Good. I'm wanting to build a NAS soon.

Where is Plex on this image?

yes, it was horrible. There's like 10 minutes of ads that you PAY for. Also corruption for scratches and fiddling with the player were painful

piracy is best

Good old two disc VCDs. Man I miss those days.

I was happy to get a DVD burner though. My best friend and I had Netflix and we’d rip everything that came in the mail. A huge book full of movies and tv shows.

Good times.

We had no phone, no cable, no internet. Most creative time in my life.

I'm finally ready to embrace Blu-ray.

I was buying every season of it’s always sunny, now they don’t even make physical copies. They stopped at like season 10.

For a second, I thought Curiosity had gone enshittified lol. I don't mind paying the subscription because they are what cable documentary channels used to be.

Broadcast had its charm. I feel like I discovered more things.

Just the other day I learned about m-discs, so burn to that for archiving using your BR burner.

Never heard of them, had to look it up. Seems kinda a spotty record depending on the manufacturer.

May I interest you in the [email protected] wiki/megathread? Yo ho yo ho...

I support creators as I can, but when there's literally no other option to own it in a way it can't be just taken from you I don't feel there's any strong argument against it.

I have loads of DVDs and a lot more VHS tapes but you don't exactly keep watching the same thing over and over again, except a few favorites. Buying a mediocre movie just to watch once will have you thinking about how much it's worth the space and money.

OTOH, here at least, you are allowed to have/create a backup of your media, so having rips of those is no issue and they are more convenient.

At least that means you have the lethal weapon episodes!

hard drive costs halve every 2 years or so.

Where did you get halves from? Maybe if you're buying refurb/low-cap/shuck-drives on sale...? Not even the 2 year price projections (which are usually extremely optimistic) are anywhere near halving for higher-cap drives.

Even now, the only thing you'd get even nearing the optimal $10/TB mark would be a shuck-drive on sale as far as I can tell. Whereas the cheapest non-shuck is like $12.50/TB, but you'll most likely be wasting tons of time RMAing it within a year anyways because it's Sea*ate

I feel ya. There was nice to have a forcing function to give something new a chance for a bit.

It was also nice to not have everyone watching their own little micro-targeted version of reality.

Your local Library has videos.

Workin' on it! Got me a used laptop that's about as recent as possible to still have a slim bluray slot built in. Learning all the things.

What's the iPlayer done?

Bring back Blockbuster so I can just pay, like, $3 once to rent a movie instead of $20/month when I'm probably only gonna watch 1 or 2 movies in that time. The rental prices aren't much cheaper than buying a copy on digital platforms.

… when there’s literally no other option to own it in a way it can’t be just taken from you …

There’s at least one legal route that’s still viable.

I buy lots of Blu-ray and 4K UHD discs. I rip them straight on to my Jellyfin server. In fact, there’s been renewed vitality in disc releases during the past few years. Small shops like Shout Factory and Arrow are buying rights to old (‘60s through ‘00s) films that were shot on 35mm. They re-scan and remaster for UHD 4K and then straight to physical disc. That’s a cheap production pipeline with modern tech.

I’ve been having a blast re-visiting films that I never saw in the theater and only know from VHS or DVD rentals. Seeing them again with fresh eyes in 4K has been really gratifying.

That, plus new release discs keep me with more options than I have time to watch.