When there was 3-4 big streaming platforms things were great... now everyone is just copy/pasting their services and slapping their own content and logo on it and charging a premium.

That movie you watched on Netflix 5 years ago, is likely no longer on Netflix. If you want to rewatch it you'd have to find it on another platform, pay their monthly fee - or pay the rental fee... ironically from one of these streaming services.

Man if there was only a convenient program that can be used to make mkv’s from optical media

It's weird watching 4k re releases of CG animated movies from the early 2000s. Some of them they re-rendered at 4k and you can see that major characters are high res, but all the background assets are not. Same with some early special effects in 4k. You can really see the rotoscoping and how some effects were done

Yohohoho

Stremio + Torrentio FTW.

Have you heard of our Lord and Saviour, Jellyfin?

Nah, I have more room without bookshelves of physical media.

I'm a huge fan of Shout Factory, and I'm at a place in my life where I can generally afford to pay for my media, so I do. I'll have to look up Arrow.

Voting with your wallet works both ways, and while most of the payment will be eaten by corporate interests at least it signals "I want more of this sort of thing".

My comment was mainly meant as a response to the statement regarding later seasons of Always Sunny simply not being available to purchase physically. In situations like that, I see no reasonable objection to raising the sails.

And you forgot the good'ol laserdisc

Torrents and Jellyfin - streaming is better if you do it yourself

My local torrent site has them without getting off the couch.

I just got mine set up with a custom domain name and CloudFlare tunnel, it seems to work a treat. Now to start selling user accounts...

I went back to physical media half a year ago. Fuck streaming. I don't miss that shit. My local library has tons of dvds and blurays so my household gets to experience many interesting films these days.

True, but if you get a walk to the library it is both healthy and you support your local library (more users means more funding hopefully).

I have. It's not as good as Plex.

Gods I could never figure out how in the hell to get Tunnels working, though I'd like to try it again someday and use one of my domains. For now Tailscale works.

I've got no way to play DVDs though I'd have to go and buy a DVD player. Streaming content is much more convenient I would like to be able to do it legally and without hassle. But the content creating companies don't seem to be interested in providing me an option to do that.

Anyway my local library isn't really that local it's a 25-minute drive and probably an hour plus walk up a really steep hill.

I am freshly into selfhosting and am running Beelink s12 pro with Jellyfin on. Ripped tons of DVDs and about to get blu ray drive for ripping. Never paid a cent to Netflix or any other streaming sites. Dunno why my wife pays entry subscription to Netflix. Cant watch FHD or higher, got ads, cant mirror screen to a TV with entry subscription, no choice in what movies to watch, shows from competitors are not on netflix. Fuck this shit, man. I pay for DVDs and blurays anyday as long as I can chose what to watch and to keep it to myself.

Got recently raspberry pi 3. Planning to setup private VPN in my homeland where pirating is not an issue yet.

I don't miss physical media either tho. I always hated that they force you to watch an anti piracy ad on a disc you bought, and force feed you trailers. Just let me see the movie i paid for.