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.
> I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this,
That's why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That's fine, and that's why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that "knows how to do that king of things" for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It's fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You'll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that's what democratic societies are, after all. If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.
I agree with you and unfortunately if me and some friends decide to rip our media to a server and share it, there’s some men with guns that might decide to interfere with our cooperation.
In practice I see plenty of people sharing access to plex servers, but it is unsettling that someone could somewhat arbitrarily be subject to violent interference for sharing media with friends.
lol - just out of curiosity: are you doing this yourself? Provide tech support to all your aunties and uncles, cousins, friends etc (already bad enough - now formalized) then you add installation and maintenance (including on all their devices), keeping everything updated etc. And having to troubleshoot every single problem they run into.
“make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that.
It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I buy Blu-ray disks exactly because I watch most things only once, because the one time I watch them I want to watch them in the best quality available. What you do with the Blu-ray after watching is a different question.
I did something similar with all my kids movies. I just ripped their dvds because they were destroying them every few months and I probably bought Madagascar three times before ripping it.
The UX is better than any streaming service.
Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.
> 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 ;)
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.
IANAL but things are still like they were with DeCSS. One of the problems the DMCA made is breaking media copy protection (like makemkv) is separate from why (making the legal backup copy)
> 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 à la copie privée), 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!
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.
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.
Isn't this a device waiting to happen? A small form factor PC with a blu ray reader that lets you watch blu rays. But it also rips them (ideally while playing!) such that you never need to put the disc in again. Slap a couple 20T drives in there, charge $1k for it. Don't even let it connect to the internet.
That would be cool but I suspect a legal nightmare.
It's one thing to have a personal collection of movies that you painstakingly ripped on your own, but if you were to try and sell a machine that automatically circumvented DRM, I cannot imagine that I wouldn't get sued and/or arrested by multiple entities.
This of course, makes me sad, because it would be nice to have a system that wasn't just a nerdy custom setup.
It exists or existed for high end home theaters years ago. I remember seeing it - something like $20k base starting price. Not sure what happened to it - high end $100k+ home theater is batshit insane.
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
>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.
Obligatory IANAL.
You should be in the clear (including the circumvention of DRM) since all you're doing is making an archival copy for your own personal use.
> ... I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse.
I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :).
Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly.
Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store.
Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup.
I tried JellyFin but I cannot get Dolby Digital sound to play to my Denon receiver. Plex handles this fine on the same speaker setup and configuration and film. The last time I tried this was maybe 2 months ago.
I play videos on LibreElec using the Jellyfin plug-in and everything seems to work fine. The audio signal goes to the TV via HDMI, then from TV to the sound system via optical cable. Are you connecting directly from the player to the sound system?
My plan is to make backup copies of the DVDs whole, so I have all of the features and extras, and am certain that I can verify that they are the exact blu-rays that other people have. We don't exactly have a list of hashes of the entire contents of the discs, but the volume keys will decrypt the data, and there's checksums on that, so we should be able to verify all the way down the chain.
(If anyone knows how to do the actual checking, I'm all ears - I'm an Exact Audio Copy guy for my CDs)
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.
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!
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.
Same here, except my collection is about an order of magnitude smaller. Seems absolutely dystopian to me to have to maintain a continuous relationship with some company to re-watch your favorite movies.
Unless your collection gets as big as yours you don't really need to maintain a server - a harddrive full of media files works pretty well.
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.
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?
Piracy is "wrong" in the context of the social contract we're taught from birth: treat others nice and they'll treat us nice. It's the underpinning of our success as the human species.
Corporations are not humans and do not honor the social contract.
> Piracy is "wrong" in the context of the social contract we're taught from birth: treat others nice and they'll treat us nice.
Hard disagree: telling me what I can and cannot share with third parties is YOU not being nice. Me sharing things with third parties does not involve you at all.
Copyright (in the US) is not a moral framework but a ulitarian one - intended as a way to incentivize production of creative and scientific works by intruducing entirely artificial scarcity. But that's just a handwavy justification for the invasion of our rights that is accepted without question not because there is data backing it up but because that's what people are used to. In reality the need for copyright is questionable at best as humans have been creating long before copyright was invented. It is also questionable that we need to keep creating new content at the current rate when we still have (or could have without copyright) the entirety of creations from human history at our disposal.
I refuse to watch ads and would sooner change my lifestyle to exclude watching TV or youtube than watch ads. It is blatant psychological manipulation. Fortunately there are technological means to avoid ads and get to watch the things I want to watch, so I will continue to do that for now.
I like youtube premium because it is ethically correct to pay for the cost of the content I watch + a reasonable profit for everyone involved, and youtube manages to be a highly centralised location for everything I care about video wise and I spend about 20hrs a week of watch time. I'm not paying for a billion different services Disney, HBO, netflix, blah, blah just to watch maybe a few hrs of content a month on each (at most). The value proposition of all streaming services besides youtube premium is atrocious.
I don't mind paying for a subscription, or watching ads (though prefer to have sub option).
What I do mind is: suited executives shaking hands for exclusivity meaning that if someone wants access to everything they have to use a dozen streaming services. I also hate that you'll pay a subscription for a streaming service and then within that there are additional subscriptions to that service's partners so you end up paying for the base service + Y additional ones. Or paying for streaming and having a selection of the content still cost money to rent. And don't get me started on things being available only in certain regions (also due to the stinking hand shaking).
EU needs to ban exclusivity contracts imo. If Apple make their own content, sure, that could only be on Apple TV. But if Netflix shake hands with HBO on something to make it only available on Netflix...that sort of thing should be illegal.
>You know whats wrong, you price gouging me for 15 services that are all awful.
No one is price gouging. You can easily survive without watching ANY media. You can also easily only pay for the exact media that you want at the exact time you want. You can also easily pay for less than 15 services, even just 1, anytime you want.
People seem to like to complain about not being able to afford a luxury, which is more affordable than it has ever been in the history of media.
Edit: to reply to comment below, consider the price for 1 month of the subscription to be the price of the media.
Edit 2: the root cause of all these complaints is excessive copyright terms. Make copyright expire after 10 years, and there will be plenty of streaming competition.
>> You can also easily only pay for the exact media that you want at the exact time you want.
Great where is the three body problem available for its fair market value.
Wait it isnt, it's locked behind a monthly subscription.
How about the bear... nope locked up in another service.
I would happily pay fair value for these items. Marking them up like its blockbuster new release shelf circa 2000 or in 15 different pay per view services is ... dumb.
This is why folks stole cable and got cracked boxes. This is why piracy ran rampant in music for so long. Video has yet to catch up and its leading to a new round of piracy...
> No one is price gouging. You can easily survive without watching ANY media. You can also easily only pay for the exact media that you want at the exact time you want.
It's 2024, we shouldn't be content with only what's needed for "survival" and we shouldn't accept being exploited in order to have access to art and culture. With modern technology and nearly free and instant global distribution art and culture should be increasingly made more accessible to everyone, but instead the paywalls grow ever higher and arbitrary restrictions are put in place.
Sadly we can't always pay for the exact media that want. The amount of lost works is increasing. Streaming services are pulling content and refusing to release it on physical media making it unavailable, and they are censoring content making unedited works unavailable at any price (at least legally). Expect the problem to get worse.
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.
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.
Amusingly I have requested and received over a hundred dvds and some books from my library, but am still on the waiting list for an ebook of one book that I already got in hardcover and read.
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.
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.
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…
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 €1 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.
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.
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.
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.
There are tons and tons of films on disc but not on Apple TV or any streaming service. Just off the top of my head: Hal Hartley's "The Unbelievable Truth", along with almost every other Hal Hartley film.
How do you “rent to own” for $5? That’s usually just the “rent for 48 hours” (which is totally fine, I’ll pay to rent digitally and then buy the Blu-ray if I want to see it again: anything watched twice will probably be watched many times.)
That’s probably the most realistic way I’d lose access, yes. But so far no competing set top box has been able to beat the ATV in the overall experience, so I’ve been continuing to use it by choice.
Every time I go to a friends house and experience how terrible all the competing bargain bin chromecast/shield/fireTV shit is, watching every button press take seconds to result in a screen update, taking ages to type in anything (vs ATV’s dictation or just the built in remote app on iOS) I feel more and more confident in this. The current gen ATV is ridiculously responsive and quick by comparison.
Apple has apps for other platforms that at least allow playback of stuff you’ve bought, even if you can’t buy more. I’ve watched mad men through on a Fire TV on Apple TV, worked fine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Except there is a reason we still have supermarkets and suppliers don't all run their own shops even when they have to compete with store brand products.
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.
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.
Where I live most of the charity shops are selling DVDs very cheaply - often 5 for £1. So I frequently buy a handful, watch them, then re-donate any that I don't want to keep.
That is a great way of doing things. I did this when I was younger and found tons of movies I would’ve never run into on a streaming website - especially Hong Kong and Japanese movies from the 90s
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
That's why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That's fine, and that's why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that "knows how to do that king of things" for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It's fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You'll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that's what democratic societies are, after all. If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.
In practice I see plenty of people sharing access to plex servers, but it is unsettling that someone could somewhat arbitrarily be subject to violent interference for sharing media with friends.
I'm also the person they usually call with any kind of tech support questions.
“make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that.
It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.
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.
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.
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.
The UX is better than any streaming service.
Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.
Only real maintenance I’ve done is replace the DVD rips with Blu-ray rips slowly over time as I figure out which ones are most watched.
Jellyfin supports multiple users, she can mail you some disks ;)
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.
This should be the tag line for those of us building homelabs for little to no practical reason.
At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), 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!
https://cyber.harvard.edu/media/files/eucd.pdf
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.
It's one thing to have a personal collection of movies that you painstakingly ripped on your own, but if you were to try and sell a machine that automatically circumvented DRM, I cannot imagine that I wouldn't get sued and/or arrested by multiple entities.
This of course, makes me sad, because it would be nice to have a system that wasn't just a nerdy custom setup.
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
Obligatory IANAL.
You should be in the clear (including the circumvention of DRM) since all you're doing is making an archival copy for your own personal use.
Legalese:
* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117
* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :).
Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly.
Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store.
Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup.
0. https://www.kaleidescape.com/
Is this something you are able to work around?
(If anyone knows how to do the actual checking, I'm all ears - I'm an Exact Audio Copy guy for my CDs)
But the others could just put the disk in the reader, without needing any server. Is it so inconvinient?
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.
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!
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.
Unless your collection gets as big as yours you don't really need to maintain a server - a harddrive full of media files works pretty well.
> Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore.
Wait what - since when?
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.
Corporations are not humans and do not honor the social contract.
Hard disagree: telling me what I can and cannot share with third parties is YOU not being nice. Me sharing things with third parties does not involve you at all.
Copyright (in the US) is not a moral framework but a ulitarian one - intended as a way to incentivize production of creative and scientific works by intruducing entirely artificial scarcity. But that's just a handwavy justification for the invasion of our rights that is accepted without question not because there is data backing it up but because that's what people are used to. In reality the need for copyright is questionable at best as humans have been creating long before copyright was invented. It is also questionable that we need to keep creating new content at the current rate when we still have (or could have without copyright) the entirety of creations from human history at our disposal.
I like youtube premium because it is ethically correct to pay for the cost of the content I watch + a reasonable profit for everyone involved, and youtube manages to be a highly centralised location for everything I care about video wise and I spend about 20hrs a week of watch time. I'm not paying for a billion different services Disney, HBO, netflix, blah, blah just to watch maybe a few hrs of content a month on each (at most). The value proposition of all streaming services besides youtube premium is atrocious.
What I do mind is: suited executives shaking hands for exclusivity meaning that if someone wants access to everything they have to use a dozen streaming services. I also hate that you'll pay a subscription for a streaming service and then within that there are additional subscriptions to that service's partners so you end up paying for the base service + Y additional ones. Or paying for streaming and having a selection of the content still cost money to rent. And don't get me started on things being available only in certain regions (also due to the stinking hand shaking).
EU needs to ban exclusivity contracts imo. If Apple make their own content, sure, that could only be on Apple TV. But if Netflix shake hands with HBO on something to make it only available on Netflix...that sort of thing should be illegal.
No one is price gouging. You can easily survive without watching ANY media. You can also easily only pay for the exact media that you want at the exact time you want. You can also easily pay for less than 15 services, even just 1, anytime you want.
People seem to like to complain about not being able to afford a luxury, which is more affordable than it has ever been in the history of media.
Edit: to reply to comment below, consider the price for 1 month of the subscription to be the price of the media.
Edit 2: the root cause of all these complaints is excessive copyright terms. Make copyright expire after 10 years, and there will be plenty of streaming competition.
Great where is the three body problem available for its fair market value.
Wait it isnt, it's locked behind a monthly subscription.
How about the bear... nope locked up in another service.
I would happily pay fair value for these items. Marking them up like its blockbuster new release shelf circa 2000 or in 15 different pay per view services is ... dumb.
This is why folks stole cable and got cracked boxes. This is why piracy ran rampant in music for so long. Video has yet to catch up and its leading to a new round of piracy...
The DOJ went after apple but we cant reflect on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....
It's 2024, we shouldn't be content with only what's needed for "survival" and we shouldn't accept being exploited in order to have access to art and culture. With modern technology and nearly free and instant global distribution art and culture should be increasingly made more accessible to everyone, but instead the paywalls grow ever higher and arbitrary restrictions are put in place.
Sadly we can't always pay for the exact media that want. The amount of lost works is increasing. Streaming services are pulling content and refusing to release it on physical media making it unavailable, and they are censoring content making unedited works unavailable at any price (at least legally). Expect the problem to get worse.
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.
Far cry from what they used to be, and, well, you're paying for it anyway via taxes so silly to not use it.
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.
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…
Most libraries have way more than they can fit on the shelves, but if you talked with the purchasing person you might be able to work something out.
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 €1 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.
If I really like it or watch it more than twice, I’ll get the Blu-ray or 4K Blu-ray.
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.
And by ripping I of course mean "create a private backup".
"No termination date. I didn't know how long we had together... Who does?"
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.
> If we know we’re really going to like a movie we sometimes buy it.
I meant buying instead of renting in this case.
Renting costs $5-ish, the “buy” option is often $20.
Every time I go to a friends house and experience how terrible all the competing bargain bin chromecast/shield/fireTV shit is, watching every button press take seconds to result in a screen update, taking ages to type in anything (vs ATV’s dictation or just the built in remote app on iOS) I feel more and more confident in this. The current gen ATV is ridiculously responsive and quick by comparison.
Following the example of Hollywood which forcefully split content studios and cinemas would create a much much healthier market.
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.
So never then.
(Also if this is circa 10 years ago every study suggests piracy is lower today than it was then.)
Physical media isn't always an alternative either. Movies usually still come out on physical media, but TV shows increasingly often don't.
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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.