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? 🙄
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...
@@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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
@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
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.
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'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?!?)
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.
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
While I'm mostly of the same mind, there is still the problem of "Streaming only" titles, and often "Streaming only" 4K releases. Many films and shows nowadays cannot be had on physical media, so if I want the actual file piracy is the only way to go about it (or learning how to rip video streams, which is also illegal).
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.
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.
You could look at encoding them in AV1 codec. Since it looks like that's where everyone is moving to. It would be really cool to see you find a budget solution to live encode an AV1 stream from you library for viewing. Maybe with a dedicated encoder card or using an encoder built into one of the newer graphics cards?
@@wojtek-33 AV1 and H265 adoption are two completely different ballgames. The reason H265 isn’t widespread after so long is because of the royalties. AV1 is royalty-free, so companies like Twitch and UA-cam, as well as GPU and other hardware manufacturers are jumping to use it. I would say we could see it pretty widespread in 2 years; once a massive media/hardware company adopts it, like Apple or UA-cam, most other companies will follow suit.
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.
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
Ahhh, the video we should've gotten from LTT instead of that 15 minute Plex advert mid-September... I'm curious about your analysis of the automated ripping machine that's floating around on the internet (should be a github link). +1 for Ripping. +1 for DataHoarding.
For a more cost friendly and easier solution; a lot of libraries offer movie rentals!! And a lot of the time you can get a free library card or pay a small fee. Indiana has free library cards if you live within districts or the biggest fee ive seen is less than $70 and smallest is about $30
There's also AV1! If you have newer devices it has significant advantages over H.265 H.265 struggled to see widespread adoption because of per-user license fees so I don't see it getting that much bigger, especially now that AMD, Intel, & Nvidia are all betting on AV1.
@@PrograError That's true, only the new generation of GPUs (Intel, Nvidia 4000, upcoming unreleased AMD GPUs) support hardware AV1 encoding. But if you have a sufficiently large library of media to transcode, like me and my partner's 200+ disc collection, it's not unreasonable to buy one of the new Intel GPUs like the A380 for under $250 just to use as a dedicated AV1 encoder card, not even as a GPU.
Back in the day, when Netflix started, I thought "So you pay and they tell you what to watch, even how much time? What a stupid idea". Then, they started with the original stuff, and I thought "Oh my... I'm still right" 😂😂
@@NaudVanDalen You said so yourself: "whatever is on", so in other words you are limited to the offering. You better hurry and watch, because they'll change the catalog without any warning (hence the "even how much time").
@@zeendaniels5809 So you want all TV shows and movies ever created for like $20 per month? That would be awesome, but is also very entitled to expect something like that. It does suck that things randomly disappear though. I haven't experienced a show disappearing while I was watching it, but it would really suck and I would resort to pirating the remainder of that show.
@@NaudVanDalen Exactly my thoughts at the time. And yes, it's cool and all to be in the legal side, but given the limited choices (and even more limited outside of the US) for me it's not worth it.
Greatest. Video. Ever. I cannot believe I found a video explaining step my step how to keep your own movies as this process is too difficult for me to figure out on my own. I wish people cared more about not voting in a way to allow corporations to do this and would fight back against them when they do this This video is incredibly well done
Great video. Completely agree subscription costs are getting insane. I have Netflix, but don't watch any of the new content as I don't see it as any good (to me). The only issue with this option for me, is all the content I watch is not movies, but TV series, many of which being multiple series in length. I tend to rewatch many of these series each year. So for now I'll keep my subscription.
Also, something to note is that VLC is not as great right now as it's not that great with colour and HDR. mpv is a really powerful media player with amazing plugins and you can add-in shaders to make things even better
The problem with physical copies is that we need to be drastically reducing our plastic production as it's terrible for the environment. Unless someone can come up with a way to make DVDs out of biodegradeable material.
You should try Tdarr as well and compare to handbrake. I stopped using handbrake when I came across MakeMkv. I noticed handbrake would leave files somewhat blurry at times so I just kept the og files for a long time (probably my poor hardware and settings choices) but I've recently started using Tdarr to convert everything to h265. Reduced my movie library size by 25% with no quality reduction thus far
And there are even tools like ARM (Automatic Ripping Machine)! I remember having to pull audio and video off a DVD, then remux them fixing their timing, often ending up with a video file with audio out of sync towards the end.
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.
It's all a super great idea Jeff until your kids/wife come running back to you because Loki or some other exclusive show isn't on your NaS and you're forced to buy seasons of it, pirate it, or resubscribe. Essentially they have us by the nards, even if you choose this method.
@@crunchygrape3806 That's LITERALLY the point I just made in my message. To quote myself: "or resubscribe. Essentially they have us by the nards, even if you choose this method." =)
You are absolutely right. Pay to watch and then not owning it, has always prevented me from paying for streaming. Even more so as always that show you want is on a network you dont have. The entertainment industry is nuts. Dont support it.
I can go to the library and borrow books, dvd's and blu-rays .... for free. Great for evaluating if a series/movie is worth owning on my own. And I knew keeping those discs I have gathered (and still do) throughout the years would be a great idea ;ø) Thanks for bringing up this point - SUBscription, services that MASTER the art of ripping YOU off
Enjoy it while it last, library are starting to go extinct. A few of the large ones will probably survey as some sort of museum to ancient non volatile storage medium, insignificant small libraries or disappearing.
Why can't I find any videos about TV/movie collectors who use a portable HDD or SSD to store their media library as "backup files" (mp4, mkv, etc.)?? I switched from burnt DVDs to vid files on my PC in about 2010, just got a dank 5TB Cyberpunk drive to backup all the 'backup files' on my assorted portable HDDs for safekeeping. My only regret so far is deciding most of my TV shows were just fine in 720p...
this is absolutely not worth it for the average user. One could also argue that the time and effort youre putting into owning the media exceeds the cost of actually buying a license to play the media.
This would only works if you already have a huge collection and don't want to get anything new (not to mention the hardware needed). But starting your collection at this point or even just getting new movies and shows would add up quick at $30 a pop. What I do is just take trials anytime I get that offer from my ISP, and share accounts with friends and family, so at any point I'm only paying for one service (if anything at all).
Absolutely agreed on all points! Excellent summary and presentation, sir! 👏 Most consumers don't realize that ANY streaming content, even "purchased" content, can be restricted or cancelled at any time. You never own the content that you "purchased", and you lose it if you step off of that service's "forever treadmill", or whenever they deem that content conflicts with new releases or other licensing agreements. I started cancelling all of my redundant and woke subscription services a few months ago. My family protested initially, but they have adjusted just fine. I've been using PLEX for a while anyway, so this was just the push that I needed to stop feeding those greedy, immoral, inequitable subscription services! Cheers, and keep up the fantastic content! 😉👍 --QM
10:35 pretty much all movies run at 24 fps, so wouldnt re-encoding the video file at 30 fps duplicate one frame every 6 frames? making it all jittery? or make it blurry my merging frames together into one when the timing lands in between frames?
best thing about ripping it yourself is the ability to retain all the extra goodies like creator commentary (especially from the simpsons and futurama)
While I totally agree with the intent, you're suggesting spending $700 up front plus the $30 for every movie, plus replacement drive costs as time goes on. For three new BR movies a month, that's about the same as your streaming cost with a big up front payment.
You know this is not intended for everyone, just the ones who are willing to make small sacrifices (like selling a kidney or something), in order to have everything at the power if your NAS, or pc.
Jeff, if you add an HDHomeRun, MythTV you can dvr OTA broadcasts. I then transcode series that I like and store on the NAS as well. You can use FireTV+Kodi to make TV endpoints in the house. I've been doing this since 2000. Video dist in the house has been over the LAN for decades here.
I do have HDHomeRun, though I haven't set anything automated yet. We just use it to pop on live TV on the iPad or iPhone from time to time (like when there's a tornado warning and we want to watch the local meteorologists break into daytime TV and then watch people complain about it on Twitter).
@@JeffGeerling The HDHomeRun integrates well with MythTV, I've got the 4 tuner OTA model, so I never miss any sporting event or series. I then use Kodi with the MythTV plug in so I can use Kodi to stream ripped content, recorded shows, or live tv. I've had a number of endpoint playback systems over the years and the firetv+kodi is the least expensive and makes sense for me since I'm a prime member. The few times a sporting event is on that I won't get OTA, I just go hang at a sports pub. haha
Rip or otherwise breaking the AACS copy protection from a BluRay remains technically illegal ... No matter if you own the Disc or not, it remains breaking a technical protection, so it's illegal, no matter what ... Really, no matter what ...
That's sarcasm, right? The amount of hours you're spending every month prepping the content is so high you should just find a way to turn this time into easy 100 bucks for the streaming, otherwise you'll just be rewatching the same stuff over and over again. Also, you're still buying all the blu-rays, you're still spending a shit to of cash and wasting money on hardware for storage and even spending physical space. That's within the worst advices I've seen this year
10:22 So that totally negates your first argument for having a media server where you say 4k streaming quality is worse than 4k Blu-ray quality when you're doing the same thing the mega streaming services are doing i.e, transcoding.
Fun fact, you also don't actually OWN your Steam games. You just paid for allowing it to install it on your computer. If steam goes down in the future, your game license will be revoked and you won't able to download games again. Ofcourse if the game is still stored on your computer, you can still play it (offline) but the game becomes illegal actually. That last part doesnt matter for you probably but that's what actually will happen
Yeah, this works until you get bored of watching the same shows over and over again or the laws update and this becomes illegal again. Copyright laws change all the time and once companies start losing money, they run to the government crying about how many millions they are losing and how it needs to stop so they want the laws changed.
Get a company to send you a home server and spend dozen of hours ripping Blu Rays, or just pirate until companies are forced to offer a better service? Hmmm 🤔
I have a feeling this problem will be balanced out by piracy, a suboptimal solution but the reality is that when you're not getting the product you want even if you pay for it... Well, not paying for it and getting it regardless seems like a sweet deal. I just hope the streaming services will understand why a shift towards piracy happens if it will and not blame it something weird like discrimination or such. Regardless, great video, great thinking, hope you succesfully start a movement :)
As Gabe Newell famously said, piracy is a service problem. Obviously he was talking about games, but it applies to everything. If some movie or show is only on a streaming service, and I'm not allowed to actually purchase a copy of it somehow, of course I'm going to pirate it instead.
The cost equation still doesn’t make the most sense if you’re being fully legal. A 4K blu-ray is between $20-$40 new, which the quality level I’ve come to enjoy. Let’s say I only purchase 4 new movies a month, that would be at $960-$1920 a year. Which is significantly more expensive than streaming and I’m missing a huge catalogue of shows and movies. I currently pay around $70 month ($840 a year) on the streaming I have currently, which gives me access to hundreds of movies and Tv shows with original content. That’s not even considering the cost for the nas, blu-ray ripper and hard drives. I understand the benefits of owning media but unless I’m missing something the financial accessibility is not the same.
thats why i never dived into that Bluraycosmos at all. DVDs have been my thing. Nowadays i rarely buy any at all. How old do i have to get to watch all the stuff i already own ? And i cant watch certain stuff on a random day anyway. I have to be in the right mood for that.
Not even that, even if you somehow only bought 4 movies a year, you could subscribe to the services as you want to watch these movies, and you'd realistically pay even less than $70. And even less than that if the movies that interest you happen to even be in the same service in the same month
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"
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.
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.
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"
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.
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...
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.
unsubscribe, got it.
Nooooo! Not from me lol
"Instructions unclear"
@@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"
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 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.
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.
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 :)
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
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
If paying isn’t ownership, piracy isn’t stealing 🏴☠️
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing.
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.
"Am I going to pirate something?"
"No, I'm going to pirate something."
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.
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
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!
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.
1:05 no ads? that's STILL piracy!
- Linus "TechTipsTheMan" Sebastian
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'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
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.
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
While I'm mostly of the same mind, there is still the problem of "Streaming only" titles, and often "Streaming only" 4K releases. Many films and shows nowadays cannot be had on physical media, so if I want the actual file piracy is the only way to go about it (or learning how to rip video streams, which is also illegal).
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.
if buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing
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.
You could look at encoding them in AV1 codec. Since it looks like that's where everyone is moving to. It would be really cool to see you find a budget solution to live encode an AV1 stream from you library for viewing. Maybe with a dedicated encoder card or using an encoder built into one of the newer graphics cards?
Some patent trolls are trying to ruin that and even for Opus audio as well.
@@wojtek-33 AV1 and H265 adoption are two completely different ballgames. The reason H265 isn’t widespread after so long is because of the royalties. AV1 is royalty-free, so companies like Twitch and UA-cam, as well as GPU and other hardware manufacturers are jumping to use it. I would say we could see it pretty widespread in 2 years; once a massive media/hardware company adopts it, like Apple or UA-cam, most other companies will follow suit.
@@raracool6531 Isn't VP9 the royalty-free equivalent to H265? And AV1 being the successor of VP9
@@MahaXad yeah pretty much. I don't know why twitch didn't adopt VP9 for streaming though.
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.
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?
Ahhh, the video we should've gotten from LTT instead of that 15 minute Plex advert mid-September...
I'm curious about your analysis of the automated ripping machine that's floating around on the internet (should be a github link).
+1 for Ripping. +1 for DataHoarding.
Why to make things complicated when you can just click and download any movie you want
For a more cost friendly and easier solution; a lot of libraries offer movie rentals!! And a lot of the time you can get a free library card or pay a small fee. Indiana has free library cards if you live within districts or the biggest fee ive seen is less than $70 and smallest is about $30
There's also AV1! If you have newer devices it has significant advantages over H.265
H.265 struggled to see widespread adoption because of per-user license fees so I don't see it getting that much bigger, especially now that AMD, Intel, & Nvidia are all betting on AV1.
but most GPU out there (except intel) doesn't really have native support for AV1 encoding, i believe
@@PrograError That's true, only the new generation of GPUs (Intel, Nvidia 4000, upcoming unreleased AMD GPUs) support hardware AV1 encoding. But if you have a sufficiently large library of media to transcode, like me and my partner's 200+ disc collection, it's not unreasonable to buy one of the new Intel GPUs like the A380 for under $250 just to use as a dedicated AV1 encoder card, not even as a GPU.
Wait isn't this technically illegal due to how it circumvents the drm on the discs?
Back in the day, when Netflix started, I thought "So you pay and they tell you what to watch, even how much time? What a stupid idea". Then, they started with the original stuff, and I thought "Oh my... I'm still right" 😂😂
Is this like “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey” ?
What do you even mean? You can watch whatever is on there and whenever you want. What are they telling you?
@@NaudVanDalen You said so yourself: "whatever is on", so in other words you are limited to the offering. You better hurry and watch, because they'll change the catalog without any warning (hence the "even how much time").
@@zeendaniels5809 So you want all TV shows and movies ever created for like $20 per month? That would be awesome, but is also very entitled to expect something like that. It does suck that things randomly disappear though. I haven't experienced a show disappearing while I was watching it, but it would really suck and I would resort to pirating the remainder of that show.
@@NaudVanDalen Exactly my thoughts at the time. And yes, it's cool and all to be in the legal side, but given the limited choices (and even more limited outside of the US) for me it's not worth it.
Greatest. Video. Ever.
I cannot believe I found a video explaining step my step how to keep your own movies as this process is too difficult for me to figure out on my own. I wish people cared more about not voting in a way to allow corporations to do this and would fight back against them when they do this
This video is incredibly well done
Sucks that ripping dvd's and bypassing copyright protection is still illegal so you might as well just pirate
Great video. Completely agree subscription costs are getting insane. I have Netflix, but don't watch any of the new content as I don't see it as any good (to me). The only issue with this option for me, is all the content I watch is not movies, but TV series, many of which being multiple series in length. I tend to rewatch many of these series each year. So for now I'll keep my subscription.
Also, something to note is that VLC is not as great right now as it's not that great with colour and HDR. mpv is a really powerful media player with amazing plugins and you can add-in shaders to make things even better
Vlc is the only program. Whatever the hell mpv is will be trash
@@xposed1168 ???
The problem with physical copies is that we need to be drastically reducing our plastic production as it's terrible for the environment. Unless someone can come up with a way to make DVDs out of biodegradeable material.
I have been unsubscribed from Netflix since 2021 and I went to sub to Disney+ in 2021
Bad deal
You should try Tdarr as well and compare to handbrake. I stopped using handbrake when I came across MakeMkv. I noticed handbrake would leave files somewhat blurry at times so I just kept the og files for a long time (probably my poor hardware and settings choices) but I've recently started using Tdarr to convert everything to h265. Reduced my movie library size by 25% with no quality reduction thus far
Ripping and transcoding seems so much easier and faster than it was 20 years ago.
And there are even tools like ARM (Automatic Ripping Machine)! I remember having to pull audio and video off a DVD, then remux them fixing their timing, often ending up with a video file with audio out of sync towards the end.
Self hosted media servers are the best! Love my Plex server.
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.
It's all a super great idea Jeff until your kids/wife come running back to you because Loki or some other exclusive show isn't on your NaS and you're forced to buy seasons of it, pirate it, or resubscribe. Essentially they have us by the nards, even if you choose this method.
My solution in that case is to just get a month or two of that streaming service then unsubscribe from the streaming service
@@crunchygrape3806 That's LITERALLY the point I just made in my message.
To quote myself: "or resubscribe. Essentially they have us by the nards, even if you choose this method." =)
You are absolutely right. Pay to watch and then not owning it, has always prevented me from paying for streaming. Even more so as always that show you want is on a network you dont have. The entertainment industry is nuts. Dont support it.
I can go to the library and borrow books, dvd's and blu-rays .... for free. Great for evaluating if a series/movie is worth owning on my own.
And I knew keeping those discs I have gathered (and still do) throughout the years would be a great idea ;ø)
Thanks for bringing up this point - SUBscription, services that MASTER the art of ripping YOU off
Enjoy it while it last, library are starting to go extinct. A few of the large ones will probably survey as some sort of museum to ancient non volatile storage medium, insignificant small libraries or disappearing.
Why can't I find any videos about TV/movie collectors who use a portable HDD or SSD to store their media library as "backup files" (mp4, mkv, etc.)?? I switched from burnt DVDs to vid files on my PC in about 2010, just got a dank 5TB Cyberpunk drive to backup all the 'backup files' on my assorted portable HDDs for safekeeping. My only regret so far is deciding most of my TV shows were just fine in 720p...
nahh thats too complicated
i'll just go piracy instead
Don’t forget to use VPN.
this is absolutely not worth it for the average user. One could also argue that the time and effort youre putting into owning the media exceeds the cost of actually buying a license to play the media.
This would only works if you already have a huge collection and don't want to get anything new (not to mention the hardware needed). But starting your collection at this point or even just getting new movies and shows would add up quick at $30 a pop. What I do is just take trials anytime I get that offer from my ISP, and share accounts with friends and family, so at any point I'm only paying for one service (if anything at all).
owning and renting physical discs are expensive and inconvenience. that's why companies like Netflix exist in the first place
if i had money to have this setup , then i will have money to subscribe ,,,
THATS WHAT I'M SAYING!
“Hop in loser. We’re reinventing cable.”
This didn't age well, when you have Best Buy stopping physical movie sales, with Target and Walmart looking to follow after already reducing inventory
P*rate Bay 😁
Online media sales are up 60% . They are moving them to online only to save shelf space.
Here in Brazil, with all the taxes and corruption, even piracy is heavy on cost. I start running at the weekends and do other stuff.
This is way more expensive than streaming services though, and 100x the work
Absolutely agreed on all points! Excellent summary and presentation, sir! 👏
Most consumers don't realize that ANY streaming content, even "purchased" content, can be restricted or cancelled at any time. You never own the content that you "purchased", and you lose it if you step off of that service's "forever treadmill", or whenever they deem that content conflicts with new releases or other licensing agreements.
I started cancelling all of my redundant and woke subscription services a few months ago. My family protested initially, but they have adjusted just fine. I've been using PLEX for a while anyway, so this was just the push that I needed to stop feeding those greedy, immoral, inequitable subscription services! Cheers, and keep up the fantastic content! 😉👍 --QM
Hey Jeff, this video inspired me to get into physical media and buy my favorite movies. Its been such a long time I forgot what its like to own media.
Fun fact, physical disks will sound a lot better than streaming as well
10:35 pretty much all movies run at 24 fps, so wouldnt re-encoding the video file at 30 fps duplicate one frame every 6 frames? making it all jittery? or make it blurry my merging frames together into one when the timing lands in between frames?
best thing about ripping it yourself is the ability to retain all the extra goodies like creator commentary (especially from the simpsons and futurama)
While I totally agree with the intent, you're suggesting spending $700 up front plus the $30 for every movie, plus replacement drive costs as time goes on. For three new BR movies a month, that's about the same as your streaming cost with a big up front payment.
You know this is not intended for everyone, just the ones who are willing to make small sacrifices (like selling a kidney or something), in order to have everything at the power if your NAS, or pc.
Jeff, if you add an HDHomeRun, MythTV you can dvr OTA broadcasts. I then transcode series that I like and store on the NAS as well. You can use FireTV+Kodi to make TV endpoints in the house. I've been doing this since 2000. Video dist in the house has been over the LAN for decades here.
I do have HDHomeRun, though I haven't set anything automated yet. We just use it to pop on live TV on the iPad or iPhone from time to time (like when there's a tornado warning and we want to watch the local meteorologists break into daytime TV and then watch people complain about it on Twitter).
@@JeffGeerling The HDHomeRun integrates well with MythTV, I've got the 4 tuner OTA model, so I never miss any sporting event or series. I then use Kodi with the MythTV plug in so I can use Kodi to stream ripped content, recorded shows, or live tv. I've had a number of endpoint playback systems over the years and the firetv+kodi is the least expensive and makes sense for me since I'm a prime member. The few times a sporting event is on that I won't get OTA, I just go hang at a sports pub. haha
Rip or otherwise breaking the AACS copy protection from a BluRay remains technically illegal ... No matter if you own the Disc or not, it remains breaking a technical protection, so it's illegal, no matter what ... Really, no matter what ...
Set up an Emby server in July. Definitely peace of mind to not have to worry if the movie you like will disappear in a month.
That's sarcasm, right? The amount of hours you're spending every month prepping the content is so high you should just find a way to turn this time into easy 100 bucks for the streaming, otherwise you'll just be rewatching the same stuff over and over again. Also, you're still buying all the blu-rays, you're still spending a shit to of cash and wasting money on hardware for storage and even spending physical space. That's within the worst advices I've seen this year
10:22 So that totally negates your first argument for having a media server where you say 4k streaming quality is worse than 4k Blu-ray quality when you're doing the same thing the mega streaming services are doing i.e, transcoding.
This is basically what I did all day while working at the university. I wonder if there's a faster way to do it.
Now we just need Blockbuster to come back so you don't have to buy all that media.
Isn't this still technically illegal since you're circumventing the copy protection?
Fun fact, you also don't actually OWN your Steam games.
You just paid for allowing it to install it on your computer.
If steam goes down in the future, your game license will be revoked and you won't able to download games again.
Ofcourse if the game is still stored on your computer, you can still play it (offline) but the game becomes illegal actually.
That last part doesnt matter for you probably but that's what actually will happen
importing movies is VERY expensive if you want multiple languages
Yeah, this works until you get bored of watching the same shows over and over again or the laws update and this becomes illegal again. Copyright laws change all the time and once companies start losing money, they run to the government crying about how many millions they are losing and how it needs to stop so they want the laws changed.
Get a company to send you a home server and spend dozen of hours ripping Blu Rays, or just pirate until companies are forced to offer a better service? Hmmm 🤔
The fact that the NAS address has a zweo in it implies that Jeff intends to increase the number of NAS devices past 9..
Disney+ would have been my first unsub... but I have ZERO subscriptions anyway.
I have a feeling this problem will be balanced out by piracy, a suboptimal solution but the reality is that when you're not getting the product you want even if you pay for it... Well, not paying for it and getting it regardless seems like a sweet deal. I just hope the streaming services will understand why a shift towards piracy happens if it will and not blame it something weird like discrimination or such. Regardless, great video, great thinking, hope you succesfully start a movement :)
I'd say in Asia some of the popular western shows will still be pirated due to censorship. and the income there ain't enough with the inflation
As Gabe Newell famously said, piracy is a service problem. Obviously he was talking about games, but it applies to everything. If some movie or show is only on a streaming service, and I'm not allowed to actually purchase a copy of it somehow, of course I'm going to pirate it instead.
His heart is in the right place, but so many bad bad bad choices.
The cost equation still doesn’t make the most sense if you’re being fully legal. A 4K blu-ray is between $20-$40 new, which the quality level I’ve come to enjoy. Let’s say I only purchase 4 new movies a month, that would be at $960-$1920 a year. Which is significantly more expensive than streaming and I’m missing a huge catalogue of shows and movies. I currently pay around $70 month ($840 a year) on the streaming I have currently, which gives me access to hundreds of movies and Tv shows with original content. That’s not even considering the cost for the nas, blu-ray ripper and hard drives. I understand the benefits of owning media but unless I’m missing something the financial accessibility is not the same.
thats why i never dived into that Bluraycosmos at all. DVDs have been my thing. Nowadays i rarely buy any at all. How old do i have to get to watch all the stuff i already own ? And i cant watch certain stuff on a random day anyway. I have to be in the right mood for that.
Not even that, even if you somehow only bought 4 movies a year, you could subscribe to the services as you want to watch these movies, and you'd realistically pay even less than $70. And even less than that if the movies that interest you happen to even be in the same service in the same month
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
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
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.
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
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
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"