UPDATE (if you want to rip 4K content): It looks like the popularity of the Pioneer drive led to a firmware update on new models that blocks ripping UHD content for now! For the most comprehensive guide to what drive to buy, and how to make sure it will work with 4K UHD content, search for "Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide Updated 2023" - over on the MakeMKV forum there's a very comprehensive thread dealing with these issues. And if you ask me what drive I would recommend, the trouble is once I recommend it, they'll likely pull those units and slap on some updated firmware too! So do your research! If you don't need UHD content, and you're content with regular Blu-Ray or DVD media, then no worries, it's a lot simpler :)
So, now we have to disconnect our PCs from the internet before we rip Blue Rays in order to prevent firmware updates that block ripping? Wow, isn't that just dandy? 🙄
@@brodriguez11000 pirate bay is not a great place for piracy as well... it is not trustworthy due to the amount of viruses the best way to pirate is to get in a private tracker, that way you don't expose what torrents you download to the public, cause only people in the private tracker can see that and private trackers are stricter than public ones, so less harmful content
@@arjix8738 reason they are far much re strict because there are moderators who remove malicious uploads plus not everyone get the permission to upload. Almost a decade ago joined a private tracker and been using it since.
@@arjix8738 the trick today is not to pirate at all, rather to borrow by livestream, which isn't a crime. The legal liability lands solely on the virtual library handlers.
Doesn't make it any easier that 7-10 years ago getting a bluray wd was a part of the spec list when buying a laptop. They dropped the drive and slapped the same price on the unit because "they made it thinner"
I’m mean legally you own only the right to reproduce the media in that form that you bought. You don’t own the media yourself just because you bought the Blu-ray… so you never really owned anything to be precise… just the ways to reproduce it for yourself… there’s even the grey area where you can have the media, like Blu-ray, but you are not allowed to play it for a lots o ppl to watch… Plus, do you really need to have that Avangers end game Blu-ray ? How many times you’ll watch anyway? Rental services almost killed piracy because it solve the problem of ppl not being able to enjoy things. “ Owning” everything is far away from a solution of enjoyment, maybe a “my precious” greed feeling going away… but in the end, does ir really matter if you own it?
@@olly344 Yesssss, rationalize away your ownership. Do their job for them. Be an ally to those that already own everything while you get less than nothing in return. If you dislike greed, allying with the greediest mother fuckers on this planet is one _hell_ of a way to fight it...
Because at their core, they are. lol My dad used to pay only $30 a month for satellite TV by saying he would cancel after a year went by and they called wanting to hike the price. "We'll see what wee can do" kept turning into "You can keep the $30 deal for another year and no more" year after year. We got rid of TV service years ago and floated between several streaming services before realizing there is nothing good to watch on any of them once you finish the few you like. So Amazon Prime is the only one that stayed simply because they pay for Prime pricing and shipping benefits; streaming is a bonus. Side note, TV networks used to be broadcast for anybody with an antenna, fully ad supported. Local channels still are, but your local channels don't have any of the big stuff anymore.
The problem still exists where: 1. Media companies are doing fewer physical releases. 2. If you have a large family where everyone has different tastes, your purchases could be large (not to mention they'll complain about having to wait to watch new shows months after everyone else)
Agreed, but this is also where sharing can become a real asset. Obviously your comfort with this may be different to mine, but you can setup something like this for more than just your personal household. For example, you may have a grandparent, sibling, cousin, family friend, etc, who you could share a library with. After all, nothing stopped you taking DVDs over to a friend's house for a movie night. Another option that will likely become even more popular over time is to use this method for stuff you find on special, and subscribe to 1 streaming service at a time for new release content. A lot of my household only actually watches one or two new shows every couple of months. Most of our media consumption is older media that we either never watched, or want to re-watch.
@@electronix6898 In the video, as you said, it was never explicitly said whether he recommended viewers should or shouldn't continue with streaming services. However, he presented it in a way that suggests that ripping your purchased media is an alternative solution to subscribing to those services. (And for some people, it is.) I just presented the cases where that solution doesn't necessarily fit. (I'm of the opinion that we should all be watching "TV" less frequently anyway.)
There is also the issue of ripping an encrypted disc is not legal because breaking the encryption is illegal... Not that you're ever gonna get caught unless you maybe made a video about it
Its incredible that companies are allowed to operate in a way where you buy a movie which might be labelled as something like 'buy' but that they have the right to discontinue your licence at any time and its because they still make you stream it. My opinion is that by law they should be forced to provide you with an offline player that plays their protected content without the need for connection to a service when they offer you buy and own options
Not good enough. People need to be able to play things they "buy" even once the company selling the offline player has gone bust, or it's not supported on newer hardware or whatever. DRM is not a solution to any human problem.
@moopet8036 I hate DRM too, but I can understand the other side (production is ridiculously expensive and directors have some justifications in how they feel) so I think it's a viable compromise *for streaming* as to prevent the average joe from circumventing the nature of a subscription. However, I demand full transparency, at the very least as to which device supports what (before paying) and perhaps also until when stuff is licensed. Buying, that's too far, you're calling it "buying", even if there was justification for DRM there (there really isn't much) it's not ok to take it back, otherwise call it "own a license to play on devices we like until we say you've had enough". License agreements should have clauses for perpetuity rights for the sake of providing access to customers that paid, since for the consumer this type of "buying" is akin to the company owning a dvd player and streaming its output to you, except they now also throw your dvd in the trash when they don't want to pay licensing fees anymore and conveniently never tell you that part
@@AKcess_Dnied well yes because the physical copy behaves like something you actually "buy", unlike a company taking it away from you at will which is called "pay to play it only on this device with only this player until we change our minds and stop caring about renewing our licensing agreements, which we will do at any time without warning and without refunds of any kind"
Hrm, you might actually be paying for it like Germany does (or used to). They had a tax on any device with data storage capability. I think the tax was a % based on the size of the storage and the money was used to pay content creators. (Video and audio) and you just got download whatever you wanted.
@@FlockofSmeagles Sadly, in P2P case, even when you download, you might share parts of files already downloaded. While you can leech and not wait for share ratio to reach 1.000, still some file parts get sent and might be found by copyright warriors.
The most annoying things for me with streaming services are their insistence on geographical licensing and the requirement that their content can only be accessed via their own app. They should all provide an open api for access to their content so consumers can search and manage their viewing in whatever app they choose.
Unfortunately if you're geofenced from content it's more likely that physical copies of those movies aren't available either. Especially not dubbed in the native language. Also as someone maintaining a scraper project, open apis for large libraries are an invitation for creating unrestricted access...
@@derisis13 "Unfortunately if you're geofenced from content it's more likely that physical copies of those movies aren't available either." ARRRRR, that be what piracy is for, matey!!! (if they won't sell it to you, f*** 'em!)
@@DarkGhostHacker by unrestricted access I mean unrestricted access to the streamed content. As for my scraping project (which isn't mine, I just maintain it) I leave it up to you to find. I work on it under the same handle as here.
As Gabe Newell once said "Piracy is a distribution problem, not a price one". People can pay easily for a DVD or BD if they like a show, but asking them to subscribe constantly to a streaming service is too much, as it is now in essence the new cable, a saturated market with pure cuantity and no wuality whatsoever.
For real, and his words go for something like emulation too. I don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on a working N64 with all the games I want for it, so I'd rather download a free emulator and ROM pack on my computer and play it that way
Well, in this case it's both. On the monetary side, $100+ to pay for every streaming service to get one movie there and one TV show there... it's just not worth it. However for music, I can pay $10-$15 a month and get any track I want, so why would I pay more than 10x that for TV shows and movies. On the distribution side, I found a piracy site that I could stream movies from, and on that site I found 3 out of 3 of the movies I was looking to watch.... I searched peacock, Netflix, Disney+ and HBO max and I was 0 out of 3, it was ridiculous. Doctor sleep, men in black 3 and some other one I can't remember... It's back to piracy until this business model changes for the better again
Maybe if blockbuster was back. It’s not easy buying movies and series in Australia. 1 season of SouthPark for e,g can be up to 40$. John wick 4 is 30$ bluray without 4K. It’s not easy for any average income. If you watch anime you’re extra screwed with how many series release and if you avidly watch multiple series every seasonal release. Attack on titan season 4 part 2 alone is 55$
@@danielhorsburgh874 I am almost certain that Blockbuster wasn't the only rental service. I mean, Netflix started renting DVDs, they just figured in a very convoluted way that becoming a cable company via the web was somehow more lucrative (it clearly isn't).
I foresee a big trend of moving back towards not just ownership, but ownership of physical media. I personally have been re-purchasing many CD albums I used to own, because I miss flipping through the album artwork and actually OWNING the media. People are tired of being yanked around by these fickle streaming platforms. Change is coming!
@@vjollila96 Speak for yourself, I can barely find anything I like on Spotify. It's great if you're into mainstream music, but for anything else you're SOL.
Yeah, I remember yrs back when I read a news story about a Linux user who ripped a DVD movie disc he owned to his hard drive just so he could watch the damn movie (because his Windows PC had a playback codec issue w/ that disc) -- & got hauled into court for movie piracy. Fortunately, the judge was not sympathetic to the whole "Piracy Is Theft!" campaign the RIAA was trumpeting everywhere.... Judge: So, let me get this straight -- the charge is that the defendant committed an act of theft by copying the contents of a movie disc he owned ... to a computer he owned ... so he could privately view the movie in his own home? Prosecutor: Yes, your Honor. Judge: [pauses, staring @ the prosecutor] And, exactly *who* was the defendant stealing *from*? Prosecutor: ...Himself, your Honor.
Thoughts on ripping - I usually backup the disc contents instead of ripping them immediately. You can open the backed up movie files in VLC and navigate around the menu. Very helpful for saving all the extra content for movies like I like to. Thoughts on encoding - Handbrake's built-in presets are great, just be careful about GPU encoding. It's designed to be fast, not efficient, so you end up with a higher bitrate for the same quality as CPU encoding (or lower quality for the same size). It's great for on-the-fly transcoding, though, which is why I still have a 1060 in my Plex server lol. Another thing to note is that if you're getting down to 4-5GB per movie, you might want to keep an eye on the audio. The original DTS audio that most blurays ship with can be anywhere from 3-8GB on their own, so if you leave those untouched (which the HQ 1080p30 preset doesn't) it'll eat up a lot of space for very, very minimal gain. If you ever run into an issue where the audio is too quiet, it's likely playing a stereo conversion of 5.1 or 7.1. It's not the end of the world, but what I've done is ensure my stereo downmixes have a 2db gain. Haven't had an issue since. Also, animated content compresses/encodes INSANELY well. Like 1-10% of the source filesize for a barely perceptible loss of video quality. I suggest anyone who wants to know more about encoding look up the Scene Rules. REV5 for h264 and h265 were last updated in 2020 and provide a lot of information and guidelines for how to encode video efficiently and correctly. There's even information about encoding video with heavy grain (e.g. older film), which is very helpful if you're like me and have a _lot_ of 60s films to rip. I can go into more detail but most people have probably already fallen asleep reading this. PS - Hi Jeff! I made a big post on the Plex subreddit about video encoding and transcoding quality a while back, and it was you who inspired me to share that information with others. Thanks for all the great work you do!
Thanks for sharing, posts like yours are extremely helpful to others, since it's a quick onramp towards improving the quality/efficiency of the process!
Jeff, this was obvious for years. The space would get more decimated needing you to subscribe to all these different services. I don't pay for Netflix anymore and will soon be canceling my Amazon Prime subscription now that almost everything on Prime video is IMDB/FreeVee pay to watch. Screw all those corporations. I've started buying physical media again despite Amazon's never ending attempts to gaslight you into thinking the only option is streaming.
I still watch a few shows that I like on various services -- but only one service at a time. This month it's Hulu -- and if "Disenchantment" drops another season next year, I'll pick up Netflix for a month. I currently get Paramount+ for free, so I watch "Lower Decks" on that service. Yeah - having a full-time service with any streaming company is ridiculous, and as I said in my comment, I've been ripping my movies for years and will continue to buy physical media. Years ago I got some movie (I don't even remember which one anymore) that came with a digital code, and I thought I'd try it. Yeah.. All I remember about it is that the service shut down, and the digital code was worthless... I believe that's when I started ripping.
This setup is already expensive, but then you have to BUY the blu-rays as well? Supporting the companies which forced you to into spending a 1000$ on a NAS? Fuck no.
It is. But you're also gambling Everytime you download something. Either with a corrupt/shitty quality file, or getting a trail of kitty P. Ppl don't get it that convenience comes with a price, if one is willing to roll the dice hey 🤷🏽♂️ your choice. But some of us (quite a few) like having full quality rips that we know are straight from the source. Ps just as a little bonus it does feel nice to know that what you have is ACTUALLY yours, bought and owned.
@@sinnwalker True . It’s a balancing act for sure. I was once a sea captain for a long while for financial reasons, but I’ve started collecting physical media for several reasons. The sales encourage companies to keep making physical media. Ownership. Backup copy of my media library gets destroyed. Guaranteed high quality video files made from my own disc! Access to all of the extras on disc. LotR has about 25 hours of extra content, for example.
I love it when Jeff gets irritated by the terrible practices of these companies. It is time to fight back. Not everyone will but not everyone has to. We only need to show them the way and enough people are ready that it can start to make a difference!
@@pepeshopping But... I completely agree with you! Yes. Stop buying/subscribing to all these streaming services. That is capitalism. You don't have to buy anything and these companies aren't entitled to you doing so. It's their job to provide compelling services we want to buy and it's once they feel entitled to get your money that things become a problem. People have been putting up with this because it was easy and convenient for a long time. Now that they're becoming more established platforms though they are testing the waters to see what they can get away with. Your wallet is how you fight back (and it's the only thing they care about). They religiously follow these subscription numbers and will change course if they are starting to become measurably impacted (and they pay entire teams of people to watch people unsubscribing and to determine why).
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 Ahh yes, this is the hard part for sure. Jeff is definitely trying to teach people but I think he's teaching mostly others who are already techies / into tech. No doubt there is some minimum technical skill level to who will be comfortable backing up (or ripping if you will) DVD/Blu-Ray. It used to be more popular a decade ago to have movie collections like this in MKV and the recompressed formats. It's something of a lost / forgotten art. I think I realized how old I'm getting was when Jeff explained what a Blu-Ray disc drive is! You totally could have a neighborhood shared NAS server with movies and stuff like that though. That is a pretty cool idea and it would be easier / cheaper to do than ever before!
I mean, at the end of the day does it matter if you own the media? How many times do you watch the same movie over and over? I'm not saying you shouldn't own media, but for how a lot of people are acting, and how you post is worded, it's not that big of a deal. It's just a thought at the end of the day. Our brains just don't like the idea that something we spent Time on(not money), is no longer valid or available, because it feels like it was a waste.
Dude, to be fair, I’m not the kinda person that rewatches the same thing over and over again, so I don’t care if the media is mine or not, as long as I can enjoy on the moment I’m happy with it. Plus it jus feels like a hoarder when you have an entire room dedicated to physical stuff that you rarely use… I like streaming because for the price of a couple of dvds/blu-rays I have a month of content that I can watch and I don’t need anything else than my tv or laptop or even phone… guess I’m a minimalist then… so be it. Happy to watch whatever’s available.
I have a huge amount of respect for you getting irritated and then actually doing something about it. I “bought” a movie on amazon, and then found out amazons HDCP refused to let me view it in full quality because our media pc had an older gpu plugged into a cheap projector. I got so fed up, I ended up acquiring the movie another way. I had already paid for it, I just wasn’t allowed to watch it in the quality I paid for because my hardware was deemed inadequate. Time to start building a media server :)
While I usually pirate everything, I understand that it's important that people rip because no one's ripping there's nothing to pirate. This video reminded me of that, so I'm off to rip what Blu-rays I do have. Then I'm gonna share them on the high seas lol
Sadly that’s just it. $700 is a ton of money, not to mention the $20-$30 for the 4K Blu-Rays (each). That’s just so expensive and a huge hassle when I can just subscribe to a service. That’s how they get you…I would do that immediately if it was cheaper, especially since it sounds like a fun project
That's why you pirate it. You can still buy a NAS to store your files and in the long run you will save a lot of money. Or just use your computers drive and delete movies as you go to keep space.
@@m.a.a.d9275 yeah I’m a supporter of copying your own movies tbh, not as big of a fan of piracy, but hey if your end isn’t illegal, go for it I guess. I’m starting to collect Blu-Rays for fun, but also so I can someday get a NAS to basically have my own streaming service lol
Completely agree. The trend towards subscription based everything doesn’t sound so good from the end user perspective. Starting to realize that free data was the lure to get everyone online. Now corporations next move is to pull it all back and monetize it. Like taking candy from a toddler. Folks will be like here take my money.
It just baffles me how nobody realizes (or cares) that subscription services pull that alluringly small amount of money from you... twelve times over in one year. It feels like I could convince a toddler in 2 seconds that it's a bad idea to have a ton of subscriptions.
Software is also going subscription. I would go without rather than subject myself to their tryanny. I remember a time when we got along just fine without software.
My current hobby is to check out thrift stores, buy my favorite classic TV shows and video games, and back them up to my NAS for safe keeping and easy access. I love the feeling of finding and archiving, and knowing it can’t be taken away all while not having a monthly fee leech off me. Great video!
You can also borrow DVDs/Blu Rays from your local library and back those up as well. Hell, if you still have a RedBox near you, you could also back those DVDs/Blu Rays up.
@@user-vi4xy1jw7e depends on the kind of game! I have a modded original Xbox, so if I find Xbox games in the wild I’ll back them up directly using the console, and then FTP transfer them to my NAS. As far as cartridges go you can get peripherals online to plug them into and backup the game that way.
My family initially wondered why I went through all the trouble to set up Jellyfin with a NAS a year ago. But with how things have been going in the streaming world, they've started using my Jellyfin server themselves for the past few months and are very happy with it! Pro tip: Using Caddy, you can set up a reverse proxy and safely access your jellyfin server over HTTPS from the wider internet.
I'm also subscribed to all those services, but I only pay ~$15 a month or less. I only subscribe to one service at a time, though. I never understood being subbed to everything all at once. No one service has enough new, quality content to justify staying with it year-round, either.
its common with high earners or even couples or families, 1 kid asks dad for netflix, the other disney, mum has amazon, and so on, they all make accounts on each others profile etc, but poor dad ends up paying for it all
This is why I usually opt to buy hard copies of movies. You are at the mercy of these streaming service providers to keep the content available. And if you lose internet access for whatever reason, you can't access your stuff. But if you actually have the media in hand, you can still watch anytime, anywhere. Great video, Jeff!!! This is a great way to preserve your DVD and BluRay disks and make them easy to access without handling disks. Be your own streaming service!
There's also this sort of potential future Getting a physical copy of "awesome movie from 1930-1990 something" might some day be impossible because the 1930-1990 version is 'problematic' Fortunately for you dear film lover, there a modern version that 'fixes' the 'problematic' elements of the original and we can pretend the original never existed
Agreed, unfortunately not as much stuff I want to watch more than twice these days :P I remember when George Lucas was trying to push that dvd format that was limited use (don't recall the name), ughh, at circuit city. The starwars movies I still have on bluray, etc, used to watch them a lot.
@@ironfist7789 do not now about George, but the was dvd type in mana auto destructed, the greenest of the DVD media type, I all a bit hasy, never seen one never mind touched one, the Idea, like dvd Rentals, dvd in the post, in light sanative envelope or something, and when you wanted to watch, you opened enverlope, and put dvd in your player, and watched the film, some as your watvhing film the pick laser in your house hold DVD player wearing out data track as it being played, you it you quick, a day or so it may still replay second or third time if lucky, after that it just drink coaster with hole in the middle, so no need to dvd return played DVD, as a Rental would normally be done? I wonder why that failed (not, this long before green revolution had kicked in) it was seen a big waste?
@@ironfist7789 That's where thrift stores and other sources of used media comes in handy Its been years since I bought anything within days/weeks of its release. Lose the FOMO and life gets simpler and less costly. Course I'm super picky about what I watch as well. Only have eight movies 2016 or newer on my Plex
Sure thing lol. You can't cut out product placement within media but at least you can eliminate the external and interstitial ads. Advertising will always happen but we can reduce it to some degree.
Try getting the UK version of the film. Product placement in children's TV is absolutely forbidden by law here (although some big american films slip through the net because they get clever with depth of field and such to add natural blur to logos).
@@dafoex They you get the problem where multilingual people expect to hear the same accent they saw the first time to when they rewatch a movie :) That issue plagues my family, we're all that way.
Here is a tip if people think that purchasing that many DVDs is expensive: libraries. The library near me has a lot of DVDs. If what you're looking for is pretty popular, chances are they'll have it. If not, request it any they'll most likely get it. Then you can just follow this tutorial to rip it.
So the solution to these subscription services being too much money is to spend exponentially more on DVDs and hardware, set up a huge storage hub, and spend time ripping every single DVD you get? It seems to me that the subscriptions are worth it as long as you only have a few. To be clear I think this is a great idea if you hate corporations and have lots of money/time to spare.
Yeah, wouldn't buying even two 4k UHD movies a month be more expensive than 4 or 5 streaming services? This solution kind of feels like "hate paying a small tax on alcohol? START YOUR OWN BREWERY!"
Investing into a media server is mainly meant for people that want to own their media and use it in a convenient manner. Its more expensive than subscriptions, but you are actually owning the content instead of renting it or "fake" owning it as the final space fan found out.
Been doing this for years... the only real issue is companies are making it harder to own stuff legally. And often when they do actually release stuff it's not even on Blu-ray anymore (The Orville being released only on DVD is a crime), or not releasing them in North America, forcing me to import them.
You make me think of a guy I used to ‘work’ with via Reddit. He wanted me to download old cartoons and put them in a software via FileZilla and his dedicated VM servers to make menu’s and stuff with them and upload them to a database. I never questioned any of it and assumed it was just for data hoarding. He payed me 2$ for every DVD or 4.5GB I successfully submitted and even had tons of self made guides only and stuff. It was pretty in-depth and became more and more complicated the more rules he implemented. I eventually stopped, but it was really intriguing to learn about it all and now leaves a great memory.
Exactly. And I do not need to own everything. Mostly I view it once. If I really know I want to watch it more often, I can still buy it. But I went to non physical, because years ago I was spending all my money on music and dvds while also cluttering my home with all the stuff. No way back for me.
@@nickdejong2899 It's certainly not for everyone, but there is some content that I'd like to watch that isn't available on the streaming services, and is far more expensive to buy digitally (or is not even available to buy digital copies). Plus, for me at least, I actually want to buy this kind of hardware for more than just movie storage, so it's very much a viable option for me.
This has been my strategy for years. As soon as Mythbusters disappeared from Netflix because Discovery started its own streaming service, I realized this problem will only get worse. I hoard hard drives and store any and all shows and movies I like to keep.
stremio is user-friendly and reliable, you can source it from various services, including a ton of p2p services, legit streaming companies and your own local storage. i'm pretty sure american ISPs notify you if they find out you're pirating something, but you can bypass that with any VPN client. currently i'm using a shared netflix acc on my TV since it's easier than screen mirroring stremio, but i screen mirror whenever i want to watch something that isn't available on the netflix catalog
@@gb76231 I'll never rely on someone else providing the streaming content I want. The problem remains, if the source decides to not offer a certain show or movie, you're screwed however you choose to stream the content. Keeping it locally is the only way. Storage is cheap.
Pro tip. Goodwill is an excellent source to get really cheap DVDs and Blu-rays. Usually a couple bucks for dvds and around 5 for Blu-rays. Though GW is getting a bit greedier lately so they might be a bit more in some cases.
Also, if you're patient, good movies eventually get dumped into the $5/$10 bins at Walmart. Just have to be willing to wait to buy it until a few months post-release.
Goodwill cherry picks their media. The good stuff they have put on eBay and now have their own store. What is left behind is junk. But ... sometimes they will miss something good. Just yesterday I found the Temptation's greatest hits CD. Kids these days don't know.
Yeah, it seems like any time GW discovers there's an actual market for something they have, the price goes way up. I've seen them selling stuff at higher prices than I can find new at other stores.
You can also just buy the bluray discs and then pirate the movies/tv shows anyway. The studios can stop with their anticonsumer DRM crap if they want us to stop pirating the content we own Also thanks for the shoutout to Jellyfin, it's really an amazing piece of software
I can somehow relate even though I didn't do it myself, as one of my favourite TV programmes has home video releases on DVD-Video, but not Blu-ray disc, so I'd normally have to settle for standard definition PAL video, whereas it's 1080p on streaming services!
Absolutely, it's much faster and uses less energy. It uses less energy because you really don't need to re-encode if there's a torrent already available with your preferred codec, resolution, or bitrate.
Agree with downloading the content you already own on disc, since someone else has already gone to all the trouble of ripping/reencoding, but if you download by torrent, turn uploading off. And you need to DL the correct format. Can't get the HD BR or Web Rip if you only own the DVD.
Yep, this is the way to go. Back to physical media, where you actually BUY something, not get hooked on some rentseeking service that will screw you over any time they deem necessary.
Thank you for this most needed PSA, Jeff. I hope you're doing well. I have not watched MSM TV for about 7 years now, and I am not subscribed no any streaming services at all. My family simply enjoys the movies we have bought on DVD/BD over the years. If we cannot get it in that format, we just don't watch it. It's really simple. Nobody NEEDS to watch TV, and the longer you don't watch it, the more you realise just how unnecessary it is.
Sooo... your solution is to not only spend hundreds of dollars in a setup (around $700 you mentioned near the end), and a fixed price of maybe $15-$30 for every piece of media I want to buy, plus all the electricity of using the hard drives... but also spending many hours of my time in ripping the data and setting everything up? Each hour of my time is worth something. Depending on how I'm feeling at a specific moment and what are the alternatives I could be doing and enjoying, I value 1 hour of my free time between $20 and $200. Each hour I spent setting that up would be for me equivalent to at least $20 added to the bill
I just saw a post about how piracy slowed down because of the ease of streaming, but now that streaming has become so expensive that piracy is back up.
Been doing this for a long time. We buy the occasional first-run movie, but more intense than not we buy movies from the dollar-bins at Walmart, rip them, and chuck the disk into a box in the closet.
@rgprosucctions1704 since when is all that storage free? Not to mention you would require an better internet connection, and your electricity bill is going to be even higher
This is something I've been doing after so much license expirations on streaming. I like to pay for the content I genuinely enjoyed and BD tends to have a better quality than most streaming services offer.
And at only 40-120 dollars for a whole show you will blow 1 year of netflix on it... If you want access to a normal person's amount of content you are going to be way above the costs of having multiple streaming services for the rest of your life and that is just now, you get to keep paying at a faster rate than streaming and then ripping it takes up even more time and time is money. This isn't the brightest idea.
I do like the idea of pay per view, but I guess Netflix, Disney and others prefer to go banrupt rather then sell just one or two series to individuals and not a full account. really the new cable, right when we almost got rid of those f... bast... Damn streaming companies now...
Built my own RPi 72TB NAS running OMV based on the axzez interceptor board you featured previously. Currently used as my secondary onsite backup (the first is using an ASUSTOR 4-drive box) and offsite goes to an AWS S3 service. One lovely benefits of Longmont, Colorado is the city offers symmetrical 1GB internet as a flat rate utility @ $70.00/month, which makes the S3 service a viable option. FWIW, Comcast absolutely hates the city utility option, and has published a number of misleading editorials and ads regarding the service.
@@JeffGeerling Future experiment here: I have a 5-port NVME adaptor and a Waveshare PCIE->NVME board that I plan to try plugging in to a CM4 board. Should be a total time-suck, but interesting version of "the fun never ends." 🙃
When re-encoding, make sure the target frame rate is the same as the source. If you encode a 24fps movie at 30fps, it will use more hard drive space. But more importantly, it will play with juddery 3:2 pulldown, even on devices which support proper 3:3 or 5:5 playback. (aka 24hz mode.)
@Confined Spiral Yeah like Amazon Firesticks which forced all the content I watched on it to play at 60 fps. Made every big budget movie look like it filmed with cheap hardware.
Great video man! Just one detail, you are changing the frame rate of the movie when you do the transcode 11:20 I can see how the original video file is at 23.9 fps, when you do the transcode, you are selecting 30fps, and should be the same as the source. Hope you see this! Thanks for this great video
And here in lies the problem, now he has to spend thousands and thousands of hours re-ripping transcoding encoding renaming transferring etc. Then bus a hdr 12bit tv and has to do the while thing all over again… colossal waste of time.
Over the last 12 months, I have been buying all of my favourite old TV shows and movies on DVD and backing them up onto a HDD for later viewing. It all started because I felt like watching episodes of Viva La Bam and Jackass one day and when I searched for what streaming platform they were on, I found out nobody had them and the only way to watch them was to try and find them on DVD. I then started to notice that some of my favourite TV shows and movies from today were being removed from various streaming platforms because they were now considered "problematic" or "offensive". We're almost at the point where TV shows and movies aren't even released on DVD anymore and so the only way to watch them is to subscribe to a streaming platform but as Jeff states in the video, that isn't forever and even buying them from a streaming platform doesn't mean you own them. I appreciate that it's not a permanent fix, but at least it means if I buy my favourite old TV shows and movies on DVD, they won't be lost to the memory hole forever. Before anyone says "Hurr durr hurr durr hurr, just torrent it all. That's how I get all my stuff", not everyone knows where to even begin with that and a lot of people are simply not comfortable doing it.
and even worse it all maybe written in the TOS of any given service that you pay a fee and that you dont get to own sh*t. But who reads them right ? But even buying stuff on DVD is not the solution as you may think. I have heard so many complaints about badly produced DVDs that you can never be sure if the show you are buying is really well produced. It starts by not stating on the Disk which parts of a season are on it and even worse if you want to watch them in english instead of your own language some episodes may not be in multilanguage. Being a customer who has to spend his hard earned money is not easy. Some shows will never make it to DVD at all and they are not even aired again .
Thanks Jeff for taking this interesting view on our NAS! Hey everyone! Marco here. We're back for another video and we have a brand new fear! Red Shirt *Pirate* Jeff! So we took the initiative to place anti-RSJ defences into our NAS this time! As always! If you have questions, comments, constructive criticism, praise or about how we can keep Red Shirt Jeff and other threats to your data out of your NAS, feel free to reply to me here and I will happily answer your questions. Thanks again!
Is there any update planned for the AS5304T? (Its still using the Celeron J4105 from 2017, an N5105 version would be much better). Also are there any updates planned to address the major malware issues that have been hitting these NAS?
Wow I can’t believe how simply you’ve managed to break everything down. My own notes scare me every time I have to go over them again but I think my dad could follow this
This is why I love garage sales. I get boxes and boxes of DVD's for around $0.05 each. Rip them with make mkv then run them through filebot to get the naming the movie databases like. From there I copy the files over to my Dell T610 Server that runs unraid and handbrake as a docker and uses watch folders. This encodes the videos and dumps them in an output folder. I have watch folders for different types of content. SD Movies, HD Movies, SD TV Series, HD TV Series. I can dump as many movies/shows as I want and let the sever just chug away once they are done I open the completed folders from my desktop and use a utility called "files to folders" which just tucks the files into a folder of the same name. (Just to keep things neat) I then move the files over to the proper plex directory (Plex also runs as a Docker on the Dell) and let it ingest the new media.
So glad people are talking about this again. I learnt the basics of this from my father as we set up a home theatre PC back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, and ripped a lot of our CDs/DVDs.
I spent a week ripping all of my CDs a couple of years ago so that I'd have them all ready on hand to listen to on my computer whenever I want instead of fussing with discs. Of course, the companies don't like that and think I'm worse than El Chapo and H.H.Holmes combined and should re-pay for the songs in every new format and should have to pay for convenience. 🙄
I think it's worth noting that the lower spec NAS you spoke about at the end is perfect for a media library if you have h.264 files. If you have h.265 and have to transcode on the fly to h.264 for your tv, seeing as most tv's don't recognise 265 it's not going to be powerful enough to handle that. It'll either buffer endlessly or just not play at all. I would recommend using some form of streaming stick instead of your TV's native apps, they're usually out of date and general garbage. If you get a fire stick or roku streaming stick for example your less powerful NAS won't need to transcode because they both use h.265.
whenever i see a video about "digital media libraries" made by a well-informed person with tons of NAS storage, i usually assume they are still doing piracy like they did back in the day. Ripping discs with further-increasing quality and tougher DRM does seem like a rewarding and interesting hobby, but surely an IT professional is going to default to the efficiency of simply clicking download ;)
You do get extras with physical media. Interviews, commentary, behind the scenes, deleted scenes, and such. Many titles, like Monopoly Men or Harry’s War, are hard to find on the high seas. Or there is only a low quality copy floating around. In addition, you’re guaranteed to get high quality video files as opposed to low bitrate, mis-labeled, watermarked videos from strangers. Don’t ask me how I know :)
1 further suggestion, if your life depends on your data (or even if you value your time) DO NOT use all drives in your NAS from a single manufacturer, or date code. If one fails, it would be likely that the rest could fail soon after, if it was a manufacturer's defect or environmental issue. Warranty replacement doesn't do you any good if you lost the data in the process... Ditto, if you have multiple NAS devices, don't use all dingle source/batch for the drives...
@@09f9 Never said it was. I do the 3/2/1 process, personally, and have disavowed andy employer's recovery plans if they attempted to tell me RAID is their data protection.
man I did that for one of my NAS servers and one thing I didn't count on was the damn raid controller dying hahaha no harm done. just a bunch of movies and tv series being deleted.
Had this happen with 3tb seagates. I got lucky and they failed over 2 months or so so i never (quite) had the array go offline. It was only dvd rips I would have lost but still. Also to the dude who's raid controller died, that's why I've been a big fan of software raid for like 20 years lol. Saw it happen to friends of mine, swore it wouldn't happen to me ;-)
I am personally also tired of the steep streaming prices, but we also need to remember that blue ray / entire seasons arent cheap unless they are years old compared to a monthly subscription. So if you want to save money i doubt that this is the way, BUT i am tired of Netflix / other removing series and movies i want to re watch later, such as stargate and variations of stargate and they can do whatever they want, when ever so this could be a way for me to keep the movies and series i love as my own with the ease of access we love, i will test this method with my existing DVD / Blue ray collection on my NAS, thanks for the inspiration. Side note: In Denmark you can legally copy and store any physical media you own for your own use, if you can get around the DRM. The world we live in are becoming crasy about subscriptions, like subscribe to unlock your car seat heaters… But i own the car? Dealership: Do you?
The downside I've been running into, is some studios (such as fox) are starting to not release blurays anymore and are starting to phase out physical media. I own every movie and show I have on my plex, but it's getting harder.
I never hoist the sails unless I can't obtain a disc. But I've been finding myself doing it more lately, because there's no other choice, even though I don't want to.
@@TananBaboo When they do become "a thing of the past", I will too. No mincing words here: I literally have nothing else to live for than collecting DVD's, and with attitudes like that, I imagine I've got a couple years left to live. Call it pathetic if you like, but it's the truth.
Disney+ is cracking down on password sharing here in Canada as of Nov 1 so the clock is ticking, as we currently use our in-laws account to let my toddler watch Puppy Dog Pals and Bluey on a daily basis. Not sure I can convince my wife to buy a whole server rack for $700 as an alternative to paying $12/month though. It's like renting vs owning your hot water heater, and I think the monthly cost is still low enough to not justify the inconvenience of setting all this up as a relative tech normie. It'll take about 5 years and a whole bunch of extra work to pay off, plus losing the ability to browse for new things to watch. Chances are one of my hard drives is also going to fail in that 5 year period before it pays itself off.
OK but the two most interesting questions for me were not answered: Aren't you paying WAY more money to buy UHD Blu Rays of all your shows and movies compared to the streaming services? And aren't most shows (say on Netflix) unavailable for physical purchase? Do you have a system or schedule for buying new shows and movies that your family might be interested in, or do you just go out and buy everything that's available? And what do you do with all your physical copies? Are they sitting around on a shelf somewhere? I don't currently have space to store shelves of discs.
Plus… what about copyright law, where you have limited rights on reproducing to others the physical media that you just bought… what about encoded media that borderlines illegality when you rip it. What about the practicality of it? Does that mean that I have to buy that stupid Adam Sandlers movie just cause someone told me it’s good and now I have fucked my budget up. What about physical disasters where all my collection has been destroyed?… what if I can’t find the series or movies, do I pirate it? Etc…
Yup, you are paying WAY more. You are buying physical copies of media, you need more and more storage drives and you need to leave your pc turned on for long sessions of ripping/encoding. Not to mention the risks of having such large amounts of data in physical form.
@@HanTheGreatInventor That really depends on how much you watch stuff. Everybody I know who uses streaming services literally force themselves to watch something every week, just to make sure the subscription is worth it.
@@Dante02d12 Nah, you're always paying more like this. If you somehow buy that few movies that this is somehow competitive with streaming, you could get by a lot better by just not maintaining any subscription, and only subscribing when you want to watch a specific movie in that streaming service. In practice, the month will be cheaper than buying the movie on its own, and if you watch anything else that month the comparison becomes just plain slaughter at that point.
@@iurigrang Fair. Anyone can take a subscription for just a month, for less than the price of a movie indeed (maybe efven half that price, depending on the country). However people usually don't take just a month. Classic breadcrumbs strategy : the price is so low that people think "oh, it's so cheap, I can keep it going!", and ultimately keep it for a year or more. So in practice, people usually don't pay for a single month, even though it is a possibility, you're right. For a yearly subscription at half the price of a movie, you'd have to watch 6 movies in the year for the subscription to be worth it. And believe or not, but that depends on people. In 2021 I have watched less than that (5 movies, no series). This year I'm pretty sure that's less than that too. On the contrary, as I said, everyone I know who took a subscription to any streaming service force themselves to watch something every week. Sure, every week is overkill, but the point still stands. The price of a subscription is still very decent, of course. At least... a single one. But to get access to as much content as possible, you'd need several subscriptions, as it is reminded in this video I believe. So instead of the 6 movies ratio I talked about, it would be more than that if we're talking on a bigger scale.
Don't know where you are from, but in the States it is. If you heard some idiot online tell you that, don't believe them. Doesn't matter what their interpretation of the laws are, it matters what the judge's is, and they will and have fined/jailed people for copyright violations.
Very untrue. Pirating is illegal in most countries, though the laws are obviously not the same, sometimes leeching is legal while seeding is not, and even if both are illegal most countries do not enforce their anti piracy laws, most you could get is an angry isp or some copyright trolls that you can easily avoid with a VPN or a service like Debrid
It’s definitely illegal for copyrighted content, but generally speaking they won’t go after you in a court room unless you’re running your own torrent site lol. I used to torrent everything and the most I ever got was my internet being temporarily shut off, at which point I just had to call them and the dude had to give me the copyright speech (given that he was a networking guy, I could tell he didn’t care lol.)
I've been using mostly physical media for the last four decades. Yes, I am that old. The $5 DVD/$7 Blu-Ray bins at Walmart are a great place to find more movies to add to my collection. Amazon also isn't too bad when buying physical media, but you couldn't pay me to use their ridiculous rental service where you pay for the privilege of being allowed to pay for something that you can't keep. (Why does anyone use it?!?)
With all the recent news that best buy and target are going to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays by Q1 2024, and Disney is no longer selling any physical media in Australia all together, i do feel that paradigm shift of "the end of physical media" that many people have worried about is coming closer to fruition. I remember watching this video a year ago, thinking i could start doing all of this in the future, but now ive seen the warning signs and know its the time to start the project before the prices go up, or even before owning the physical media becomes niche and the cost comes down to the consumer. So once again, thank you for posting this video, and showing these alternatives in a rational way.
You're quite welcome, and I had the exact same thoughts reading the news this week. I'm glad I have my digital library already, and the thing I'm the most sad about is these companies are completely ditching the way consumers could handle media over the past 50 or so years, all to try to grab up a small slice of the streaming market.
I've been ripping my physical disks to mkv files for years now. I'd recommend that anyone who is serious about this, build a NAS that is powerful enough to transcode. I run emby on truenas and it runs great. Running hand brake on all your files is a giant hassle and a huge time sink. I've literally saved hundreds of hours by not dealing with the extra transcoding step. This has more than covered the cost of a better NAS and additional storage. Also, keep the movies at their original resolution. This is especially helpful for 4K HDR content. Storage is pretty cheap.
I don't even bother to transcode at all. Most modern hardware has no problems with mkvs. I use Chromecast with Google TV devices running Kodi as media players and they don't struggle at all. Plus you can keep e.g. Blu-ray closed caption tracks more easily.
I still remember when I was made fun of for suggesting that companies could legally steal your content that you paid for. I haven't been bullied for that in a few years. Gee, I wonder why.
On another note: It blows my mind that Usenet solves this problem beautifully with a monthly subscription, yet most companies don't even consider doing it.
I have been doing this for years. It's frustrating how many QA issues pop up, such as too low audio levels, audio desync (that sometimes only becomes obvious well into a movie), subtitle issues, etc. Yes, I know that if I spent a bunch of time fixing it I could make it work, but I am getting burnt out and am increasingly willing to pay money for something that just works.
I get where you're going, but you're missing that so many of these companies aren't releasing new media, especially series, on disc anymore. You gave the example of Final Space, which was taken off ALL streaming libraries people can buy from, not just Amazon (the chronologically first complaint was regarding Apple, then people noticed it gone on Amazon, UA-cam, and Vudu), but this series was and will never be released on disc, especially since it was taken down as a tax break. So while your advice works great for what's been released, there a building library of media that will never be released on disc that people will need to pirate somehow (because even if you download when you do "own" it, it's gated in some way so that you cannot truly save it), and this is something that people need to recognize if they truly want to have all the media they want available regardless of any company's tomfoolery.
@@thomgizziz the discs maybe but not digital, that was the reason I used it as an example. I implore you to check again, Prime says it's unavailable, amd the reason people were pissed at WB was because a month after S3 went on sale, the whole series was taken off all sites like Prime, Vudu, Google, etc where you could buy digital content. It was done as a tax write off, the first of many they would do.
@@thomgizzizactually no you can't save it physically. That's the point. When you 'buy' a movie off premium UA-cam/google, there is an option to save to your device but it won't allow to really save it. It won't play unless you're still subscribed or whatever.
With an expected lifespan of 5 years (which we use in the IT sector), that would be 140 dollars per year for a NAS setup. And that's without factoring in the cost of purchasing the actual media you want to store and the power it consumes. When you consider these expenses, it becomes evident that the effort and cost of ripping everything might not be worth it in the long run. In many cases, it's a more cost-effective option to enjoy content through streaming services and only buy physical copies for content that isn't available (anymore) via streaming platforms.
That is right for the most part, but there are projects which are only availed through streaming, and with Dizne pulling some of there new films from streaming and media being lost because they have stop releasing Bluerays of there films. You pay not only for ownership but to make shore big corporations are not just able to pull plugs on things and make it vanish.
I completely agree. In the netherlands more and more movies aren't releasing to bluray or dvd because well, streaming. I have created a massive plex libary which is also contains rare movies (rare on dutch streaming) so I want to watch what I want to watch not what disney wants me to watch. Great job!
It would be nice to see a 2022 comparison between jellyfin, Emby, Plex, and Kodi. I settled on Plex even though it’s not free or open source, mostly for ease of metadata discovery & set up. Others would certainly have other priorities.
For what it's worth I tried Jellyfish recently and quickly went back to Plex because it was a disaster for series with subtitles and could often take a couple of minutes to start them. On that note: even after Plex have mostly killed plugin support there's still useful tools like Pasta Tool to mass change the audio and subtitles for a series.
I never liked Plex. I use Kodi with a centralized database. I don't stream to anything outside the house as my upload speed still sucks but we get fiber next year! Supposedly.
I paid the 1 time lifetime membership for plex and it's all I use. I stopped paying for everything except HBO MAX which is the cheapest and has the best catalog.
@@masterbard The lifetime pass is so worth it for Plex, even if just for the music functionality or intro skipping. I didn't know HBO Max was any good, it's not available in Ireland, and a lot of other services are kneecapped with licensing issues
Basically: Emby is dead and was replaced by it's fork: Jellyfin, Plex is okay but the subscription and always online is terrible, and Kodi is pretty much irrelevant since it often acts as a client rather than a server.
Saw this coming years ago. Last year I gave a streaming box a try only to get my favorite shows old and new pulled without notice a week later. I basically have no control over the content I liked so from that point on I went right back to physical media just buy what and I can keep it the quality are much higher as well. Nothing like a hunt for that weird formats or editions that are hard to come by or never released on any service.
We did this, we had this - the whole generation was ripping, downloading, copying, converting movies and building their library of media on drives and discs, while thinking, how to make all of this user friendly... This is basically a simplistic tutorial for younger people, how to go back in time to 90's and 00's and feel the "good old times" way of spending hundreds or thousands of hours and dollars to owe great numbers of movies which we will never watch twice ;P
we're already seeing a bit of that with steam, uplay, etc., selling big corp games via download, you don't have a physical copy of your purchased game. and the trend is showing things will get worst. and I'm not even touching the subject of microtransactions in games you already paid for like 60, 70, 80 bucks. So video games future is also not so bright if all the community will not stand together against big corps, and again Disney is a name that repeats itself.
Nobody is ever going to choose to stream over playing locally. There are latency issues that will never be overcome. A direct connection to a PC always will beat authenticating into a streaming service, and then sending packets to a cloud PC.
We've seen attempts in the '90s of that very concept - "Sega Channel" for the Sega Genesis in the U.S., and the Satellaview for the Super NES in Japan. While it was good for distributing game demos, gaming news, and other small things, full-fledged games are not meant, or are able to be streamed over like that. Even the aforementioned demos took time to download before they could be played. Tl;dr we won't see that future, it's just not viable
@@morkallearns781"nobody will ever" is a big term. i myself cannot afford to play the latest generation of games locally, as the prices for pc parts in my country have skyrocketed, resulting in high end pcs costing the as much as cars (not a joke nor an exageration. a high end pc is costing as high as R$40.000,00, same price as a Honda Civic). while using cloud gaming plus a few pre owned steam games and now the collab between geforce now and xbox game pass, i can easily run games at 4k, stable 60 fps with rtx on (something that i couldn't even dream of). i am currently spending around R$300 monthly (= U$ 60) for my full cloud gaming setup. which is astonomically cheaper then a high end pc, that given the current state of the gaming industry, will likely have to be at least partially replaced in the following few years.
My man thought he did something when he canceled his 100$/month subscriptions… Just to set up his own hardware worth probably around 1000$ and then buying blurays at 30$/piece. Not even mentioning the countless hours of ripping them, converting them through fiddly software like handbrake etc 🤦🏼♂️ Why not just keep Disney+ at this point and if you want to watch anything else, just rent it at 4-10$ per Movie? You’ll save so much money this way that you’ll still be able to buy a hard copy of your most favourite movies. By far the easiest legal solution to his whole problem, if you ask me.
Yes! This was my thought exactly throughout the video! Just by hopping between different streaming platforms would get your costs down by a lot. Even if you pirate the content, it's a pretty big ROI on the hardware.
Blu Rays can be found on the thrift at super cheap, like a dollar or two in most places. The inital inventment of 1k to set this all up seems steep but 11 months of 100 bucks only to have to watch ads, and lose your rights to view media that you love is well worth the investment.
@@CanadianRetro Do you pay 100 dollars a month for streaming? I just pay like 15-20 dollars depending on the service. Jumping back and forth between services depending on what I want to watch. But sure, if your only other option is paying for five services each month then I guess it might be worth it.
I tried talking to my mom about this, but she just likes the convenience of Netflix. Guess I'll have to set this up just to show her how much easier and higher quality it is. Edit: One issue Jeff, mpv is actually better and lighter than vlc.
I totally agree that *mpv* is usually better than vlc, but it does depend on your hardware. I have an old Raspberry Pi that refuses to play videos smoothly with mpv but is fine with vlc. Also, vlc has easy to install binaries for any OS, even phones. mpv may work on Apple MacOS and Microsoft Windows, but it is not as slickly packaged as vlc.
Ive recently got into my blu rays for the reasons you put in this video. Mainly the selection of content I can view. My family thought I was crazy owning dvds but hey, I'm now a mini blockbusters, giving my dvds to friends and family who couldn't see the film on netflix or amazon 😂 Great video!!
just pirate everything. most people can't afford expensive Blurays, and most people can't afford external hard drives or NAS support movies you like by watching them in theaters when they come out. donate money to directors, producers, actors you like. buy their products. for old movies/shows, pirate them. if you watch them on streaming services, the creators (directors, writers, actors, etc.) get very little money, only the big streaming companies (disney, netflix, etc.) make money.
Very excited for this. I put a little money and time into trying something like this earlier in the year. I got far enough to be able to rip my own discs, had an old computer set up with TrueNAS and Plex. Put a few movies on it, was able to watch them, it basically worked. But I never went further than that, buying the proper NAS drives, ripping all my content, etc. This might be the kick in the pants I needed to finally get that going again. Thanks!!
Hey Jeff! This is a project I started myself a while back too! I got an LG Blu-Ray drive that I added custom firmware to to be able to read 4K discs. But there's an important advantage you forgot to mention in my opinion. I have some region locked Blu-Ray discs, and by ripping them, the region lock is gone. So no need to invest in a hacked or hackable Blu-Ray player. BTW, I guess your collection will shrink some more in terms of file size when (if) Handbrake makes converting to AV1 possible 😁
Yep, I've got a couple of LG Blu-Ray drives with the hacked firmware installed on them. MakeMKV have no issues reading 4K disks. Jeff probably didn't want to get into hot water if he mentions about region free drives using hacked firmware. All of my movies are region 1 anyway so no big deal to me.
Awesome video and a reminder that the streaming services marketplace is just going to devolve into more expensive cable TV. For a budget version of this I have been using a raspberry pi with openmedia vault and the minidlna extension, hooked up to a hard drive, which let's me stream to my TV and any devices in my local network
I love the informative content. I run a NAS personally, but there are issues that I think people should know about: 1. while a majority of media (especially older media) is available physically, increasingly companies are eschewing physical releases. Part of that is a profit thing for them, but some of it is an acknowledgement that exclusivity to streaming services is a bonus value to that service. 2. Data integrity becomes an issue you gotta worry about. I live in a house with not great wiring, and the power will flicker during bad storms. You either have to make sure your NAS is running a RAID configuration of some sort, hook your NAS up to a UPS, or.... probably a combination of those things. That means that just cuz you buy X TB drives, doesn't mean you'll be able to store X TB of individual content. Some of that will be eaten up by RAID configuration, and a UPS is not exactly cheap by itself. 3. The upfront cost of this is not cheap, and while maintenance cost is low it's not zero. Drives fail, electricity cost, the price of the media itself, storage of that media. You're almost definitely saving money if you cancel every subscription right now, but.... those savings only will manifest in the long term.
1. Pirate it, then. I'm happy to buy things if they are available for purchase, but if not? Pirate it. It's not a lost sale if they literally will not sell it. 2. You should get a UPS anyway. Building a NAS isn't cheap, and it'd be silly to have it ruined by power problems. A UPS isn't cheap either, but it's a worthwhile investment to protect the rest of your investment in the NAS.
@@mjc0961 Yeah completely agree. But these are all things not gone over in the video. I know people who have the money and desire to do something like this, but do not necessarily have the technical know how to... pirate safely/effectively, setup RAID configurations, or price a UPS for a NAS.
@@09f9 I mean... I think that's a good point for valuable personal data, but... I think for a media collection you don't need everything backed up, but you probably do want a certain amount of drive fault tolerance
I also suggest FileBot, it makes naming files super easy. For the move example you gave it might not be an issue, but I rip TV series as it's most of what I watch, and labeling all of those gets time consuming. I'm already using MakeMKV and HandBrake. Mostly because I'm tired of shows I like being removed from one streaming network and moved to another. I'm in the situation where there's only 1 show per streaming service I actually like anymore. I'm considering setting up a Plex server to upload my video's to so I can stream my own stuff.
Pretty good video, but for me personally this seems like a lot of additional effort and quite costly. The setup already requires me to buy everything on blu-ray anyways, but then also comes with additional costs for the hardware and the electricity to keep it running non-stop. Sure, once you setup everything and got used to the process of ripping newly attained media, you're having a very convenient time watching the stuff and in a really good quality too, but to me I just don't think it's worth it.
Sshhh, that bluray showing in the video is for show only, for the dmca people, no one is so stupid to buy a bluray just because they want to rip it and put it in NAS, come on, this is comon sense
UPDATE (if you want to rip 4K content): It looks like the popularity of the Pioneer drive led to a firmware update on new models that blocks ripping UHD content for now!
For the most comprehensive guide to what drive to buy, and how to make sure it will work with 4K UHD content, search for "Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide Updated 2023" - over on the MakeMKV forum there's a very comprehensive thread dealing with these issues.
And if you ask me what drive I would recommend, the trouble is once I recommend it, they'll likely pull those units and slap on some updated firmware too! So do your research!
If you don't need UHD content, and you're content with regular Blu-Ray or DVD media, then no worries, it's a lot simpler :)
Any chance you can downgrade the firmware to an older version?
The BDR-XD07UHD doesn't seem to be available anymore. Is there another drive you suggest?
@@joriv Search for the article I mention in the parent comment-it has the best recommendations now.
So, now we have to disconnect our PCs from the internet before we rip Blue Rays in order to prevent firmware updates that block ripping?
Wow, isn't that just dandy? 🙄
@@LRM12o8 No, that's not it. It means the more recently manufactured versions of this drive have an update/gimped firmware. That's it.
There was a nice little period of time when piracy wasn't preferable
Welcome back
Piratebay never went out of business.
@@brodriguez11000 pirate bay is not a great place for piracy as well...
it is not trustworthy due to the amount of viruses
the best way to pirate is to get in a private tracker, that way you don't expose what torrents you download to the public, cause only people in the private tracker can see that
and private trackers are stricter than public ones, so less harmful content
@@arjix8738 reason they are far much re strict because there are moderators who remove malicious uploads plus not everyone get the permission to upload.
Almost a decade ago joined a private tracker and been using it since.
@@arjix8738 don't private trackers require you to contribute your own releases?
@@arjix8738 the trick today is not to pirate at all, rather to borrow by livestream, which isn't a crime. The legal liability lands solely on the virtual library handlers.
We've come full circle. Something I was doing twenty years ago with DVD's now needs explaining to a whole new generation. Great video.
Doesn't make it any easier that 7-10 years ago getting a bluray wd was a part of the spec list when buying a laptop. They dropped the drive and slapped the same price on the unit because "they made it thinner"
Time for Blockbuster to make a return....hire 15 movies for 1 night, yes I'm going to watch them all............eventually
@@brad5185 "you wouldn't steal a car..."
@@noahmarosok8168 you misspelled download...
@@freedustin lol I was trying to reference the old anti piracy ad from the 2000s
unsubscribe, got it.
Nooooo! Not from me lol
@@lpeabody "instructions unclear, task failed successfully"*
@@JeffGeerling Friend and building contractor I used to work for when a carpenter: "Oh sh*t, you did just what I asked..." 🤣
This is what you call "NOT understanding the assignment"
@@JeffGeerling You mock, but Red Shirt's got the right idea for once.
Too complicated, i'll stick to Piracy, thank you
As long as we maintain the seed ratio. Sail High Brother
*clicks on magnet link and auto dl 2tb of content to home server, sits down and opens jellyfin and a pack of chips*
GIGACHAD
ads on paid plans lmao these companys gotta go broke, fuck that, piracy is what it is
@@theranpan_aye aye captain
Spoiler Alert: Corporations won't be happy until you own _nothing_ and *everything* is a rental.
Cut them off.
I thought this was common sense 😔
"You will own nothing, and you will be happy." -WEF
That's going to be hard on the condom industry.
I’m mean legally you own only the right to reproduce the media in that form that you bought. You don’t own the media yourself just because you bought the Blu-ray… so you never really owned anything to be precise… just the ways to reproduce it for yourself… there’s even the grey area where you can have the media, like Blu-ray, but you are not allowed to play it for a lots o ppl to watch… Plus, do you really need to have that Avangers end game Blu-ray ? How many times you’ll watch anyway? Rental services almost killed piracy because it solve the problem of ppl not being able to enjoy things. “ Owning” everything is far away from a solution of enjoyment, maybe a “my precious” greed feeling going away… but in the end, does ir really matter if you own it?
@@olly344 Yesssss, rationalize away your ownership. Do their job for them. Be an ally to those that already own everything while you get less than nothing in return.
If you dislike greed, allying with the greediest mother fuckers on this planet is one _hell_ of a way to fight it...
Man those streaming companies became just like cable companies. Very nice video Jeff as always.
Basically yeah, you need to pay to watch ad's.
It's fucking insane
Cut off one head and two more take it's place
Worse. You need to have a good internet connection.
Because at their core, they are. lol My dad used to pay only $30 a month for satellite TV by saying he would cancel after a year went by and they called wanting to hike the price. "We'll see what wee can do" kept turning into "You can keep the $30 deal for another year and no more" year after year. We got rid of TV service years ago and floated between several streaming services before realizing there is nothing good to watch on any of them once you finish the few you like. So Amazon Prime is the only one that stayed simply because they pay for Prime pricing and shipping benefits; streaming is a bonus.
Side note, TV networks used to be broadcast for anybody with an antenna, fully ad supported. Local channels still are, but your local channels don't have any of the big stuff anymore.
The problem still exists where:
1. Media companies are doing fewer physical releases.
2. If you have a large family where everyone has different tastes, your purchases could be large (not to mention they'll complain about having to wait to watch new shows months after everyone else)
That’s why we have piracy.
Agreed, but this is also where sharing can become a real asset. Obviously your comfort with this may be different to mine, but you can setup something like this for more than just your personal household. For example, you may have a grandparent, sibling, cousin, family friend, etc, who you could share a library with. After all, nothing stopped you taking DVDs over to a friend's house for a movie night.
Another option that will likely become even more popular over time is to use this method for stuff you find on special, and subscribe to 1 streaming service at a time for new release content. A lot of my household only actually watches one or two new shows every couple of months. Most of our media consumption is older media that we either never watched, or want to re-watch.
@@electronix6898 In the video, as you said, it was never explicitly said whether he recommended viewers should or shouldn't continue with streaming services. However, he presented it in a way that suggests that ripping your purchased media is an alternative solution to subscribing to those services. (And for some people, it is.)
I just presented the cases where that solution doesn't necessarily fit.
(I'm of the opinion that we should all be watching "TV" less frequently anyway.)
There is also the issue of ripping an encrypted disc is not legal because breaking the encryption is illegal... Not that you're ever gonna get caught unless you maybe made a video about it
i seen most shows come out on dvd still even if its some time later.
Its incredible that companies are allowed to operate in a way where you buy a movie which might be labelled as something like 'buy' but that they have the right to discontinue your licence at any time and its because they still make you stream it. My opinion is that by law they should be forced to provide you with an offline player that plays their protected content without the need for connection to a service when they offer you buy and own options
Not good enough. People need to be able to play things they "buy" even once the company selling the offline player has gone bust, or it's not supported on newer hardware or whatever. DRM is not a solution to any human problem.
@moopet8036 I hate DRM too, but I can understand the other side (production is ridiculously expensive and directors have some justifications in how they feel) so I think it's a viable compromise *for streaming* as to prevent the average joe from circumventing the nature of a subscription. However, I demand full transparency, at the very least as to which device supports what (before paying) and perhaps also until when stuff is licensed. Buying, that's too far, you're calling it "buying", even if there was justification for DRM there (there really isn't much) it's not ok to take it back, otherwise call it "own a license to play on devices we like until we say you've had enough". License agreements should have clauses for perpetuity rights for the sake of providing access to customers that paid, since for the consumer this type of "buying" is akin to the company owning a dvd player and streaming its output to you, except they now also throw your dvd in the trash when they don't want to pay licensing fees anymore and conveniently never tell you that part
I paid $800 for zbrush and I still have to log into the app monthly. So I can’t go offline long or I won’t be able to sculpt. It makes me furious.
That's just owning the physical copy at that point.
@@AKcess_Dnied well yes because the physical copy behaves like something you actually "buy", unlike a company taking it away from you at will which is called "pay to play it only on this device with only this player until we change our minds and stop caring about renewing our licensing agreements, which we will do at any time without warning and without refunds of any kind"
I love living in Switzerland, downloading movies online is legal (for private use only)
Even P2P sharing of copyrighted content is legal 😅
In hungary we can download but.not seed the movies. But no one give a shit about torrenting so we have our own p2p website/network
@@ThePresidentsNurse With a right VPN and good connection, the world is yours. Nice!
Same in the states. Download, don't seed, You're good.
Hrm, you might actually be paying for it like Germany does (or used to). They had a tax on any device with data storage capability. I think the tax was a % based on the size of the storage and the money was used to pay content creators. (Video and audio) and you just got download whatever you wanted.
@@FlockofSmeagles Sadly, in P2P case, even when you download, you might share parts of files already downloaded. While you can leech and not wait for share ratio to reach 1.000, still some file parts get sent and might be found by copyright warriors.
The most annoying things for me with streaming services are their insistence on geographical licensing and the requirement that their content can only be accessed via their own app. They should all provide an open api for access to their content so consumers can search and manage their viewing in whatever app they choose.
Unfortunately if you're geofenced from content it's more likely that physical copies of those movies aren't available either. Especially not dubbed in the native language.
Also as someone maintaining a scraper project, open apis for large libraries are an invitation for creating unrestricted access...
@@derisis13 "Unfortunately if you're geofenced from content it's more likely that physical copies of those movies aren't available either."
ARRRRR, that be what piracy is for, matey!!!
(if they won't sell it to you, f*** 'em!)
This is exactly my problem. I need a single hub where I can watch things.
@@derisis13 what's a scraper project? Also when you say unrestricted access do you mean others can access your devices?
@@DarkGhostHacker by unrestricted access I mean unrestricted access to the streamed content.
As for my scraping project (which isn't mine, I just maintain it) I leave it up to you to find. I work on it under the same handle as here.
As Gabe Newell once said "Piracy is a distribution problem, not a price one". People can pay easily for a DVD or BD if they like a show, but asking them to subscribe constantly to a streaming service is too much, as it is now in essence the new cable, a saturated market with pure cuantity and no wuality whatsoever.
For real, and his words go for something like emulation too. I don't have hundreds of dollars to spend on a working N64 with all the games I want for it, so I'd rather download a free emulator and ROM pack on my computer and play it that way
Well, in this case it's both. On the monetary side, $100+ to pay for every streaming service to get one movie there and one TV show there... it's just not worth it. However for music, I can pay $10-$15 a month and get any track I want, so why would I pay more than 10x that for TV shows and movies. On the distribution side, I found a piracy site that I could stream movies from, and on that site I found 3 out of 3 of the movies I was looking to watch.... I searched peacock, Netflix, Disney+ and HBO max and I was 0 out of 3, it was ridiculous. Doctor sleep, men in black 3 and some other one I can't remember... It's back to piracy until this business model changes for the better again
Maybe if blockbuster was back. It’s not easy buying movies and series in Australia. 1 season of SouthPark for e,g can be up to 40$. John wick 4 is 30$ bluray without 4K. It’s not easy for any average income. If you watch anime you’re extra screwed with how many series release and if you avidly watch multiple series every seasonal release. Attack on titan season 4 part 2 alone is 55$
@@danielhorsburgh874 I am almost certain that Blockbuster wasn't the only rental service. I mean, Netflix started renting DVDs, they just figured in a very convoluted way that becoming a cable company via the web was somehow more lucrative (it clearly isn't).
I foresee a big trend of moving back towards not just ownership, but ownership of physical media. I personally have been re-purchasing many CD albums I used to own, because I miss flipping through the album artwork and actually OWNING the media. People are tired of being yanked around by these fickle streaming platforms. Change is coming!
I started collecting vinyl and CD's recently for this very reason.
I've been buying cds and blurays again because I can't stand the idea of pay for a service for them to remove the content I'm paying for anyways
@@vjollila96 Speak for yourself, I can barely find anything I like on Spotify. It's great if you're into mainstream music, but for anything else you're SOL.
I foresee a big trend of media companies not releasing content on physical media.
@@amunak_ that’s what cd burners are for :)
Fun Fact: If you rip your movies from your discs that you bought legitimately, it still counts as Piracy to them. :)
Yeah, I remember yrs back when I read a news story about a Linux user who ripped a DVD movie disc he owned to his hard drive just so he could watch the damn movie (because his Windows PC had a playback codec issue w/ that disc) -- & got hauled into court for movie piracy. Fortunately, the judge was not sympathetic to the whole "Piracy Is Theft!" campaign the RIAA was trumpeting everywhere....
Judge: So, let me get this straight -- the charge is that the defendant committed an act of theft by copying the contents of a movie disc he owned ... to a computer he owned ... so he could privately view the movie in his own home?
Prosecutor: Yes, your Honor.
Judge: [pauses, staring @ the prosecutor] And, exactly *who* was the defendant stealing *from*?
Prosecutor: ...Himself, your Honor.
@@zenkim6709 lmaoooo
it depends on where you live!
@@zenkim6709 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Well yah ur making a copy
Thoughts on ripping - I usually backup the disc contents instead of ripping them immediately. You can open the backed up movie files in VLC and navigate around the menu. Very helpful for saving all the extra content for movies like I like to.
Thoughts on encoding - Handbrake's built-in presets are great, just be careful about GPU encoding. It's designed to be fast, not efficient, so you end up with a higher bitrate for the same quality as CPU encoding (or lower quality for the same size). It's great for on-the-fly transcoding, though, which is why I still have a 1060 in my Plex server lol. Another thing to note is that if you're getting down to 4-5GB per movie, you might want to keep an eye on the audio. The original DTS audio that most blurays ship with can be anywhere from 3-8GB on their own, so if you leave those untouched (which the HQ 1080p30 preset doesn't) it'll eat up a lot of space for very, very minimal gain.
If you ever run into an issue where the audio is too quiet, it's likely playing a stereo conversion of 5.1 or 7.1. It's not the end of the world, but what I've done is ensure my stereo downmixes have a 2db gain. Haven't had an issue since.
Also, animated content compresses/encodes INSANELY well. Like 1-10% of the source filesize for a barely perceptible loss of video quality.
I suggest anyone who wants to know more about encoding look up the Scene Rules. REV5 for h264 and h265 were last updated in 2020 and provide a lot of information and guidelines for how to encode video efficiently and correctly. There's even information about encoding video with heavy grain (e.g. older film), which is very helpful if you're like me and have a _lot_ of 60s films to rip.
I can go into more detail but most people have probably already fallen asleep reading this.
PS - Hi Jeff! I made a big post on the Plex subreddit about video encoding and transcoding quality a while back, and it was you who inspired me to share that information with others. Thanks for all the great work you do!
I'm going to have to find that post in r:Plex. I could use that.
Thanks for sharing, posts like yours are extremely helpful to others, since it's a quick onramp towards improving the quality/efficiency of the process!
@@JeffGeerling please pin this post!
bookmark
Jeff, this was obvious for years. The space would get more decimated needing you to subscribe to all these different services. I don't pay for Netflix anymore and will soon be canceling my Amazon Prime subscription now that almost everything on Prime video is IMDB/FreeVee pay to watch. Screw all those corporations. I've started buying physical media again despite Amazon's never ending attempts to gaslight you into thinking the only option is streaming.
Guess who owns FreeVee? Yep, Bezos/Amazon, so, in effect you are paying MORE to Amazon for Pay to view on FreeVee than if it is on Amazon Prime...
@@kevinshumaker3753 They also own IMDB where you have the priviledge of watching stuff full of ADS
I still watch a few shows that I like on various services -- but only one service at a time. This month it's Hulu -- and if "Disenchantment" drops another season next year, I'll pick up Netflix for a month. I currently get Paramount+ for free, so I watch "Lower Decks" on that service.
Yeah - having a full-time service with any streaming company is ridiculous, and as I said in my comment, I've been ripping my movies for years and will continue to buy physical media. Years ago I got some movie (I don't even remember which one anymore) that came with a digital code, and I thought I'd try it. Yeah.. All I remember about it is that the service shut down, and the digital code was worthless... I believe that's when I started ripping.
@@kevinshumaker3753 Not to mention people who say "screw amazon prime! Back to buying movies!" and then buy from Amazon
The only reason I don’t cancel prime is the shipping is worth it. But I might get rid of it soon
The only thing i get from this, is that piracy is WAAAAY more convenient
This setup is already expensive, but then you have to BUY the blu-rays as well? Supporting the companies which forced you to into spending a 1000$ on a NAS? Fuck no.
It is. But you're also gambling Everytime you download something. Either with a corrupt/shitty quality file, or getting a trail of kitty P. Ppl don't get it that convenience comes with a price, if one is willing to roll the dice hey 🤷🏽♂️ your choice. But some of us (quite a few) like having full quality rips that we know are straight from the source.
Ps just as a little bonus it does feel nice to know that what you have is ACTUALLY yours, bought and owned.
@@sinnwalkersounds like skill issue to me. Private trackers are what you are looking for
@@sinnwalkerthis is a very very small chance. Maybe it also makes it more likely that lightning will strike you but I'm not worried
@@sinnwalker True . It’s a balancing act for sure. I was once a sea captain for a long while for financial reasons, but I’ve started collecting physical media for several reasons.
The sales encourage companies to keep making physical media.
Ownership.
Backup copy of my media library gets destroyed.
Guaranteed high quality video files made from my own disc!
Access to all of the extras on disc. LotR has about 25 hours of extra content, for example.
I love it when Jeff gets irritated by the terrible practices of these companies. It is time to fight back. Not everyone will but not everyone has to. We only need to show them the way and enough people are ready that it can start to make a difference!
“Fight back”??
This is capitalism. If you don’t agree, stop buying and giving them so much undeserved power!
@@pepeshopping But... I completely agree with you! Yes. Stop buying/subscribing to all these streaming services. That is capitalism.
You don't have to buy anything and these companies aren't entitled to you doing so. It's their job to provide compelling services we want to buy and it's once they feel entitled to get your money that things become a problem.
People have been putting up with this because it was easy and convenient for a long time. Now that they're becoming more established platforms though they are testing the waters to see what they can get away with.
Your wallet is how you fight back (and it's the only thing they care about). They religiously follow these subscription numbers and will change course if they are starting to become measurably impacted (and they pay entire teams of people to watch people unsubscribing and to determine why).
@@pepeshopping Yeh. It is pretty simple. Don't like it don't buy it.
I don't have subscriptions to any of this crap.
@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 Ahh yes, this is the hard part for sure. Jeff is definitely trying to teach people but I think he's teaching mostly others who are already techies / into tech. No doubt there is some minimum technical skill level to who will be comfortable backing up (or ripping if you will) DVD/Blu-Ray.
It used to be more popular a decade ago to have movie collections like this in MKV and the recompressed formats. It's something of a lost / forgotten art. I think I realized how old I'm getting was when Jeff explained what a Blu-Ray disc drive is!
You totally could have a neighborhood shared NAS server with movies and stuff like that though. That is a pretty cool idea and it would be easier / cheaper to do than ever before!
@@pepeshopping except that it's not capitalism. It's cronyism.
Very cool idea, but piracy sounds way more fun
I disagree
@@raskolnikov6443 I dont agree with your disagreement
@@raskolnikov6443 Piracy is just easier and infinitely cheaper
But what if you wanted to store those movies
@@MateuLeGrillepain but you didn't have to cut me off
But be aware!! As Wendell said, a media server really is a gateway drug.
Buys first NAS...
Fills it up...
"Now there are two of them!"
@@JeffGeerling Heyy.... Hey. Wanna hit of storage?
@@JeffGeerling Honey, I accidentally built a san again
@@ASUSTOR_YT I gotta lay off it a while!
@@JeffGeerling Not until we bring NVMealicious.
If buying isn't owning, then piracy is not stealing.
Thank you for helping to destigmatize the concept of owning our own media.
The own nothing and be happy about it crew is getting out of control!
Destigmatize? I don't think anyone is going to ostracize you for having a DVD.
@@eadweard. Fair- I should have been more clear that there is stigma around ripping the media you own.
@@gannas42 you only owns a license to watch it though, not the media itself.
I mean, at the end of the day does it matter if you own the media? How many times do you watch the same movie over and over? I'm not saying you shouldn't own media, but for how a lot of people are acting, and how you post is worded, it's not that big of a deal. It's just a thought at the end of the day. Our brains just don't like the idea that something we spent Time on(not money), is no longer valid or available, because it feels like it was a waste.
Dude, to be fair, I’m not the kinda person that rewatches the same thing over and over again, so I don’t care if the media is mine or not, as long as I can enjoy on the moment I’m happy with it. Plus it jus feels like a hoarder when you have an entire room dedicated to physical stuff that you rarely use… I like streaming because for the price of a couple of dvds/blu-rays I have a month of content that I can watch and I don’t need anything else than my tv or laptop or even phone… guess I’m a minimalist then… so be it. Happy to watch whatever’s available.
I have a huge amount of respect for you getting irritated and then actually doing something about it.
I “bought” a movie on amazon, and then found out amazons HDCP refused to let me view it in full quality because our media pc had an older gpu plugged into a cheap projector. I got so fed up, I ended up acquiring the movie another way. I had already paid for it, I just wasn’t allowed to watch it in the quality I paid for because my hardware was deemed inadequate.
Time to start building a media server :)
What type of connection was between the pc and the projector?
I starting pirating so much lately because of similar reasons. Their loss lmao
A cheap hdmi splitter should yeet HDCP straight out the window. Cheap China Manufacturers aren't that concerned with complying with standards :D
What he is actually doing is advertising a Pioneer reader and an Asustor NAS.
While I usually pirate everything, I understand that it's important that people rip because no one's ripping there's nothing to pirate. This video reminded me of that, so I'm off to rip what Blu-rays I do have. Then I'm gonna share them on the high seas lol
robinhood, is that you?
Thank you! We love you for that - do remember about it :D
Yo ho, yo ho, matey!
Maybe don’t announce that to google
Do you not feel like an asshole committing theft?
Sadly that’s just it. $700 is a ton of money, not to mention the $20-$30 for the 4K Blu-Rays (each). That’s just so expensive and a huge hassle when I can just subscribe to a service. That’s how they get you…I would do that immediately if it was cheaper, especially since it sounds like a fun project
That's why you pirate it. You can still buy a NAS to store your files and in the long run you will save a lot of money.
Or just use your computers drive and delete movies as you go to keep space.
@@m.a.a.d9275 yeah I’m a supporter of copying your own movies tbh, not as big of a fan of piracy, but hey if your end isn’t illegal, go for it I guess. I’m starting to collect Blu-Rays for fun, but also so I can someday get a NAS to basically have my own streaming service lol
Completely agree. The trend towards subscription based everything doesn’t sound so good from the end user perspective. Starting to realize that free data was the lure to get everyone online. Now corporations next move is to pull it all back and monetize it. Like taking candy from a toddler. Folks will be like here take my money.
It just baffles me how nobody realizes (or cares) that subscription services pull that alluringly small amount of money from you... twelve times over in one year. It feels like I could convince a toddler in 2 seconds that it's a bad idea to have a ton of subscriptions.
Software is also going subscription. I would go without rather than subject myself to their tryanny. I remember a time when we got along just fine without software.
My current hobby is to check out thrift stores, buy my favorite classic TV shows and video games, and back them up to my NAS for safe keeping and easy access. I love the feeling of finding and archiving, and knowing it can’t be taken away all while not having a monthly fee leech off me. Great video!
You can also borrow DVDs/Blu Rays from your local library and back those up as well. Hell, if you still have a RedBox near you, you could also back those DVDs/Blu Rays up.
@@20035079 Yep, they won't know anything as long as you don't tell them
@@ToaderTheToad I tell everyone after I back them up
How do you back up video games?
@@user-vi4xy1jw7e depends on the kind of game! I have a modded original Xbox, so if I find Xbox games in the wild I’ll back them up directly using the console, and then FTP transfer them to my NAS. As far as cartridges go you can get peripherals online to plug them into and backup the game that way.
My family initially wondered why I went through all the trouble to set up Jellyfin with a NAS a year ago. But with how things have been going in the streaming world, they've started using my Jellyfin server themselves for the past few months and are very happy with it! Pro tip: Using Caddy, you can set up a reverse proxy and safely access your jellyfin server over HTTPS from the wider internet.
I hope you are charging them for that access. 🤣
@@JoeyBaby47 that's where the legality gets weird.
I'm also subscribed to all those services, but I only pay ~$15 a month or less.
I only subscribe to one service at a time, though.
I never understood being subbed to everything all at once.
No one service has enough new, quality content to justify staying with it year-round, either.
its common with high earners or even couples or families, 1 kid asks dad for netflix, the other disney, mum has amazon, and so on, they all make accounts on each others profile etc, but poor dad ends up paying for it all
I have all services but only pay for one; through sharing the password with family.
I've been doing this for my DVD/Bluray collection since 2008. Probably the most "wife-approved" project I've ever done.
Funny how important wife approved is for project success.
This is why I usually opt to buy hard copies of movies. You are at the mercy of these streaming service providers to keep the content available. And if you lose internet access for whatever reason, you can't access your stuff. But if you actually have the media in hand, you can still watch anytime, anywhere. Great video, Jeff!!! This is a great way to preserve your DVD and BluRay disks and make them easy to access without handling disks. Be your own streaming service!
There's also this sort of potential future
Getting a physical copy of "awesome movie from 1930-1990 something" might some day be impossible because the 1930-1990 version is 'problematic'
Fortunately for you dear film lover, there a modern version that 'fixes' the 'problematic' elements of the original and we can pretend the original never existed
@@dorvinion Excellent point; especially in our modern era of rewriting history to reflect current societal "norms".
Agreed, unfortunately not as much stuff I want to watch more than twice these days :P I remember when George Lucas was trying to push that dvd format that was limited use (don't recall the name), ughh, at circuit city. The starwars movies I still have on bluray, etc, used to watch them a lot.
@@ironfist7789 do not now about George, but the was dvd type in mana auto destructed, the greenest of the DVD media type, I all a bit hasy, never seen one never mind touched one, the Idea, like dvd Rentals, dvd in the post, in light sanative envelope or something, and when you wanted to watch, you opened enverlope, and put dvd in your player, and watched the film, some as your watvhing film the pick laser in your house hold DVD player wearing out data track as it being played, you it you quick, a day or so it may still replay second or third time if lucky, after that it just drink coaster with hole in the middle, so no need to dvd return played DVD, as a Rental would normally be done?
I wonder why that failed (not, this long before green revolution had kicked in) it was seen a big waste?
@@ironfist7789 That's where thrift stores and other sources of used media comes in handy
Its been years since I bought anything within days/weeks of its release. Lose the FOMO and life gets simpler and less costly.
Course I'm super picky about what I watch as well. Only have eight movies 2016 or newer on my Plex
Jeff: "No ads ever!"
Me: *scratches head while seeing an animated movie with my kids where only Mercedes' automobiles are being driven*
Sure thing lol. You can't cut out product placement within media but at least you can eliminate the external and interstitial ads. Advertising will always happen but we can reduce it to some degree.
Try getting the UK version of the film. Product placement in children's TV is absolutely forbidden by law here (although some big american films slip through the net because they get clever with depth of field and such to add natural blur to logos).
Sony movies on their way to have only Sony appliances
@@dafoex They you get the problem where multilingual people expect to hear the same accent they saw the first time to when they rewatch a movie :) That issue plagues my family, we're all that way.
Well, no *explicit* ads padding out the content, then ;)
Here is a tip if people think that purchasing that many DVDs is expensive: libraries. The library near me has a lot of DVDs. If what you're looking for is pretty popular, chances are they'll have it. If not, request it any they'll most likely get it. Then you can just follow this tutorial to rip it.
Yes but popular and DVD only is pretty limiting.
That's just piracy with extra steps
So the solution to these subscription services being too much money is to spend exponentially more on DVDs and hardware, set up a huge storage hub, and spend time ripping every single DVD you get? It seems to me that the subscriptions are worth it as long as you only have a few.
To be clear I think this is a great idea if you hate corporations and have lots of money/time to spare.
I have 8 siblings, like hundreds of cousins and so many friends. So we just share passwords 😂
Yeah, wouldn't buying even two 4k UHD movies a month be more expensive than 4 or 5 streaming services? This solution kind of feels like "hate paying a small tax on alcohol? START YOUR OWN BREWERY!"
It's just we can't own something
Investing into a media server is mainly meant for people that want to own their media and use it in a convenient manner. Its more expensive than subscriptions, but you are actually owning the content instead of renting it or "fake" owning it as the final space fan found out.
You must be a zoomer.
Been doing this for years... the only real issue is companies are making it harder to own stuff legally. And often when they do actually release stuff it's not even on Blu-ray anymore (The Orville being released only on DVD is a crime), or not releasing them in North America, forcing me to import them.
AI Upscale to 4k :P
You make me think of a guy I used to ‘work’ with via Reddit. He wanted me to download old cartoons and put them in a software via FileZilla and his dedicated VM servers to make menu’s and stuff with them and upload them to a database. I never questioned any of it and assumed it was just for data hoarding. He payed me 2$ for every DVD or 4.5GB I successfully submitted and even had tons of self made guides only and stuff. It was pretty in-depth and became more and more complicated the more rules he implemented. I eventually stopped, but it was really intriguing to learn about it all and now leaves a great memory.
If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing.
It seems like getting the equipment and physical media costs about as much at 15 or 20 years of streaming subscriptions and a lot more work.
Came here to say this
Exactly. And I do not need to own everything. Mostly I view it once. If I really know I want to watch it more often, I can still buy it. But I went to non physical, because years ago I was spending all my money on music and dvds while also cluttering my home with all the stuff. No way back for me.
Or u could do the nas setup but forget about everything else and just vpn + torrent
@@nickdejong2899 It's certainly not for everyone, but there is some content that I'd like to watch that isn't available on the streaming services, and is far more expensive to buy digitally (or is not even available to buy digital copies). Plus, for me at least, I actually want to buy this kind of hardware for more than just movie storage, so it's very much a viable option for me.
Your right... piracy is the only way to go.
This has been my strategy for years. As soon as Mythbusters disappeared from Netflix because Discovery started its own streaming service, I realized this problem will only get worse.
I hoard hard drives and store any and all shows and movies I like to keep.
Bravo 👋
just go to p2p at this point
stremio is user-friendly and reliable, you can source it from various services, including a ton of p2p services, legit streaming companies and your own local storage.
i'm pretty sure american ISPs notify you if they find out you're pirating something, but you can bypass that with any VPN client.
currently i'm using a shared netflix acc on my TV since it's easier than screen mirroring stremio, but i screen mirror whenever i want to watch something that isn't available on the netflix catalog
@@gb76231 I'll never rely on someone else providing the streaming content I want. The problem remains, if the source decides to not offer a certain show or movie, you're screwed however you choose to stream the content.
Keeping it locally is the only way. Storage is cheap.
@@sk4lman realistically p2p media never vanishes
Pro tip. Goodwill is an excellent source to get really cheap DVDs and Blu-rays. Usually a couple bucks for dvds and around 5 for Blu-rays. Though GW is getting a bit greedier lately so they might be a bit more in some cases.
Also, if you're patient, good movies eventually get dumped into the $5/$10 bins at Walmart. Just have to be willing to wait to buy it until a few months post-release.
thrift stores are the new department stores
This is great in theory but at best ripping movies is a legal gray area and at worst considered piracy no different than downloading a torrent...
Goodwill cherry picks their media. The good stuff they have put on eBay and now have their own store. What is left behind is junk. But ... sometimes they will miss something good. Just yesterday I found the Temptation's greatest hits CD. Kids these days don't know.
Yeah, it seems like any time GW discovers there's an actual market for something they have, the price goes way up. I've seen them selling stuff at higher prices than I can find new at other stores.
You can also just buy the bluray discs and then pirate the movies/tv shows anyway. The studios can stop with their anticonsumer DRM crap if they want us to stop pirating the content we own
Also thanks for the shoutout to Jellyfin, it's really an amazing piece of software
I can somehow relate even though I didn't do it myself, as one of my favourite TV programmes has home video releases on DVD-Video, but not Blu-ray disc, so I'd normally have to settle for standard definition PAL video, whereas it's 1080p on streaming services!
Absolutely, it's much faster and uses less energy. It uses less energy because you really don't need to re-encode if there's a torrent already available with your preferred codec, resolution, or bitrate.
Agree with downloading the content you already own on disc, since someone else has already gone to all the trouble of ripping/reencoding, but if you download by torrent, turn uploading off. And you need to DL the correct format. Can't get the HD BR or Web Rip if you only own the DVD.
As the intro suggested, yes you can do that. And that is not the point of this tutorial.
@@mark4751
>turn uploading off
Or simply have JDownloader on a Pi and load from OCHs.
Yep, this is the way to go. Back to physical media, where you actually BUY something, not get hooked on some rentseeking service that will screw you over any time they deem necessary.
Thank you for this most needed PSA, Jeff. I hope you're doing well. I have not watched MSM TV for about 7 years now, and I am not subscribed no any streaming services at all. My family simply enjoys the movies we have bought on DVD/BD over the years. If we cannot get it in that format, we just don't watch it. It's really simple. Nobody NEEDS to watch TV, and the longer you don't watch it, the more you realise just how unnecessary it is.
Yep, much more enjoyable to turn off the TV and put music on while doing other things.
@@spotifyseascapessmoothjazz you seem a bit biased.
Sooo... your solution is to not only spend hundreds of dollars in a setup (around $700 you mentioned near the end), and a fixed price of maybe $15-$30 for every piece of media I want to buy, plus all the electricity of using the hard drives...
but also spending many hours of my time in ripping the data and setting everything up? Each hour of my time is worth something. Depending on how I'm feeling at a specific moment and what are the alternatives I could be doing and enjoying, I value 1 hour of my free time between $20 and $200. Each hour I spent setting that up would be for me equivalent to at least $20 added to the bill
yeah he's kind of a dork for trying to do it all legally with way more work involved
Too long, I'll pirate
That whats I have been doing then uploading it to my physical hard drive
lmfaoo
I just saw a post about how piracy slowed down because of the ease of streaming, but now that streaming has become so expensive that piracy is back up.
Been doing this for a long time. We buy the occasional first-run movie, but more intense than not we buy movies from the dollar-bins at Walmart, rip them, and chuck the disk into a box in the closet.
This is the way-it's rare I'll buy a Blu-Ray at release like I'm doing with Top Gun... usually I wait to get them at $5 or less!
Why spend $100/month when you can spend about the same and do 10x the work just to watch a movie
Or you can get them for free 😉😉😉
@rgprosucctions1704 since when is all that storage free? Not to mention you would require an better internet connection, and your electricity bill is going to be even higher
This is something I've been doing after so much license expirations on streaming. I like to pay for the content I genuinely enjoyed and BD tends to have a better quality than most streaming services offer.
And at only 40-120 dollars for a whole show you will blow 1 year of netflix on it... If you want access to a normal person's amount of content you are going to be way above the costs of having multiple streaming services for the rest of your life and that is just now, you get to keep paying at a faster rate than streaming and then ripping it takes up even more time and time is money. This isn't the brightest idea.
@@thomgizziz the nice thing about physical media is that you can also buy it second hand. I see lots of series for €3 in our thrift shops.
I do like the idea of pay per view, but I guess Netflix, Disney and others prefer to go banrupt rather then sell just one or two series to individuals and not a full account. really the new cable, right when we almost got rid of those f... bast... Damn streaming companies now...
@@thomgizzizyeah, so just download it in 10 minutes instead.
Built my own RPi 72TB NAS running OMV based on the axzez interceptor board you featured previously. Currently used as my secondary onsite backup (the first is using an ASUSTOR 4-drive box) and offsite goes to an AWS S3 service. One lovely benefits of Longmont, Colorado is the city offers symmetrical 1GB internet as a flat rate utility @ $70.00/month, which makes the S3 service a viable option. FWIW, Comcast absolutely hates the city utility option, and has published a number of misleading editorials and ads regarding the service.
Sure hope the city utility of providing internet service will catch on to more cities....that would be kool
I would looooove having faster upload speeds. But nice work on the OMV NAS! Going to be doing some more work with the Interceptor soon :)
@@JeffGeerling Future experiment here: I have a 5-port NVME adaptor and a Waveshare PCIE->NVME board that I plan to try plugging in to a CM4 board. Should be a total time-suck, but interesting version of "the fun never ends." 🙃
When re-encoding, make sure the target frame rate is the same as the source.
If you encode a 24fps movie at 30fps, it will use more hard drive space. But more importantly, it will play with juddery 3:2 pulldown, even on devices which support proper 3:3 or 5:5 playback. (aka 24hz mode.)
Thanks!
Wow, didn't know that. Thanks for the tip!
@Confined Spiral Yeah like Amazon Firesticks which forced all the content I watched on it to play at 60 fps. Made every big budget movie look like it filmed with cheap hardware.
"Am I going to pirate something?"
"No, I'm going to pirate something."
Great video man! Just one detail, you are changing the frame rate of the movie when you do the transcode 11:20 I can see how the original video file is at 23.9 fps, when you do the transcode, you are selecting 30fps, and should be the same as the source. Hope you see this! Thanks for this great video
I‘m glad someone else noticed, haha.
He should really look into encoding a bit more before teaching others how to do it though…
And here in lies the problem, now he has to spend thousands and thousands of hours re-ripping transcoding encoding renaming transferring etc. Then bus a hdr 12bit tv and has to do the while thing all over again… colossal waste of time.
Over the last 12 months, I have been buying all of my favourite old TV shows and movies on DVD and backing them up onto a HDD for later viewing. It all started because I felt like watching episodes of Viva La Bam and Jackass one day and when I searched for what streaming platform they were on, I found out nobody had them and the only way to watch them was to try and find them on DVD. I then started to notice that some of my favourite TV shows and movies from today were being removed from various streaming platforms because they were now considered "problematic" or "offensive".
We're almost at the point where TV shows and movies aren't even released on DVD anymore and so the only way to watch them is to subscribe to a streaming platform but as Jeff states in the video, that isn't forever and even buying them from a streaming platform doesn't mean you own them. I appreciate that it's not a permanent fix, but at least it means if I buy my favourite old TV shows and movies on DVD, they won't be lost to the memory hole forever.
Before anyone says "Hurr durr hurr durr hurr, just torrent it all. That's how I get all my stuff", not everyone knows where to even begin with that and a lot of people are simply not comfortable doing it.
and even worse it all maybe written in the TOS of any given service that you pay a fee and that you dont get to own sh*t. But who reads them right ? But even buying stuff on DVD is not the solution as you may think. I have heard so many complaints about badly produced DVDs that you can never be sure if the show you are buying is really well produced. It starts by not stating on the Disk which parts of a season are on it and even worse if you want to watch them in english instead of your own language some episodes may not be in multilanguage. Being a customer who has to spend his hard earned money is not easy. Some shows will never make it to DVD at all and they are not even aired again .
Thanks Jeff for taking this interesting view on our NAS! Hey everyone! Marco here. We're back for another video and we have a brand new fear! Red Shirt *Pirate* Jeff! So we took the initiative to place anti-RSJ defences into our NAS this time! As always! If you have questions, comments, constructive criticism, praise or about how we can keep Red Shirt Jeff and other threats to your data out of your NAS, feel free to reply to me here and I will happily answer your questions. Thanks again!
No question - but this is how companies should do their PR!
Great job! 👍
@@PixelSheep Thanks!
well... this is gonna get buried... if it's ain't pin already...
Is there any update planned for the AS5304T? (Its still using the Celeron J4105 from 2017, an N5105 version would be much better). Also are there any updates planned to address the major malware issues that have been hitting these NAS?
@@PrograError Yep. Can't compete with that witty comment. Will tell Jeff to pin us next video.
Wow I can’t believe how simply you’ve managed to break everything down. My own notes scare me every time I have to go over them again but I think my dad could follow this
This is why I love garage sales. I get boxes and boxes of DVD's for around $0.05 each. Rip them with make mkv then run them through filebot to get the naming the movie databases like. From there I copy the files over to my Dell T610 Server that runs unraid and handbrake as a docker and uses watch folders. This encodes the videos and dumps them in an output folder. I have watch folders for different types of content. SD Movies, HD Movies, SD TV Series, HD TV Series. I can dump as many movies/shows as I want and let the sever just chug away once they are done I open the completed folders from my desktop and use a utility called "files to folders" which just tucks the files into a folder of the same name. (Just to keep things neat) I then move the files over to the proper plex directory (Plex also runs as a Docker on the Dell) and let it ingest the new media.
You may as well pirate, you're still violating the DMCA this way, there is no way to run your own media server legally.
So glad people are talking about this again. I learnt the basics of this from my father as we set up a home theatre PC back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, and ripped a lot of our CDs/DVDs.
I spent a week ripping all of my CDs a couple of years ago so that I'd have them all ready on hand to listen to on my computer whenever I want instead of fussing with discs. Of course, the companies don't like that and think I'm worse than El Chapo and H.H.Holmes combined and should re-pay for the songs in every new format and should have to pay for convenience. 🙄
r/datahorders but seriously. This is an awesome way to own your media. I love it.
What have you done? This is like dropping people a link to a TV Tropes entry! Except instead of being lost for a day, they'll never rest easy again!
I think it's worth noting that the lower spec NAS you spoke about at the end is perfect for a media library if you have h.264 files. If you have h.265 and have to transcode on the fly to h.264 for your tv, seeing as most tv's don't recognise 265 it's not going to be powerful enough to handle that. It'll either buffer endlessly or just not play at all. I would recommend using some form of streaming stick instead of your TV's native apps, they're usually out of date and general garbage. If you get a fire stick or roku streaming stick for example your less powerful NAS won't need to transcode because they both use h.265.
Started doing this about 10 years ago. Good to see it becoming more mainstream.
whenever i see a video about "digital media libraries" made by a well-informed person with tons of NAS storage, i usually assume they are still doing piracy like they did back in the day. Ripping discs with further-increasing quality and tougher DRM does seem like a rewarding and interesting hobby, but surely an IT professional is going to default to the efficiency of simply clicking download ;)
You do get extras with physical media. Interviews, commentary, behind the scenes, deleted scenes, and such.
Many titles, like Monopoly Men or Harry’s War, are hard to find on the high seas. Or there is only a low quality copy floating around.
In addition, you’re guaranteed to get high quality video files as opposed to low bitrate, mis-labeled, watermarked videos from strangers. Don’t ask me how I know :)
Of course. Who wouldn’t join a movie-sharing group? This video only mentions ripping from your own discs to not get booted from UA-cam.
1 further suggestion, if your life depends on your data (or even if you value your time)
DO NOT use all drives in your NAS from a single manufacturer, or date code.
If one fails, it would be likely that the rest could fail soon after, if it was a manufacturer's defect or environmental issue. Warranty replacement doesn't do you any good if you lost the data in the process... Ditto, if you have multiple NAS devices, don't use all dingle source/batch for the drives...
@@09f9 Never said it was. I do the 3/2/1 process, personally, and have disavowed andy employer's recovery plans if they attempted to tell me RAID is their data protection.
man I did that for one of my NAS servers and one thing I didn't count on was the damn raid controller dying hahaha no harm done. just a bunch of movies and tv series being deleted.
Had this happen with 3tb seagates. I got lucky and they failed over 2 months or so so i never (quite) had the array go offline. It was only dvd rips I would have lost but still. Also to the dude who's raid controller died, that's why I've been a big fan of software raid for like 20 years lol. Saw it happen to friends of mine, swore it wouldn't happen to me ;-)
@@zyeborm my backup plan is one primary and one backup HDD formated as NTFS, i don't want to mess with RAID or weird filesystems when I need my backup
if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
I am personally also tired of the steep streaming prices, but we also need to remember that blue ray / entire seasons arent cheap unless they are years old compared to a monthly subscription.
So if you want to save money i doubt that this is the way, BUT i am tired of Netflix / other removing series and movies i want to re watch later, such as stargate and variations of stargate and they can do whatever they want, when ever so this could be a way for me to keep the movies and series i love as my own with the ease of access we love, i will test this method with my existing DVD / Blue ray collection on my NAS, thanks for the inspiration.
Side note: In Denmark you can legally copy and store any physical media you own for your own use, if you can get around the DRM.
The world we live in are becoming crasy about subscriptions, like subscribe to unlock your car seat heaters… But i own the car?
Dealership: Do you?
You could sell the movie after you have ripped it
The downside I've been running into, is some studios (such as fox) are starting to not release blurays anymore and are starting to phase out physical media. I own every movie and show I have on my plex, but it's getting harder.
Yup, it won’t be long until DVD’s are a thing of the past. I’m surprised they aren’t already.
Thatks why we have piracy,
I never hoist the sails unless I can't obtain a disc. But I've been finding myself doing it more lately, because there's no other choice, even though I don't want to.
@@TananBaboo When they do become "a thing of the past", I will too. No mincing words here: I literally have nothing else to live for than collecting DVD's, and with attitudes like that, I imagine I've got a couple years left to live. Call it pathetic if you like, but it's the truth.
@@slambangaction your life is worth more than DVD’s.
"Until Hollywood actually cares about your right to OWN the content you buy... I'm Jeff Geerling"
HAHA, I see what you did there...
I'll admit, that took me longer than it really should have to figure out... 🤣
Disney+ is cracking down on password sharing here in Canada as of Nov 1 so the clock is ticking, as we currently use our in-laws account to let my toddler watch Puppy Dog Pals and Bluey on a daily basis. Not sure I can convince my wife to buy a whole server rack for $700 as an alternative to paying $12/month though. It's like renting vs owning your hot water heater, and I think the monthly cost is still low enough to not justify the inconvenience of setting all this up as a relative tech normie. It'll take about 5 years and a whole bunch of extra work to pay off, plus losing the ability to browse for new things to watch. Chances are one of my hard drives is also going to fail in that 5 year period before it pays itself off.
OK but the two most interesting questions for me were not answered:
Aren't you paying WAY more money to buy UHD Blu Rays of all your shows and movies compared to the streaming services? And aren't most shows (say on Netflix) unavailable for physical purchase? Do you have a system or schedule for buying new shows and movies that your family might be interested in, or do you just go out and buy everything that's available?
And what do you do with all your physical copies? Are they sitting around on a shelf somewhere? I don't currently have space to store shelves of discs.
Plus… what about copyright law, where you have limited rights on reproducing to others the physical media that you just bought… what about encoded media that borderlines illegality when you rip it. What about the practicality of it? Does that mean that I have to buy that stupid Adam Sandlers movie just cause someone told me it’s good and now I have fucked my budget up. What about physical disasters where all my collection has been destroyed?… what if I can’t find the series or movies, do I pirate it? Etc…
Yup, you are paying WAY more. You are buying physical copies of media, you need more and more storage drives and you need to leave your pc turned on for long sessions of ripping/encoding. Not to mention the risks of having such large amounts of data in physical form.
@@HanTheGreatInventor That really depends on how much you watch stuff. Everybody I know who uses streaming services literally force themselves to watch something every week, just to make sure the subscription is worth it.
@@Dante02d12 Nah, you're always paying more like this. If you somehow buy that few movies that this is somehow competitive with streaming, you could get by a lot better by just not maintaining any subscription, and only subscribing when you want to watch a specific movie in that streaming service. In practice, the month will be cheaper than buying the movie on its own, and if you watch anything else that month the comparison becomes just plain slaughter at that point.
@@iurigrang Fair. Anyone can take a subscription for just a month, for less than the price of a movie indeed (maybe efven half that price, depending on the country).
However people usually don't take just a month. Classic breadcrumbs strategy : the price is so low that people think "oh, it's so cheap, I can keep it going!", and ultimately keep it for a year or more. So in practice, people usually don't pay for a single month, even though it is a possibility, you're right.
For a yearly subscription at half the price of a movie, you'd have to watch 6 movies in the year for the subscription to be worth it. And believe or not, but that depends on people. In 2021 I have watched less than that (5 movies, no series). This year I'm pretty sure that's less than that too.
On the contrary, as I said, everyone I know who took a subscription to any streaming service force themselves to watch something every week. Sure, every week is overkill, but the point still stands.
The price of a subscription is still very decent, of course. At least... a single one. But to get access to as much content as possible, you'd need several subscriptions, as it is reminded in this video I believe. So instead of the 6 movies ratio I talked about, it would be more than that if we're talking on a bigger scale.
one thing: there is nothing technically illegal about downloading and torrenting movies or anything online. Big companies are just scaring you
Don't know where you are from, but in the States it is. If you heard some idiot online tell you that, don't believe them. Doesn't matter what their interpretation of the laws are, it matters what the judge's is, and they will and have fined/jailed people for copyright violations.
Very untrue. Pirating is illegal in most countries, though the laws are obviously not the same, sometimes leeching is legal while seeding is not, and even if both are illegal most countries do not enforce their anti piracy laws, most you could get is an angry isp or some copyright trolls that you can easily avoid with a VPN or a service like Debrid
It’s definitely illegal for copyrighted content, but generally speaking they won’t go after you in a court room unless you’re running your own torrent site lol. I used to torrent everything and the most I ever got was my internet being temporarily shut off, at which point I just had to call them and the dude had to give me the copyright speech (given that he was a networking guy, I could tell he didn’t care lol.)
I've been using mostly physical media for the last four decades. Yes, I am that old. The $5 DVD/$7 Blu-Ray bins at Walmart are a great place to find more movies to add to my collection. Amazon also isn't too bad when buying physical media, but you couldn't pay me to use their ridiculous rental service where you pay for the privilege of being allowed to pay for something that you can't keep. (Why does anyone use it?!?)
ease/not knowing any better until they find out the hard way
With all the recent news that best buy and target are going to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays by Q1 2024, and Disney is no longer selling any physical media in Australia all together, i do feel that paradigm shift of "the end of physical media" that many people have worried about is coming closer to fruition.
I remember watching this video a year ago, thinking i could start doing all of this in the future, but now ive seen the warning signs and know its the time to start the project before the prices go up, or even before owning the physical media becomes niche and the cost comes down to the consumer.
So once again, thank you for posting this video, and showing these alternatives in a rational way.
You're quite welcome, and I had the exact same thoughts reading the news this week.
I'm glad I have my digital library already, and the thing I'm the most sad about is these companies are completely ditching the way consumers could handle media over the past 50 or so years, all to try to grab up a small slice of the streaming market.
I love the hunt of finding DVDs at thrift stores or finding random movies on free streaming services so this works for me 🤷♀️
I've been ripping my physical disks to mkv files for years now. I'd recommend that anyone who is serious about this, build a NAS that is powerful enough to transcode. I run emby on truenas and it runs great. Running hand brake on all your files is a giant hassle and a huge time sink. I've literally saved hundreds of hours by not dealing with the extra transcoding step. This has more than covered the cost of a better NAS and additional storage. Also, keep the movies at their original resolution. This is especially helpful for 4K HDR content. Storage is pretty cheap.
I don't even bother to transcode at all. Most modern hardware has no problems with mkvs. I use Chromecast with Google TV devices running Kodi as media players and they don't struggle at all. Plus you can keep e.g. Blu-ray closed caption tracks more easily.
Time to fight back! Thanks for this, Jeff! Also, redshirt Jeff is not entirely wrong here :)
I still remember when I was made fun of for suggesting that companies could legally steal your content that you paid for. I haven't been bullied for that in a few years. Gee, I wonder why.
On another note: It blows my mind that Usenet solves this problem beautifully with a monthly subscription, yet most companies don't even consider doing it.
And no seeding!!! Just DL!!!
@@ross4329 No seed ratio, no problem.
I have been doing this for years. It's frustrating how many QA issues pop up, such as too low audio levels, audio desync (that sometimes only becomes obvious well into a movie), subtitle issues, etc. Yes, I know that if I spent a bunch of time fixing it I could make it work, but I am getting burnt out and am increasingly willing to pay money for something that just works.
I get where you're going, but you're missing that so many of these companies aren't releasing new media, especially series, on disc anymore. You gave the example of Final Space, which was taken off ALL streaming libraries people can buy from, not just Amazon (the chronologically first complaint was regarding Apple, then people noticed it gone on Amazon, UA-cam, and Vudu), but this series was and will never be released on disc, especially since it was taken down as a tax break. So while your advice works great for what's been released, there a building library of media that will never be released on disc that people will need to pirate somehow (because even if you download when you do "own" it, it's gated in some way so that you cannot truly save it), and this is something that people need to recognize if they truly want to have all the media they want available regardless of any company's tomfoolery.
Why does this one very meaningful solution to a given problem have to be a solution for literally every media availability problem ever invented?
Prime has it. Go buy the digital copy and then you can keep it on your choice of storage medium.
@@thomgizziz the discs maybe but not digital, that was the reason I used it as an example. I implore you to check again, Prime says it's unavailable, amd the reason people were pissed at WB was because a month after S3 went on sale, the whole series was taken off all sites like Prime, Vudu, Google, etc where you could buy digital content. It was done as a tax write off, the first of many they would do.
@@thomgizzizactually no you can't save it physically. That's the point. When you 'buy' a movie off premium UA-cam/google, there is an option to save to your device but it won't allow to really save it. It won't play unless you're still subscribed or whatever.
With an expected lifespan of 5 years (which we use in the IT sector), that would be 140 dollars per year for a NAS setup. And that's without factoring in the cost of purchasing the actual media you want to store and the power it consumes. When you consider these expenses, it becomes evident that the effort and cost of ripping everything might not be worth it in the long run. In many cases, it's a more cost-effective option to enjoy content through streaming services and only buy physical copies for content that isn't available (anymore) via streaming platforms.
That is right for the most part, but there are projects which are only availed through streaming, and with Dizne pulling some of there new films from streaming and media being lost because they have stop releasing Bluerays of there films. You pay not only for ownership but to make shore big corporations are not just able to pull plugs on things and make it vanish.
He just said he pays 100/mo for 140/yr is a huge savings.
I completely agree. In the netherlands more and more movies aren't releasing to bluray or dvd because well, streaming. I have created a massive plex libary which is also contains rare movies (rare on dutch streaming) so I want to watch what I want to watch not what disney wants me to watch. Great job!
It would be nice to see a 2022 comparison between jellyfin, Emby, Plex, and Kodi. I settled on Plex even though it’s not free or open source, mostly for ease of metadata discovery & set up. Others would certainly have other priorities.
For what it's worth I tried Jellyfish recently and quickly went back to Plex because it was a disaster for series with subtitles and could often take a couple of minutes to start them. On that note: even after Plex have mostly killed plugin support there's still useful tools like Pasta Tool to mass change the audio and subtitles for a series.
I never liked Plex. I use Kodi with a centralized database. I don't stream to anything outside the house as my upload speed still sucks but we get fiber next year! Supposedly.
I paid the 1 time lifetime membership for plex and it's all I use. I stopped paying for everything except HBO MAX which is the cheapest and has the best catalog.
@@masterbard The lifetime pass is so worth it for Plex, even if just for the music functionality or intro skipping. I didn't know HBO Max was any good, it's not available in Ireland, and a lot of other services are kneecapped with licensing issues
Basically: Emby is dead and was replaced by it's fork: Jellyfin, Plex is okay but the subscription and always online is terrible, and Kodi is pretty much irrelevant since it often acts as a client rather than a server.
Saw this coming years ago.
Last year I gave a streaming box a try only to get my favorite shows old and new pulled without notice a week later.
I basically have no control over the content I liked so from that point on I went right back to physical media just buy what and I can keep it the quality are much higher as well.
Nothing like a hunt for that weird formats or editions that are hard to come by or never released on any service.
He skipped over hdr or Dolby vision. Encoding those is another sublevel of ripping knowledge to learn.
We did this, we had this - the whole generation was ripping, downloading, copying, converting movies and building their library of media on drives and discs, while thinking, how to make all of this user friendly... This is basically a simplistic tutorial for younger people, how to go back in time to 90's and 00's and feel the "good old times" way of spending hundreds or thousands of hours and dollars to owe great numbers of movies which we will never watch twice ;P
Lmfao depends who you ask on that last bit. But yes the good ol days man. Can't forget the 70's and 80's kids they started that shit.
We used DVD Shrink in my time, it was pretty good.
Nothing beats having a store full of films you don't want to watch! Lol
part of the reason i really hope video game streaming doesn’t take off.
we're already seeing a bit of that with steam, uplay, etc., selling big corp games via download, you don't have a physical copy of your purchased game. and the trend is showing things will get worst. and I'm not even touching the subject of microtransactions in games you already paid for like 60, 70, 80 bucks. So video games future is also not so bright if all the community will not stand together against big corps, and again Disney is a name that repeats itself.
Nobody is ever going to choose to stream over playing locally. There are latency issues that will never be overcome. A direct connection to a PC always will beat authenticating into a streaming service, and then sending packets to a cloud PC.
We've seen attempts in the '90s of that very concept - "Sega Channel" for the Sega Genesis in the U.S., and the Satellaview for the Super NES in Japan. While it was good for distributing game demos, gaming news, and other small things, full-fledged games are not meant, or are able to be streamed over like that. Even the aforementioned demos took time to download before they could be played.
Tl;dr we won't see that future, it's just not viable
@@morkallearns781"nobody will ever" is a big term. i myself cannot afford to play the latest generation of games locally, as the prices for pc parts in my country have skyrocketed, resulting in high end pcs costing the as much as cars (not a joke nor an exageration. a high end pc is costing as high as R$40.000,00, same price as a Honda Civic). while using cloud gaming plus a few pre owned steam games and now the collab between geforce now and xbox game pass, i can easily run games at 4k, stable 60 fps with rtx on (something that i couldn't even dream of).
i am currently spending around R$300 monthly (= U$ 60) for my full cloud gaming setup. which is astonomically cheaper then a high end pc, that given the current state of the gaming industry, will likely have to be at least partially replaced in the following few years.
@@morkallearns781 true except quantum tech comes into play
From the audio tracks to the LOTR disks, every part of this video was relatable lol. Well done sir.
My man thought he did something when he canceled his 100$/month subscriptions… Just to set up his own hardware worth probably around 1000$ and then buying blurays at 30$/piece.
Not even mentioning the countless hours of ripping them, converting them through fiddly software like handbrake etc 🤦🏼♂️
Why not just keep Disney+ at this point and if you want to watch anything else, just rent it at 4-10$ per Movie? You’ll save so much money this way that you’ll still be able to buy a hard copy of your most favourite movies.
By far the easiest legal solution to his whole problem, if you ask me.
Yes! This was my thought exactly throughout the video! Just by hopping between different streaming platforms would get your costs down by a lot. Even if you pirate the content, it's a pretty big ROI on the hardware.
Blu Rays can be found on the thrift at super cheap, like a dollar or two in most places. The inital inventment of 1k to set this all up seems steep but 11 months of 100 bucks only to have to watch ads, and lose your rights to view media that you love is well worth the investment.
@@CanadianRetro Do you pay 100 dollars a month for streaming? I just pay like 15-20 dollars depending on the service. Jumping back and forth between services depending on what I want to watch. But sure, if your only other option is paying for five services each month then I guess it might be worth it.
1:05 no ads? that's STILL piracy!
- Linus "TechTipsTheMan" Sebastian
I tried talking to my mom about this, but she just likes the convenience of Netflix.
Guess I'll have to set this up just to show her how much easier and higher quality it is.
Edit: One issue Jeff, mpv is actually better and lighter than vlc.
MPV, Yes.
I totally agree that *mpv* is usually better than vlc, but it does depend on your hardware. I have an old Raspberry Pi that refuses to play videos smoothly with mpv but is fine with vlc. Also, vlc has easy to install binaries for any OS, even phones. mpv may work on Apple MacOS and Microsoft Windows, but it is not as slickly packaged as vlc.
Ive recently got into my blu rays for the reasons you put in this video. Mainly the selection of content I can view. My family thought I was crazy owning dvds but hey, I'm now a mini blockbusters, giving my dvds to friends and family who couldn't see the film on netflix or amazon 😂
Great video!!
You should put a "Be Kind Rewind" sticker on them 😂
just pirate everything. most people can't afford expensive Blurays, and most people can't afford external hard drives or NAS
support movies you like by watching them in theaters when they come out. donate money to directors, producers, actors you like. buy their products.
for old movies/shows, pirate them. if you watch them on streaming services, the creators (directors, writers, actors, etc.) get very little money, only the big streaming companies (disney, netflix, etc.) make money.
Very excited for this. I put a little money and time into trying something like this earlier in the year. I got far enough to be able to rip my own discs, had an old computer set up with TrueNAS and Plex. Put a few movies on it, was able to watch them, it basically worked. But I never went further than that, buying the proper NAS drives, ripping all my content, etc. This might be the kick in the pants I needed to finally get that going again. Thanks!!
Hey Jeff! This is a project I started myself a while back too! I got an LG Blu-Ray drive that I added custom firmware to to be able to read 4K discs.
But there's an important advantage you forgot to mention in my opinion. I have some region locked Blu-Ray discs, and by ripping them, the region lock is gone. So no need to invest in a hacked or hackable Blu-Ray player.
BTW, I guess your collection will shrink some more in terms of file size when (if) Handbrake makes converting to AV1 possible 😁
Yep, I've got a couple of LG Blu-Ray drives with the hacked firmware installed on them. MakeMKV have no issues reading 4K disks. Jeff probably didn't want to get into hot water if he mentions about region free drives using hacked firmware. All of my movies are region 1 anyway so no big deal to me.
Awesome video and a reminder that the streaming services marketplace is just going to devolve into more expensive cable TV. For a budget version of this I have been using a raspberry pi with openmedia vault and the minidlna extension, hooked up to a hard drive, which let's me stream to my TV and any devices in my local network
0:51 Is that a reference on how most people just watch the shows for free on illegal websites
I love the informative content. I run a NAS personally, but there are issues that I think people should know about: 1. while a majority of media (especially older media) is available physically, increasingly companies are eschewing physical releases. Part of that is a profit thing for them, but some of it is an acknowledgement that exclusivity to streaming services is a bonus value to that service. 2. Data integrity becomes an issue you gotta worry about. I live in a house with not great wiring, and the power will flicker during bad storms. You either have to make sure your NAS is running a RAID configuration of some sort, hook your NAS up to a UPS, or.... probably a combination of those things. That means that just cuz you buy X TB drives, doesn't mean you'll be able to store X TB of individual content. Some of that will be eaten up by RAID configuration, and a UPS is not exactly cheap by itself. 3. The upfront cost of this is not cheap, and while maintenance cost is low it's not zero. Drives fail, electricity cost, the price of the media itself, storage of that media. You're almost definitely saving money if you cancel every subscription right now, but.... those savings only will manifest in the long term.
1. Pirate it, then. I'm happy to buy things if they are available for purchase, but if not? Pirate it. It's not a lost sale if they literally will not sell it.
2. You should get a UPS anyway. Building a NAS isn't cheap, and it'd be silly to have it ruined by power problems. A UPS isn't cheap either, but it's a worthwhile investment to protect the rest of your investment in the NAS.
@@mjc0961 Yeah completely agree. But these are all things not gone over in the video. I know people who have the money and desire to do something like this, but do not necessarily have the technical know how to... pirate safely/effectively, setup RAID configurations, or price a UPS for a NAS.
@@09f9 I mean... I think that's a good point for valuable personal data, but... I think for a media collection you don't need everything backed up, but you probably do want a certain amount of drive fault tolerance
I also suggest FileBot, it makes naming files super easy. For the move example you gave it might not be an issue, but I rip TV series as it's most of what I watch, and labeling all of those gets time consuming. I'm already using MakeMKV and HandBrake. Mostly because I'm tired of shows I like being removed from one streaming network and moved to another. I'm in the situation where there's only 1 show per streaming service I actually like anymore. I'm considering setting up a Plex server to upload my video's to so I can stream my own stuff.
Plex server is fairly easy to build ime as well 😊
Pretty good video, but for me personally this seems like a lot of additional effort and quite costly. The setup already requires me to buy everything on blu-ray anyways, but then also comes with additional costs for the hardware and the electricity to keep it running non-stop. Sure, once you setup everything and got used to the process of ripping newly attained media, you're having a very convenient time watching the stuff and in a really good quality too, but to me I just don't think it's worth it.
Sshhh, that bluray showing in the video is for show only, for the dmca people, no one is so stupid to buy a bluray just because they want to rip it and put it in NAS, come on, this is comon sense
@@mr-rbk So the video is saying "go with piracy". How is that anything new then?
Why to make things complicated when you can just click and download any movie you want