This is not only a good way to handle media, it’s one of the best.

It blows my goddamn mind that TV manufacturers didn’t develop a streaming portal “endpoint” player and band together to require content from Netflix/Hulu/etc meet that standard for delivery. It’s made TVs just app boxes.

Can you just imagine being able to see what is available on all services from one interface, all at once, and then start a stream of it seamlessly from whichever you movie profile page you have access to?

Instead we have half-assed lookup apps in some TVs that even when they find it a film then just launch a separate app.

Build a good Plex library and never look back. Buy Blurays and DVDs and lookup how to automate good handbrake encoding. Once you know how, you can honest to god automate most of it, and in my case, I have it auto-launch and rip any disc if it detects a Blu-ray film or DVD film and drop the resulting file in my NAS storage to be sorted. Blurays drives are cheap too now, so you can buy 2-3 and dump a whole library in just a few days.

It’s odd to me that there are places that would consider that piracy

In my country (the Netherlands), to my knowledge, you have the right to do whatever you like with your copy of a movie as long as you don’t distribute it.
That includes ripping it, and putting the mkv on your personal server. That is precisely what the home-copy tax is for afterall…

deleted

I either claim the digital copy with the disc or I just pirate a copy because it’s less hassle than ripping lol.

Something something synology. Rent a disc, rip and repeat.

But don’t you know. They put a do not copy sticker on the disc. That means that you super Dooper can’t copy this disc or you’ll be in trouble.

I have considered buying or building a second NAS and putting it in my parents house for offsite backup.

To build on this: DO NOT USE AN SSD to store your data long-term! Solid-state storage has a very short, finite life-span. What you want to do is buy an even number of hard drives, plug them in long enough to copy your data to, and then unplug them and store them in a climate-controlled area. bout once a year, copy the data to a different hard drive, rinse, and repeat. Left untouched long enough, a hard drive will experience data rot. Used constantly, a hard drive will wear out. Used very sporadically, you preserve the data and the mechanical parts of the hard drive.

What are you on about? In the US at least, there’s no legal restriction on you playing 4K Blu-Ray movies on a PC.

I’ve run into a similar issue, I built a media PC for my living room which includes a 4K compatible Blu-ray drive. After spending an hour trying to flash it’s BIOS in Linux, realizing Windows would take 2 minutes to do the same task, then finally testing a disk, I find that DRM ruins that. All my 4K disks will not play because it’s a crapshoot if they do play. It will rip them no problem, but not play.

I could fix this by using Windows, however I don’t want windows on this system, it works quickly and with no annoyances in Linux.

So now I have to resort back to the PS5 as my player until I figure something out.

Nah. I’m sure there are multiple factors, as mentioned in the article, but another big thing preserving physical media is home theater enthusiasts. With a good system, the higher bitrate video and lossless audio on a UHD Blu-ray is noticable compared to most streamed content.

Buy an Xbox One Series X, or PS5. Heck, there are even stand alone 4K players.

My mkv software says otherwise.

It’s way easier to break. And even ignoring that, for these technologies at least, as long as you keep/find a working player, it’s fine-ish. You can still do backup/duplicate too. As far as conservation is concerned, physical media gives these options.

Yes; but DRM can be cracked, and it rarely makes DVDs and Blu-Rays unusable.

My father who used to be able to pirate entire music libraries has been reduced to an apple subscriber its crazy

I’ve always just gotten moving, watched them, and then usually just delete them to make room for more. Lately I’ve been thinking about just upgrading my storage, and making sure to have copies of a lot of my favorite movies and TV shows. I don’t rewatch things much anymore, now that there’s so many new things always coming out. But I like to every now and then.

I’ve read Feynman’s autoanecdotal (It’s not quite an autobiography?) book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman…and he makes himself sound like an idiot. It’s basically a book about what he did in his spare time; he deliberately avoids his science work and just talks about his hobbies and passtimes. And it’s hundreds of pages of shit that sounds like this:

I went to the bar. To look at all the girls. And there was this music playing. It sounded great! So I went over to the guys who were playing the music. I said “Hey that sounds great! What is it?” And they said it’s African Jazz. And I asked if I could play. They said sure. They gave me a little drum. They said it was a froingoboingo drum. You hit it with your fingers. They started playing, and I started hitting the drum. It was great! I played with them all night. I joined an African Jazz club. We played all the time. Until one time we went to this other place to play, and there was a guy there who didn’t like that I was playing the drum. So I never played the drum again.

It’s like he leans SO hard on being a straightforward guy that he tips over and lands in safety pencils and circle of paper territory.

From the book, “learning to safecrack” might be a bit of a stretch. The way I read it…Los Alamos was supposed to be like, the ultimate in secure locations, because Manhattan Project, right? Except they kept the most secret documents in the world in ordinary filing cabinets. The kind that don’t have backs so you can just slide the thing away from the wall and pull the documents out. Or pointed out that people invariably left combination locks still pointing at the last digit of the combination. He didn’t really get to the point of using The Tool That Bosnian Bill And I Made.

I buy lots of cassette tapes on bandcamp (thousands by now) and also download lossless digital for the archive. Streaming sucks and I like to support artists, so piracy is out (for music only, I’m not buying video content).

I’m convinced that it’s not actually any better in theaters, we’re just a lot more willing to bear painfully loud audio in a setting where it’s considered normal. There’s an argument to be made that it’s similar to concerts, but for my money I’d like to not have to wear ear protection in a theater just because some director figured minor hearing hearing damage is worth an especially “epic” crescendo.

Wish he would just provide different mixes on the disk. You know, one mix for normal people, and one mix for Nolan’s personal theater where he can benefit from a theater mix on a blu-ray.

It’s not better in theatres, just louder. I actually had my hands over my ears in some scenes of Oppenheimer

Worse, he doesn’t care if the sound overwhelms the dialog.

That he focuses on sound quality for the theatre is could be argued as understandable. But fucking over the dialog? Yea, fuck him

$50 bucks for the movies? What are you sitting on Steven Spielberg’s lap?

I spend $20/month to see as many movies as I want at the theater. Last month I saw 6 movies, 9 in November, and expecting 6 this month.

The theater isn’t a bad deal with these unlimited subscriptions. In fact it’s the most bang for my buck entertainment option I have these days.

Yup. “Buying” a movie online is a grift, since all you’re actually doing is buying a license to stream as long as they decide they want to host it. Companies can, and have, removed movies people have bought because of things like studio distribution agreements expiring.

My dream would be for UHD Blu-ray quality (or better) DRM-free digital movie purchases, much like you already can with high res music. But until that becomes a thing, I’ll be buying a physical copy of any movies or shows that I want to own (rather than rent).

The commentary was in character too!