Literally just started collecting blu rays again because I'm sick of the shitty selection streaming platforms have. Good thing my PS3 still runs perfect haha.
These assholes are going to make books impossible to read next. We are going full Fahrenheit 451.
I never completely stopped collecting conventional DVDs specifically because of the Blu-Ray DRM scheme and it's need for an external decryption key. The few blu-rays I have are either from DVD+Blu-Ray bundles or because standard DVD wasn't an option.
Surely we have that permanently cracked by now?
I know there have long been workarounds but I don't know if there's ever been a "crack" per se.
Just picked up 20 TB of storage on a black Friday deal.
Doing a huge upgrade from my 2TB NAS. I'm starting my personal media archive, music, movies, shows, anime, Ebooks, games, YouTube content.
It's the only defense against the scumbag corpos. The will continue to take more content away without warning, and make what they allow us to still have, worse quality and more expensive to watch.
Storage is cheap, libraries are your friend, fight the power. ✊
Streaming only. Sign up now for your recurring subscription. You'll own nothing and you'll like it, or else.
Jellyfin (Or Plex if you have to deal with the "Spouse Factor") + Radarr and Sonarr + Usenet
Perfection, no annoying physical media to worry about, but you still get to keep the data you...uhh.."acquired"
I genuinely believe more people would have kept uaing physical media if they made it more convenient just to pop in a movie and play it.
Everytime I put in a 4k blu Ray, there's like 40 seconds of useless loading screens, unskippabble warnings, menu animations, and other bullshit. It feels like the old days of massively overcooked multimedia "experiences" in the worst way possible.
That and DVDs were like £3 most of the time. I'd always be picking up stuff just for the hell of it. Got shelves full of them.
Blu-rays and especially 4K Blu-rays were pretty much always full price of £20. That's at least a whole month of any streaming service and sometimes two. Plus I can barely tell any difference between streaming and disc, especially on the picture quality. The audio is more noticeable, but not worth £20 a movie.
The current streaming services will slowly decline as well until they realise they need to switch to a music industry model where nearly everything is on every service. I installed Jellyfin ages ago, and the experience of just having one service to look through is so much better than dipping into half a dozen apps to see if any of them have what you want to watch.
I know what I'm after as an experience, it's up to them if they want to provide it at a reasonable price.
I ripped our physical media, and the experience is way better. I wish I could just buy and download a .mkv or .avi or whatever.
You can rent (until your service decides to stop selling that content) and download a DRM-locked copy only playable in one app that's 1/5 the bitrate. Is that not good enough for you?
What if we include a full screen ad whenever you pause. You're not watching anyways, what's the harm?
Oh, also, did you hear about our other content and services? We would like to remind you of all of those every time you start to watch something - we don't consider them advertisements, just important feature updates, so you can't remove them.
Aand... you HAVE to be connected to the internet to watch, because we made this really cool AI thing that watches literally everything you do, sends it to our servers, and sometimes happens to recognize which characters are on screen so you can access their IMDB pages through your TV while watching the movie for some reason, like that's a normal thing people want to interrupt their movie experience to do.
Mmm, when you put it that way...
Best we can do is enshitification. Hope your standards steadily lower throughout your life.
The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!
I have never actually seen that happen
The DRM on Blu-Ray was too harsh so I skipped the format entirely. If I couldn't put a disc into my HTPC (Linux) and press "play", I wasn't interested.
We got a few, and then I ended up getting a Bluray drive and flashing libredrive on it, and now I can rip Bluray in full quality. I'm probably going to go load up on more Bluray discs because ripping works well.
I don't have an HTPC, I just stream my videos from my NAS to my TV, and I do all my ripping on Linux.
In a different, better universe HD-DVD won.
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