working.
|
| Honestly, I've been happy enough with 1080p. I think 1080p
| blu-rays still hold up pretty well visually. My biggest TV
| is 70", and I watch it from like 15 feet away, so I don't
| think I'd benefit much from the increased resolution.
|
| I know that there's other variables that are enhanced with
| a 4k blu-ray, but they haven't been significant enough for
| me to bother collecting/ripping them. When I buy a 4k blu-
| ray, I've just been ripping the regular 1080p blu-ray that
| always comes with it.
| krustyburger wrote:
| Isn't ripping your own media the sort of use case where Plex
| really shines as a solution and is fairly user friendly?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Nowhere near user friendly for a large part of the population
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| True, but given legal constraints on ripping, etc. it would
| be nearly impossible for anyone to make it drop dead
| simple.
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, it's "user friendly" in the sense that it's the
| easiest solution, but it still requires understanding how
| servers work, knowing how to administer a RAID, knowing what
| kind of transcoding settings to set etc.
|
| Also, I think anyone that tells you that you can just have
| always-online media that you don't have to babysit is lying.
| As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Your server _will_
| break at some point, for no apparent reason, and you 're
| going to have to fix it. Usually the fixes are easy on their
| own, but you end up accidentally nuking the RAID and losing
| all your rips. It's hardly "user friendly".
|
| This isn't crapping on Plex, it's sort of the nature of the
| beast
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You don't need a RAID. Just have 2 hard drives and copy
| stuff from one folder to another. Click skip all for
| identical files that already exist.
|
| I've had jellyfin serving my music, family videos and
| youtube rips (e.g. university lectures) for years. Haven't
| had to touch it since I set it up. I just plop files into
| folders and it picks them up.
|
| I got a lot of family videos from my mom, who keeps them on
| her computer plus an external hard drive, which she brought
| to me to copy. Copying files to USB drives as a backup and
| sharing that is pretty understandable for non tech people.
| mastax wrote:
| There are NAS devices from a bunch of manufacturers where
| you can just buy them, plug them in, run through the setup
| wizard, and click install on the Plex app in their built in
| App Store. Not much more difficult than getting printer
| drivers installed.
|
| That's certainly more than many people are able (or
| willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred
| dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is
| pretty good theee days.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| > Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers
| installed.
|
| Dude, really bad example, printers are hell to set up.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| These days pretty much every printer should support IPP.
| You just plug it in and it shows up to devices on your
| network.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Plugged it into Ethernet logged into web based config set
| password. Installed distro package for HP printers
| instantly usable on void linux and Windows.
|
| I think 99% of problems are wifi related or trying to
| share the USB connected printer over the network.
| izacus wrote:
| That's that the original poster means with "Jellyfin", it's
| just an OSS version of the same type of software.
| m463 wrote:
| I think plex sort of sold out. Jellyfin is under your
| control.
| screamingninja wrote:
| Do you watch those movies / series more than once? I have
| always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and
| then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media
| companies would want, but purchasing media/books and not using
| them more than once just feels wrong.
| tombert wrote:
| My rule of thumb has generally been "if there's any chance
| I'll want to watch the movie more than once, I'll buy the
| blu-ray."
|
| Until about two years ago, I was happy enough to pay for two
| streaming services (HBO Max and Hulu), along with Amazon
| Prime, and I treated that like my "rental store". The first
| viewing would be to see if I like the movie, and if I did
| then I would immediately order the blu-ray.
|
| Now I've canceled all my streaming services because I don't
| want to pay for a million of them.
|
| Just a note, I will very frequently put a movie or TV series
| on in the background while I work on other things, probably
| even more frequently than I turn on music. I just like having
| noise from a movie or show that's familiar for me.
| nox101 wrote:
| I am slightly embarrassed to say that yes, I watch movies
| over and over. All of them off of a shared hard drive using
| Kodi on an Apple TV to watch.
|
| I recently through away all my CDs, DVDs, and BluRay after
| carrying them from apartment to apartment for years (in
| notebooks) and never once opening them during those years.
|
| As for the embarrassment. I get from some POV it's a waste of
| time but I easily have a list of ~400 movies all of which
| I've watched 3-20 times each. Examples might be a movie like
| The Matrix I'm sure I've watch 10+ times. A movie like
| Harvey, 2 or 3.
| badpun wrote:
| Same here. Great movies (most of the imdb Top 250 easily
| qualifies) can be rewatched every couple of years IMO,
| unless you have unusually good memory.
| andirk wrote:
| Or watch them after staying up way too late with a couple
| libations. I remember my opinions of the film but not the
| content.
| emeril wrote:
| what's your approach to using kodi on ATV?
|
| do you have a paid $99/year dev account?
| rpdillon wrote:
| I also watch movies multiple times! Typically it's several
| months or years apart, but sometimes it's more frequent. I
| remember the first night I saw Primer, right after it ended
| I started it all over again because I needed to understand.
| Unfortunately, the second watch did not provide as much
| clarity as I was hoping.
| jdofaz wrote:
| I only buy the bluray if I've already seen it and know I'd
| want to watch again when I receive it. Keeps me from
| collecting stuff that doesn't get watched.
|
| I loop through the collection by putting a watched disc back
| in a separate spot until I've gone through them all and then
| start over.
| lloeki wrote:
| > I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the
| DRM of my movies
|
| At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit a la copie
| privee), there's even a tax for that, paid on _every_ storage
| device, whether or not it 's intended to store such media. Yup
| the tax is about paying for a copy of something you _already
| own_.
|
| You can rip anything all you want from a source medium you own.
| But you can't fetch it from another source even if you do own
| an original medium and the resulting data is 1:1 identical down
| to the last literal bit. The bits have a legal colour depending
| on where they come from!
| thfuran wrote:
| In the US, you're legally entitled to create a backup copy,
| but breaking the encryption on the disc to actually do so is
| illegal.
| tombert wrote:
| I believe in the states, it's technically illegal to break
| DRM most of the time, though I think there's a million
| possible exceptions, and I don't know how much it has
| actually been tested in court.
|
| I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-
| ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably
| not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am
| technically breaking a rule.
| sp332 wrote:
| Ripping your own media is a civil violation, small stakes
| for a blu-ray collection. Where people really get in
| trouble is distribution. Private sharing like a Plex server
| among friends _could_ get you in more trouble, but public
| sharing like bittorrent, or anything commercial like
| charging for access to your Plex, is where it really starts
| to attract attention from the lawyers.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, more or less what I figured. Right now at least, I
| don't even have the port opened on my network, so the
| only way to watch it is to be logged in via my network,
| or do some kind of VPN/proxy into the network. I really
| doubt that it would be worth it for a company to sue me
| for it.
|
| To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law;
| obviously distributing the media makes sense to be
| illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM
| illegal.
| saurik wrote:
| France is on the hook -- along with the rest of the EU -- for
| having a similar anti-circumvention law to the US (which is
| part of a treaty that the US pushed forward), but apparently
| hasn't implemented one yet? I hadn't realized this (I thought
| everyone had long ago put in place similar laws) and am
| excited to have found a good reference on the status for
| various countries.
|
| https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf
| Mindwipe wrote:
| That paper is nearly twenty years old.
|
| Breaking DRM to format shift in France is illegal and has
| been for many years.
| wnevets wrote:
| does the iOS Jellyfin client have Chromecast support yet? That
| is my main roadblock to switching to jellyfin for everything.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly legal (in America) to make
| copies of media for your own use, even if that means removing
| the DRM.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| You're probably right, because the part of DMCA 1201 that
| criminalizes individual acts of breaking DRM has about 40
| different exceptions, plus a general "this is not intended to
| overturn fair use" clause, plus a rule-making process that
| lets the Copyright Office add more exceptions if they feel
| they are necessary. Given that there is already caselaw in
| favor of format shifting (e.g. RIAA v. Diamond) it's _highly_
| unlikely a court is going to say format shifting is wrong if
| DRM is involved.
|
| None of that matters because nobody is going to try and
| litigate against individual disc rippers, they are going to
| litigate against the people who actually wrote the ripping
| software, and DMCA 1201 is far more harsh to them. There is
| basically no exception to the prohibition on DRM-breaking
| tools - I'm not even 100% sure that, say, verifying each
| individual's usecase before letting them break DRM is enough
| to escape DMCA 1201's ire.
| rrix2 wrote:
| > as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and
| Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from
| fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine
| my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media
| landscape has gotten only worse.
|
| Jellyfin supports multiple users, she can mail you some disks
| ;)
| hintymad wrote:
| Realistically speaking, would it be the return of piracy
| streaming or VPN + BitTorrent?
| dangus wrote:
| The article was good and I was happy to learn about Arrow Video,
| which reminds me a lot of Limited Run Games.
|
| I will say there is a big downside of physical media that has to
| be mentioned: the physical space. In my apartment it really makes
| the whole thing a bit of a non-starter unless I'm willing to
| discard jackets and put discs into soft binders like my old CD
| setup that I had in my 1999 Civic.
|
| That issue can be made worse if you're just not the type of
| person to watch and rewatch content over and over. That's where
| streaming shines: I'm sure to some people, the fact that content
| rotates in and out isn't that much of a downside. They just want
| to watch "whatever is on."
|
| I am also not a big fan of how much ripping and data hoarding
| becomes a hobby. In terms of the fact that you're doing something
| illegal (breaking cryptographic protection to rip a personal
| collection), your risk certainly minimal, but it's technically a
| non-zero risk. You're technically supposed to keep those movies
| on their discs and not decrypt their content in order to back
| them up.
|
| With that in mind if you're already getting into ripping content
| and setting up Plex/Jellyfin for yourself you might as well just
| go the whole way and start downloading off of Usenet.
|
| Aside from that, I also think that digital purchases and
| downloads can be a decent way to go. I've heard of some providers
| like Sony removing purchases from libraries but that also seems
| extremely rare. I have a few random movies purchased on iTunes
| (now renamed/moved to the Apple TV app but still available) and
| they're still there many years later, but it would be nice to get
| that as more of a guarantee. Apple's streaming quality is also
| second excellent and certainly close enough to what you get on
| Blu-Ray for 99.9% of people.
| atum47 wrote:
| I've been using my raspberry pi 4 as a server for my local
| network. Just plugged in some external hard drive, some samba
| configuration and I'm all set. I was thinking about investing in
| my offline catalog again, since I get less and less content worth
| watching in streaming platforms.
|
| Update: https://i.ibb.co/52Q5cfr/Screenshot-20240323-152512.png
| volumo wrote:
| Here at Volumo (a specialized music store for pro DJs that have I
| co-founded) we see our future in downloads (DRM-free, of course),
| not streaming. With a download license, you can do anything you
| can do with streaming, and much more. And it allows the author to
| get a decent royalty instead of some "microcents".
|
| It can sometimes take an effort to explain to an outsider why we
| don't do streaming and don't want to. It's like we are swimming
| opposite to the flow. But I see streaming as something geared
| towards casual listeners, while downloads are for professionals
| and enthusiasts.
| zamadatix wrote:
| This makes perfect sense for DJs but I'm not sure it makes
| sense for the streaming market in general. DJs are expecting to
| use specialized equipment (be that a full set or a laptop and
| some speakers), software, and to manage their own content
| library as a thing in itself but most consumers just want to
| turn the TV on and watch content without dealing with where it
| goes.
| haunter wrote:
| I buy collector's edition blu-rays of films I love but mostly
| because of the film stock bookmarks, I love those. But I actually
| never ever watched a film from blu-ray disc (or DVD). I just make
| a copy with MakeMKV.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| The problem is that government helping big corporations make
| piracy less effective (dmca, forcing telco to give up customer
| names) and the lack of effective piracy doesn't put enough
| pressure on media company becoming better and offering a decent
| service
| demondemidi wrote:
| where I live in Portland Oregon there is a store called Movie
| Madness that has about a 80 thousand titles on dvd and vhs (you
| can rent a vhs player with an adapter). The films are sorted by
| director country and genre. It's pretty amazing. I'm there every
| week because it's a few blocks from my place, it blows away
| streaming because they have everything I come across online.
| aosmith wrote:
| Physical media was dead on arrival. This was a product of poor
| infrastructure eg it's faster and cheaper to ship a DVD vs
| transferring several GB. This no longer holds true. While
| streaming and ownership are complicated there's no reason to go
| back to physical media unless you like vinyl.
| greedo wrote:
| The quality of a blu-ray disc is usually a magnitude better
| than the best streaming service. And a 4K blu-ray is years
| ahead of what streaming platforms even dream of.
| aosmith wrote:
| Sure but storing blu-rays is silly, just rip them to disk.
| Use a lossless codec if you're picky.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Agreed on turning them digital. If you care about quality
| just remux them though, all a lossless codec is going to
| get you is a 10x larger file with the exact same output.
| UberFly wrote:
| "Where will streaming video go next? My guess is that media
| conglomerates with ties to communications companies will form a
| team-up. Comcast (NBCUniversal) and AT&T (Warner) may partner
| with Disney to take the lead on at least one unified streaming
| service"
|
| The end result of the streaming services era seems like it will
| look no different than the cable era that people were fleeing.
| dbcooper wrote:
| I have a nice Sony OLED TV, I have calibrated it with a hardware
| colorimeter, and I use MadVR ML upscaling to 4K for all my files.
| I have a ripped a lot of blu-ray discs (especially Dario
| Argento). Is there a quality issue, rather than censorship, to go
| beyond that?
|
| Sadly, I suspect that pirate torrent sites will preserve a lot of
| this stuff better than the streaming owners of the IP. We are in
| kind of a golden age for quality transfers of niche films. Even
| if there are still significant gaps.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| I no longer care that "piracy is wrong"
|
| You know whats wrong, you price gouging me for 15 services that
| are all awful.
|
| Unlike TV where channels compete for eyeballs, unlike the theater
| where they only make money when you show up streaming services
| have perverse incentives.
|
| What is the ideal streaming customer: one who pays, and never
| watches. The content only has to be good enough often enough to
| make you not want to unsub and resub. I have to suspect that
| these servcies are programing this way.
|
| It explains why free + ads is a model for better content. You
| only get paid for what I watch... It means that 800 hours of shit
| content isnt worth having up, and you need to have better stuff.
| thfuran wrote:
| No, free + ads is a horrible mess of perverse incentives. Pay
| per view is the model that aligns interests.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| You realize that ads are pay per view. Rather than cash its
| attention and eyeballs. It's an arbitrage one can win if
| smart.
| thfuran wrote:
| No, they're a third party fucking everything up. The person
| watching the stream should pay the streaming service.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Right:
|
| Netflix is an all you can eat buffet... It's cheap and
| the food is half assed at best. Every now and again the
| come out with something good but your gonna eat a lot of
| mediocre to get your moneys worth.
|
| I can pay Amazon or a theater to watch ONLY what I want
| to see. I pick it I pay for it. If it sucks I'm out 3-6
| bucks for a rental or 15+ for a theater. Unlike a
| restaurant, you're never getting a refund or a freebee if
| the content is bad.
|
| Or I can watch something like tubi. Where I don't have a
| true profile... I get to watch ads' to watch content. IM
| trading a bit of my attention for not pre paying for the
| hope of good content and being able to abandon something
| if it is bad with a minimum of loss.
|
| Give me a streaming service with a reasonable amount of
| ad's and give me a micro transaction to skip them when I
| really want to...
| andsoitis wrote:
| > You realize that ads are pay per view.
|
| Fun quip but not a sophisticated view on business models.
|
| The big categories include: AVOD (advertising subscription
| on demand) is a different business model from SVOD
| (subscription video on demand) is different from TVOD
| (transactional video on demand).
|
| There are 3 kinds of TVOD:
|
| * Pay-Per-View (charge viewer every time you watch)
|
| * Download-to-Rent (access title for limited time)
|
| * Electronic-sell-through (one time fee for unlimited
| access)
|
| Some business start with one simple model but embrace some
| hybrid for different content types or to reach a more
| diverse customer base.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| * Pay-Per-View (charge viewer every time you watch)
|
| If I pay 99 cents to watch a movie once that's Pay Per
| View.
|
| Are you making the argument that me sitting through ads
| for 99 cents worth of value to the streamer is different
| than a direct transaction? The money per stream is still
| changing hands, Be it from my hands or an advertisers to
| the streamer and then the content producer.
|
| Because of modern profiling you could make the argument
| that the no sign up services are tracking who watches
| what at a household level (shadow subscriptions). But
| that does not change the fact that in a pure ad based
| model If I dont watch no one gets paid...
|
| Regardless of who is paying for the view, myself to
| streaming service, an andversiser or sponsor, me to a
| theater... if the product isnt quality no money changes
| hands. This is in direct contrast to streaming service
| where the ideal customer pays and does not watch (or
| watches the minimum)... where consumption reduces profit.
| thfuran wrote:
| >Are you making the argument that me sitting through ads
| for 99 cents worth of value to the streamer is different
| than a direct transaction?
|
| Are you seriously trying to argue that it isn't? You're
| basically arguing that making waffles at home is exactly
| the same thing as getting pancakes from IHOP because the
| farmers get paid either way, never mind that the meal
| isn't actually the same and neither are the parties
| involved.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| If you pay $5 or $2 to watch a film and I choose to pick
| the no money ad version what IS the distinction.
|
| Nothing really if we both enjoy the content. If it sucks
| however we both have choices. I move on to the next thing
| and enjoy it. IF you move on, then you're paying again,
| if you stay your funding shitty content and wasting time.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| good news, now we have paid + ads, just like cable
| thinkyfish wrote:
| Why do we tolerate this? Shouldn't there be consumer
| protections that say that if you don't use the service, you
| shouldn't have to pay for that month? Where do we get our
| refunds?
| Animats wrote:
| Can you get a Blu-Ray player that doesn't have an Internet
| connection?
| mrandish wrote:
| My Panasonic BR player has an internet connection but I've
| never connected it and it works just fine (I updated the
| firmware once from a USB stick).
|
| I'm pretty sure it works better not connected than if it was
| connected because prior experience with disc players which
| wanted to be online was they would boot slower and play discs
| slower due to doing online DRM updates, content checks and load
| movie studio web pages containing nothing but promos and ads -
| all while providing no actual end-user value from being online.
| nsagent wrote:
| I also recently ditched the streaming services I was paying for
| (Netflix, Youtube, and Max). I'd love a recommendation for an
| external Blu-ray drive for ripping media onto a streaming server.
|
| That said, I recently discovered Tubi, which is completely free,
| has a crazy amount of shows and movies, and ad blockers seem to
| work fine. Re-watching Andromeda while I finish up my
| dissertation. It's been great fun.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| With regular Blurays it's pretty easy to find a good USB3 model
| on Amazon for MakeMKV. I have the prior model of the Pioneer
| BDR-XD08 and it works great - the current model uses USB-C
| even!
|
| On the other hand UHD/4K drives require flashing firmware to
| get them to rip with MakeMKV and manufacturers have been
| seemingly patching them. I've not given it an honest try yet.
| andsoitis wrote:
| How much do you pay per Blu-ray Disc? When you compare to the
| subscriptions you cancelled, are you getting more value for
| money?
| wtcactus wrote:
| For me the straw that broke the camel's back was Amazon Prime
| wasting billions in shows that almost no one wants to see (Rings
| of Power, anyone?) and now realizing they have to show me ads to
| stop them from hemorrhaging money.
|
| No, I've gone back to pirating everything with Radarr, Sonarr,
| Jellyfin and the likes. Enough is enough.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have for while wondered how have many of these media
| productions in general come so inefficient. Both in video and
| gaming. Massive teams, massive expenditures and content is well
| mediocre or just outright bad or critically flawed...
|
| How come more of stuff is not made more efficiently, with all
| the computers and such?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Amazon Prime wasting billions in shows that almost no one
| wants to see
|
| And remember that is money that is coming from their customers.
| Thats why it is important for streaming companies to use the
| money to invest in content that people want to watch and
| produced at a price that makes sense.
|
| If you make a bet that turns out bad, it is better to cancel
| the series rather than continue to waste subscribers' money on
| another season.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| On the flip side, that resulted in great shows coming out like
| Too Old to Die Young, which would have never otherwise come
| out.
|
| The net result of what you're asking for is crap reality tv and
| a million more generic superhero movies.
| BryantD wrote:
| The boutique Blu-ray market has become fairly well served in the
| last five years. I suspect this may partially be because of the
| pandemic, but it seems to be sustaining.
|
| Most people have heard of Criterion and of course they're still
| going strong. But there are easily a dozen labels of various
| sizes dedicated to physical media these days. Arrow is one.
| Vinegar Syndrome tends to focus on more exploitative titles plus
| they act as distributor for many smaller labels. Severin does a
| lot of horror. The UK's Radiance Video is carving out an
| interesting niche in more obscure genre offerings. Kino Lorber
| has a lot of classics. And so on, and so on.
|
| I don't know the financials behind this but a lot of the print
| runs seem to be around 3K copies and many of these labels have
| sustained for a few years now. Radiance and Vinegar Syndrome both
| have subscription programs which probably help with
| predictability. Some people buy these for the movies, some
| because they're collectors, and some for both reasons.
|
| https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/blu-ray-labels-film...
| is a decent article on all of this.
| tills13 wrote:
| No, a return to piracy, unfortunately.
|
| I WANT to pay creators I just don't want to also pay for 10
| different services to watch what I want.
| costanzaDynasty wrote:
| I went full streaming in 2007 and I always knew that it would
| become this. So I made a rule that when Netflix got ads I'd bail
| on streaming altogether. I've been digital only for video games
| for a few generations so just picked a video ecosystem and buy
| content when it's at its cheapest. I'm not playing this game
| where my collection requires extra time and maintenance. If a
| company takes a license away then the won't get anymore money
| from me. There are a few video game companies that will never get
| money from me ever again. They need my money more than I need to
| give it to them.
| neilv wrote:
| I was watching Blu-rays for awhile (mostly borrowing them from a
| nearby public library branch, and also occasionally buying a
| boxed set of a good series I wanted to watch), and had a few
| problems:
|
| 1. The Blu-ray software/data design itself is a monstrosity,
| seemingly designed for hostility towards users, and otherwise
| indifferent to user experience and reliability. (DVD wasn't too
| bad by comparison, with the only offenses being DRM and the
| obnoxious unskippables mainly used for threatening police-state
| messages at the start of your entertainment.)
|
| 2. Even with a better recent Sony Blu-ray player, I frequently
| had problems playing, which slams the brakes on whatever
| entertainment you were having, and turns it into a work task or
| frustration. I guess causes probably mostly from library disc
| wear, but also a few discs that just wouldn't play due to to what
| appeared to be software problems.
|
| 3. Modern surveillance capitalism behavior by devices. Virtually
| all companies, and some non-companies, will spy on you and then
| sell/give the data to sketchy other parties, with how normalized
| this has gotten. Just finding a modern player console that was
| airgappable but should work with all/most discs was difficult,
| and it wasn't a great ergonomic solution.
|
| 4. Assembling a better media player with Linux (despite being
| very familiar with Linux tinkering) looked time-consuming, duct-
| tape-ish, and legally questionable. Out-of-box solutions I tried
| seemed piracy-oriented, with disc-playing an afterthought. And
| search hits would overwhelming be SEO pages full of BS-ing sales
| pitches to sell sketchy VPN services or occasionally trick people
| into installing malware.
|
| (Streaming, OTOH, has gotten ridiculous, with the services I've
| tried recently having mostly disposable content, and sometimes
| user-hostile UI. I canceled Amazon Prime mainly because Prime
| Video had gotten blatantly user-hostile in such ways that I think
| Bezos would've picked up that customer's chair in a meeting, and
| thrown it at people pitching the changes. But Netflix does some
| anti-user things too.)
|
| More generally, my current mode as a consumer who doesn't like to
| be violated is to pick up tablescraps of value while minimizing
| harm. While wistfully keeping an eye out for the elusive
| collaborations of people who aren't just expending their energy
| towards extracting money by making the world worse for everyone
| else.
| cmarschner wrote:
| Just lately there was an article about one of the last 50
| surviving video stores in Germany that has recently seen an
| uptick in customers. They have a huge collection of DVDs. They
| get a lot more requests for DVDs rather than Blu-rays.
|
| https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/dvd-vs-streaming-eine-d...
| bilsbie wrote:
| Has anyone looked into recreating the original Netflix with dvd
| by mail?
|
| Yes, streaming is that bad.
| mathewsanders wrote:
| I live in a smallish apartment building with 50 apartments and in
| the basement we have a little building community library where
| people put books/DVDs/Blu-ray disks that they're done with. Last
| weekend I grabbed The Goodfellas and The Dark Night and will put
| them back when I'm done.
|
| I think it would be really cool if there were ways for people to
| share their physical media because I don't have the room to
| maintain a big media library, and also don't have the energy to
| rip and store locally.
|
| I also want to add that I've changed my streaming behavior- I
| will subscribe and immediately cancel the subscription so that it
| expires after a month so that I don't end up with a bunch of
| active subscriptions that I'm not actively using.
|
| When I do subscribe I always pay for the more expensive ad-free
| versions but recently I couldn't get anything to play on
| Paramounts streaming service. After some trial and error I found
| that their "ad-free" service won't run with my blocker running on
| my router and I needed to allowlist some ad services for it work.
| That's pretty annoying.
| kibwen wrote:
| Many local libraries offer DVDs. Libraries aren't just for
| books! My local library has all sorts of weird things, e.g. I
| can borrow a cake pan for if I don't want to buy a pan just to
| make a single bundt cake.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Paramount's LG app is the worst I've used. It doesn't support
| the _pause_ feature reliably, ffs! Even browsing TV episodes is
| a jittery mess (and you must browse because it does a bad job
| of resuming a series where you left off). As soon as we 're
| done with Star Trek we're gone.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Where I live most of the charity shops are selling DVDs very
| cheaply - often 5 for PS1. So I frequently buy a handful, watch
| them, then re-donate any that I don't want to keep.
| buescher wrote:
| Do any of the media server solutions retrieve metadata (that
| someone has made, if they have) for you? I would happily rip
| discs while I do other things so I can have the convenience of
| playing from a server and the ability to pick up where I left
| off. But I draw the line at entering all the metadata and sample
| images and stuff for seasons of a TV series.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Plex can definitely grab metadata from a number of sources,
| yes.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Plex and Jellyfin definitely do. Cover art, cast lists with
| pictures, genres, as well as remembering where you're up to in
| a movie or TV series.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Yes but not quite the same way as you might have experienced
| with Music CDs. Generally when ripping a CD it does the
| metadata scraping in the program ripping the CD which then gets
| stored in the resulting files (MP3, flac etc).
|
| Media servers match based on the directory/filename then store
| the metadata in their own way (files stored with the video,
| their own database, etc).
|
| So if you're ripping your discs you'll need to name the files
| correctly, easy enough for films, a little time consuming for
| TV show episodes.
| leokennis wrote:
| I maintain an Apple TV+ subscription and that one is definitely
| worth it. For the rest I'm sailing the high seas, and whatever I
| manage to catch in my nets I enjoy via a combination of a cheap
| WebDAV server in the cloud + Infuse on all my devices.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| wait till they hear about bittorrent
| atum47 wrote:
| Values evaporates and corporations decide what's offensive or
| not. They are removing excellent episodes from great tv shows
| just because it might be considered offensive.
|
| Here's an example
| https://youtu.be/HjJQBX2Nw2A?si=awZAc-a9ZYjJv8BY
| andrew-ld wrote:
| bue-rays can evaporate even faster, thanks to drm, you often find
| yourself with players that don't allow old blue-rays or computers
| with cpu's that no longer implement some protection mechanism
| galleywest200 wrote:
| You can bypass this by ripping the Blu-Ray.
| ninkendo wrote:
| I may be crazy but I just pay to rent movies on my Apple TV. $5
| or so for a movie once it's available to rent, watch it, and I'm
| done. Essentially every movie is available this way... if its on
| blu-ray, it's on the Apple TV. If we know we're really going to
| like a movie we sometimes buy it. I know we don't really "own"
| the movies because they're DRM'd, but I feel like Apple will keep
| them available for quite a long time, essentially "forever", and
| if they ever lose the rights or shut the service down I'll feel a
| lot more justified in pirating any movies I lost access to.
|
| Decades ago my wife and I would go to blockbuster every Friday
| night and pick the movie we wanted to watch for the weekend. Now
| we do the same thing, just by streaming it instead of getting a
| physical copy and having to take it back. I have no complaints.
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