Streaming only. Sign up now for your recurring subscription. You’ll own nothing and you’ll like it, or else.
Jellyfin (Or Plex if you have to deal with the “Spouse Factor”) + Radarr and Sonarr + Usenet
Perfection, no annoying physical media to worry about, but you still get to keep the data you…uhh…“acquired”
I dunno, Jellyfin UI looks pretty good no?
It’s alright, but definitely needs a real good polish for more non-technical people.
Unless it’s changed recently however, it’s been maybe a year since I last looked
I use Stremio/Torrentio/RealDebrid, is there any practical reason to switch?
One reason is that if you ever have an issue with RealDebrid, you can expect them to post your name and email publicly online while talking a boat load of shit about you.
Why would you sign up for a piracy service with your government name and email address? RealDebrid thinks my name is Bizzle McLastname and my email address is xxweedfiendxx420@gmail.com
Still, bad business like that is definitely a compelling reason to switch regardless
Those are dependent on the relevant torrent being available and seeded
Jellyfin/Plex and Radarr/Sonarr + Usenet, you’ll have said file once downloaded for as long as you want, but requires considerably more storage space and torrents suck for older, more obscure stuff. Usenet doesn’t depend on seeders, and the big boys have something like 15+ years retention and you’ll always download them at full speed (no tons of seeders but slow upload speeds to worry about either)
So it’s a matter of personal preference
Can the storage be regular ol slow ass HDDs? That sounds pretty sweet honestly
Yes most people use HDDs for this because their speed doesn’t matter when they’re just serving up a single (or even a dozen) huge files at playback speeds. They’re slow for hosting your OS because of the quantity and speed of reads and writes but this isn’t an issue with movies, TV, or music.
I store my entire Plex library on an old Dell t420 server which has an old spinning disk raid array and it performs well enough. And if you’re able to direct play the files they you don’t even need a strong CPU when hosting Plex, you can run it on a raspberry pi.
Yea absolutely, people have ran it off Raspberry Pis and external USB drives lol
I use same solution as you having tried emby and sonarr etc. the biggest problem got my family and me was searching what to watch and adding it rrr services, we wanted to have netflix but quite instant, not just to watch ( as you might have to wait a while be at 5 or 10 mins on torrent) but also browse, there is so much to watch what should I download, so streamio helped me there, now how to get there media, well debrid services gave us instant access, so it was quite a easy solution.
That’s what I like about Stremio, it feels like any other streaming service. Maybe I need both…
I’ve only used Jellyfin, what does Plex do better for the non-expert user?
Biggest upside of Plex for me is the fact that you can set up secure streaming from anywhere with basically a single click. With Jellyfin, that is much more manual. Besides that, I think some people may like that Plex has its own set of TV Shows & movies to stream, though I’m certain that those are ad supported. (Haven’t used that feature & have moved to Jellyfin)
If you like Jellyfin, stick with it. Plex kept screwing up requiring me to wipe the database. And the people who run it keep adding shit nobody wants.
Just a more polished interface, solid stability, real good transcoding and a client on just about everything that installs an app lmao
If you and everyone you care about being on it have been fine with Jellyfin, then there’s absolutely no reason to switch
i dont have a desktop or a server that can run this stuff constantly yet. but is usenet still good for the “discussions?” i thought there were better free versions.
If you have the time to seed a lot then private torrent trackers can be just as effective for finding your ahem… linux ISOs without the cost. Usenet is most useful for people who are worried about repercussions from their gov for seeding (as many count this as “distribution” and it carries more weight than simply downloading)
I would be torrenting with a VPN with multihop, and seeding is a bit iffy in my country becuase you cannot be charged here for downloading, but you can be charged with seeding.
Usenet is a bit more work to setup than bittorrent, but you will be able to find lots of movies and TV shows there without having to seed anything. Unfortunately, you have to pay for access to good indexers if you want to download more than a few files per day.
As far as I know, there’s still a strong but small community on Usenet for discussions still
As far as server/desktop stuffs, many have had decent success running them on things like old laptops and raspberry pis to decent success. Won’t be as powerful, but if it’s just you and a spouse and maybe kids or something it should be just fine
someone was actually selling some older dell blade servers on kijiji for 120. if it doesn’t go down i might buy one
You sure you don’t mean rack servers? The blade chassis is pretty expensive and power hungry.
If it’s an Rx30 or newer that’s fine. Rx20 or older is meh. M anything is the modular blades, and that needs the big chassis to be useful.
sorry i meant rack. I was looking at a blade as well and got that messed up. i have to check the post again.
Just get an old optiplex in Amazon renewed
Yar har, fiddle-dee-dee.
I genuinely believe more people would have kept uaing physical media if they made it more convenient just to pop in a movie and play it.
Everytime I put in a 4k blu Ray, there’s like 40 seconds of useless loading screens, unskippabble warnings, menu animations, and other bullshit. It feels like the old days of massively overcooked multimedia “experiences” in the worst way possible.
I ripped our physical media, and the experience is way better. I wish I could just buy and download a .mkv or .avi or whatever.
You can rent (until your service decides to stop selling that content) and download a DRM-locked copy only playable in one app that’s 1/5 the bitrate. Is that not good enough for you?
What if we include a full screen ad whenever you pause. You’re not watching anyways, what’s the harm?
Oh, also, did you hear about our other content and services? We would like to remind you of all of those every time you start to watch something - we don’t consider them advertisements, just important feature updates, so you can’t remove them.
Aand… you HAVE to be connected to the internet to watch, because we made this really cool AI thing that watches literally everything you do, sends it to our servers, and sometimes happens to recognize which characters are on screen so you can access their IMDB pages through your TV while watching the movie for some reason, like that’s a normal thing people want to interrupt their movie experience to do.
Mmm, when you put it that way…
Best we can do is enshitification. Hope your standards steadily lower throughout your life.
40 seconds?
More like 10 minutes
For real though
The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!
And it’s a great way to make sure you get an up to date ad snuck in there.
I still like physical media, but every corner of everything just has to be jam packed with ad crap and other distractors now
I have never actually seen that happen
I prefer my 10min of unskippable download time and watching it in 4k with a proper bitrate.
in better formats (mkv) you can start playing before download has completed. you may need to have the last part of the time, but I’m not sure about that
4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.
Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.
But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).
I have a bunch of uhd discs that are full of meandering loading crap. The HD Blu Ray era was worse, and that’s what I think drove people away. It’s obviously too little too late on the newer stuff.
And five minutes of ads.
That and DVDs were like £3 most of the time. I’d always be picking up stuff just for the hell of it. Got shelves full of them.
Blu-rays and especially 4K Blu-rays were pretty much always full price of £20. That’s at least a whole month of any streaming service and sometimes two. Plus I can barely tell any difference between streaming and disc, especially on the picture quality. The audio is more noticeable, but not worth £20 a movie.
The current streaming services will slowly decline as well until they realise they need to switch to a music industry model where nearly everything is on every service. I installed Jellyfin ages ago, and the experience of just having one service to look through is so much better than dipping into half a dozen apps to see if any of them have what you want to watch.
I know what I’m after as an experience, it’s up to them if they want to provide it at a reasonable price.
The DRM on Blu-Ray was too harsh so I skipped the format entirely. If I couldn’t put a disc into my HTPC (Linux) and press “play”, I wasn’t interested.
Funny that the DRM didn’t even really prevent ripping the disks… A few different players were hacked to leak decryption keys and mess with the firmware to allow backing up to a PC (or piracy if that’s your thing). I have all my media stored locally because I can’t stand having shows being removed from streaming services.
I’ve only ever bought one single blue ray disk, and that was the final venture brothers movie, in support of Jackson & Doc
Go Team Venture!
We also would have accepted:
Rigby tax:
Lol, i kept foolishly building HTPCs with bluray drives hoping that someday i could actually play my bluray disks…
You can now, if you have the right drive (some don’t even need to be libredrive flashed), a few libraries and a keylist in .config. At least with VLC, mpv, mplayer.
Yeah, it sucks. But good enough to convert the video to a run-of-the-mill format.
In a different, better universe HD-DVD won.
We got a few, and then I ended up getting a Bluray drive and flashing libredrive on it, and now I can rip Bluray in full quality. I’m probably going to go load up on more Bluray discs because ripping works well.
I don’t have an HTPC, I just stream my videos from my NAS to my TV, and I do all my ripping on Linux.
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The end is near for physical media for video.
I wish there were more/better/good choices for streaming video. We already have decent solutions for audio, games and books/audiobooks, yet video seems to be lagging behind, hugely.
That’s because there is a strong tradition of rights distribution for movies and TV being totally fucked up, and it has been since day 1 of both industries. Brought to you by the same motherfuckers who gave you Hollywood Accountingtm, where a movie that cost $100 million to make and raked in $500 million at the box office somehow “didn’t turn a profit” and magically they don’t have to pay royalties to any of their writers or actors.
Yeah, I’d buy a lot more if there was a DRM-free way to buy media. Bluray is a pain to rip and I hate having to deal with discs.
But no, media companies are intent on keeping piracy easier than legitimate purchases. I go through the effort to rip my discs, but many won’t bother.
That’s basically what I want, and what should exist. File sizes aren’t much different to modern day games, people are also willing to pay if the quality is there.
Yup, give me something like GOG, but for movies, and I’ll buy a bunch.
Streaming isn’t the middle ground in my opinion, rather it’s unrestricted downloadable files that you can then handle however. Streaming provides some convenience but no consistent access (see various shows being delisted or shuffled between services).
Companies would love if everyone forgot having home video, in the sense of owning copies of movies and shows they always have access to and ability to watch whenever.
Yes, I should have clarified that as non-physical/digital media. Current platforms are a rough equivalent of renting movies.
Especially since stuff you want to watch changes services all the time.
It’s like if your DVDs of the star wars trilogy got replaced by the Brady bunch and then told you to pay more for that privilege.
Jellyfin and Plex: “What am i? Chopped liver‽”
what decent solutions do we have for audio and books?
Books: a variety of ways to purchase, with products a uniform quality. Yes, the file sizes are tiny, but it’s true, they are as they should be, they are adjustable to the device you use, and have extra - useful - features because of digitalisation.
Audio: a variety of services offering pretty much the same stuff. Spotify is basic but works. Tidal is higher quality. My disappointment comes from the fact that it is still region-dependent, I cannot sign up for Tidal where I am. There is also stuff like Bandcamp for those who want to be ‘closer’.
well i’d like to buy books from a source that’s not amazon or with DRM. bandcamp is nice becuase i get the actual audio files, i dont want streaming. I avoid spotify and garbage like that. I’m looking at buying CD’s and ripping them becuase i don’t know how else to buy music where i get the audio files for me to store.
You can buy music in .flac on Qobuz.
sweet. thanks for the rec!
Happy to help!
ok
lol…
First their phones, now this? Does LG only want to be known as the company that makes great TVs and shit appliances?
Their washing machines are pretty decent.
We have an LG tumble dryer. By far the best dryer we’ve owned.
Yup, we’ve had an LG washer dryer pair for ~10 years, and the dryer has needed no maintenance at all, whereas the washer has only needed fixes to the relay board. So one repair on the washer and none on the dryer for ~10 years, that’s pretty decent!
We’ll be replacing it soon because the relay board is acting up again and it’s not worth the $150 or so and an hour of time to fix it again since something else is likely to break soonish (probably the pump motor of I had to guess).
I’ve heard horror stories about Samsung and some other brands, so I think we did well.
No way someone can make an appliance worse then samsung
Depends on the appliance. For example, LG dishwashers have good track records.
Different manufacturers excel at making different things. Don’t shop by brand, that’s how you get stuck with a lemon. Read the product reviews and expect different brands to be better at different things.
Read the product reviews…
better renew that subscription to Consumer Reports to make sure the reviews aren’t fake.
If you want to real dirt, search from reviews from appliance repair people.
Ah, where’s the repository of their reviews?
They do way more than that, that’s just the consumer facing stuff.
Lol go to Korea and see all the other consumer facing stuff. LG shampoo if you want.
They make screens on contract for many electronic devices.
Literally what they’ve been since the 1940s… Shitty black and white Goldstar TVs from your local pharmacy.
Have one of their smaller model washers for the past ten years. Zero complaints.
You don’t mind the stench? Their washers are notoriously stinky because water gets trapped where it shouldn’t. I had to clean mine every week.
I have a small front loader, F12B8NDA
I leave the door on it open between washing cycles.
It’s a non-iot device that I can program to start the wash cycle at specific times, E.g. Load it in the evening but start at 4am so it’s ready by 7am. Yes, cycles are long but it’s super efficient with both electricity and water use. It’s also very quiet even during spin.
It plays a cute chime when finished.
The arrrs are often rips of physical media, so they’ll be setting sail too I guess
I’m curious what the landscape will be like in 10 years. Hard to push 8k, HDR, and all the other TV gizmos when the only source media available is 3GB ‘UHD’ movies from streaming services that have been stomped all over with compression.
Hopefully original quality versions of things will stay available. I was pretty hyped to rewatch Westworld when the 4K HDR bluray seasons came out. Soooo much better quality than streaming.
Me too but I just don’t see how that’ll be possible without something physical to put it on since studios will likely never give us straight digital files without a bunch of DRM hoops to jump through.
Perhaps they will give us digital files but tied to some service like Amazon or VUDU where you can only watch it through their app after purchasing a copy for as long as the company still holds distribution rights. This has some major pitfalls for the average consumer though since your purchases will be locked into a specific app with some shitty media interface and they’ll only be temporary as companies often holds the rights for a specific period of time.
Yeah, for movies and TV shows in original quality, physical media makes a lot of sense due to the size. I know I’ve been able to buy lossless music as raw FLAC file downloads, which has been really nice.
The format was made in such a way that you needed very specific specs to watch on PC. They killed the format themselves.
It’s the thing Sony does best.
Blu-ray wasn’t designed by Sony, they just participated in the licensing pool. Sony designed UMD, those tiny disks used by PlayStation Portable.
Literally just started collecting blu rays again because I’m sick of the shitty selection streaming platforms have. Good thing my PS3 still runs perfect haha.
I recently bought a second PC Blu-ray writer just in case this would happen. Lucky me. I should be good for the next 10 years.
Looks like they’re still available for now in the UK but at inflated prices sent from America
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B079LTC6ML
The above supports UHD and is easy to… adapt for legitimate ripping of your Blu-ray. For backup purposes of course.
I think Panasonic still make some too but I’ve used LG ones for years.
For internal desktop drives, I have the WH16NS40. After flashing some open firmware on it, it works perfectly for playing and ripping BRs. Looks like I’ll be picking up a spare in case this one dies.
The MakeMKV forum has a lot of good tips and instructions on selecting and configuring BluRay drives.
Thanks for the rec. I’ve been using the BP60NB10 for about a year now since I didn’t have a PC with 5.25" slots at the time, but seeing as how the WH16NS40 is currently 68 bucks on Amazon, it’s tempting to grab a couple as backups.
I’m surprised that usb Blu-ray drives are as expensive as they are still, low supply and mostly only niche demand I guess? Was hoping to get one to make some copies of my physical media, but spending $100ish for a usb drive hurts haha
I guess now’s the time to pull the trigger
Get one that works with libredrive so you can rip at full quality and speed through Makemkv.
Yeah, thank you, I’ve seen the LG BP60NB10 recommended a lot for makemkv, ordered one of Amazon, but they’ve been temporarily out of stock for a few days. The article doesn’t mention usb drives, so I think those are safe for a while, at least.
It might be permanently out of stock… cries
What’s the make and model number? The link is funky if your AMZN location isn’t set to UK
BP60NB10, though that may be different by region.
Also had just as much success, including with UHD BD, with the older BP50NB40.
im torn. as someone with a massive personal library, bluray was a non-starter. they never fleshed it out to the storage densities i would have required for my library. solid state storage has come so far now, it just makes sense.
someday i’ll just be able to hand a single drive with my 100tb of content to my kids. if youre concerned about ‘owning’ shit. start powning it.
Inb4 drive failure
3-2-1 backup rule
meh. i have triple redundancy including an offline set. cheap storage means cheap redundancy,
It’s $100 for 4TB right now.
But once you factor in RAID and alternating offsite backups, it’s really $400 for 4TB.
I go through all the older stuff I pulled from the internet. A lot of it can’t be found now.
There’s currently little reason to choose SSDs over HDDs when you’re talking about bulk storage for media. HDDs have plenty of R/W speed for this purpose and are a fraction of the price. New, you can buy 8TB drives for around $100 or used/refurbished (from somewhere like serverpartdeals.com) you can buy 14TB for $150 or even 20TB+ for $250.
My raid has an nvme bcache on it, so it’s still fairly quick.
$100USD is just what it costs in Australia, because we get screwed for price over here.
yep, dirt cheap. all about perspective. my first hd was 40mb and cost 250$
e. oh, and you can get solid used 4tbs in bulk for ~60$ now
Haha remember when CD burners came out and a $5 CD-R had the capacity of a $200 HDD?
The kid with access to a CD burner was the king of the playground.
Eh, you can do off-site backups a bit cheaper than that, just bring a drive in to work and leave it in your desk. Boom, off-site backups for the cost of a drive. No need to alternate anything, just bring the drive home every few months to re-sync. Or keep that drive at a relative’s/friend’s house if work doesn’t work for whatever reason.
I’m currently using a RAID mirror only, but I’m planning on doing the “bring your drive to work day” thing, and I think it can work really well. The drive should last something like 5 years (or more!), especially if you’re only spinning it up a few times/year.
This is the best way. My locker at work has my offsite backup on an encrypted+compressed portable drive. I have two drives that alternate offsite so they are never all in the one spot.
I never completely stopped collecting conventional DVDs specifically because of the Blu-Ray DRM scheme and it’s need for an external decryption key. The few blu-rays I have are either from DVD+Blu-Ray bundles or because standard DVD wasn’t an option.
Surely we have that permanently cracked by now?
I know there have long been workarounds but I don’t know if there’s ever been a “crack” per se.
These assholes are going to make books impossible to read next. We are going full Fahrenheit 451.
Just picked up 20 TB of storage on a black Friday deal.
Doing a huge upgrade from my 2TB NAS. I’m starting my personal media archive, music, movies, shows, anime, Ebooks, games, YouTube content.
It’s the only defense against the scumbag corpos. The will continue to take more content away without warning, and make what they allow us to still have, worse quality and more expensive to watch.
Storage is cheap, libraries are your friend, fight the power. ✊
As much as I hate that this is happening, I think once you turn to digital media, it’s incredibly difficult to go back. The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
That said, if you’re into movies specifically, i’d personally still go the route of buying a disk, and ripping it to your local storage, but that’s both expensive, and inconvenient in terms of space
I’d have no issue with digital media if there was a way to actually own it. Everything is either streaming only or ridden with DRM that can only be played within their app. Blurays, assuming you can decrypt its DRM bs, are the last bastion of media ownership left.
You’ve essentially described exactly what the issue is. All these companies want you to continue subscribing, so you owning anything isn’t in their interest
“If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.”
- A bunch of pirates, probably
Yup, which is why I have a Bluray drive with libredrive flashed so I can rip full quality UHD and store the raw video on my NAS.
The convenience of having your stuff at a click of a button is just too good.
Except when you go to find your stuff, discover it’s not there, and yearn to be able to just stuff a DVD in a player.
That’s why I ripped my media onto my NAS. I have the physical media as a backup, but I don’t have to actually deal with discs. No more scratched discs is amazing.
You can still get the best of both worlds with piracy. Click of a button to watch media and it’ll never disappear unless you want it to (or drive failures).
Oh, absolutely! But I do feel you’re trading a level of convenience for the privilege (and what a privilege!) - even something as simple as pirating one movie is already a much bigger hurdle than getting a Netflix subscription, for instance. Let alone setting up a Jellyfin server, backups, getting external connections / reverse proxying going, and so on.
Storage is cheap for what you get.
A DVD movie ripped to MKV is 3-5GB.
A 12 terabyte drive is ~ $100. That’s… 2400 movies (if my math is right). My current movie collection is about 300 movies, 500GB of storage (I’ve ripped some stuff to MP4).
Having a backup of 12TB would cost perhaps $100/yr (Im paying less than that for backup of my 4TB storage).
Alternatively you can replicate your library with friends and family, pretty simple to do. Drop a mini pc with a drive in it running Kodi/Casaos/Freedombox, whatever, behind the TV at everyone’s house, for less than 20w of power you have a replicated media player.
Sure a DVD is only 3-5GB but a UHD Blu-Ray is 50-100 GB
You’re misunderstanding. I’m not talking about drive space, i’m talking about the space the physical disk cases take up
But getting a DVD just to rip it is very inconvenient. Not only can there be scarcity issues with out-of-print disks, but also you’d either deal with the disks you never use lying around, throw them out or bother reselling, which I’d prefer not to do. I’d prefer having just hard drives of my media.
Commenting as a reminder to revisit.
You can just use the “Save” function which is the Star icon near the post Title instead of cluttering up the comment section with these kinds of ersatz “bookmarks”
