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 use Stremio/Torrentio/RealDebrid, is there any practical reason to switch?
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
Yea absolutely, people have ran it off Raspberry Pis and external USB drives lol
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.
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…
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.
The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!
I have never actually seen that happen
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.
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.
In a different, better universe HD-DVD won.
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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.
First their phones, now this? Does LG only want to be known as the company that makes great TVs and shit appliances?
No way someone can make an appliance worse then samsung
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
