When you stream you're still downloading. I prefer to have finer grain control over my buffer zone for when I'm offline.
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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After years of streaming sites, you get tired of the churn. It's only natural that most only last a year or two. Who's paying for the infrastructure? The users just want to view streams with no payment and no ads, so the provider is just paying out of pocket. That doesn't last long.
Torrents are maintained by a community, that you can contribute to yourself. It's just more sustainable.
I hoard media. I’m particular about my releases. I don’t want to stream some shady website that could disappear half way through a show.
I kept waiting to invest in more drives. Now I’m stuck with 4x4TB for the foreseeable future because replacing that raid array is brutal and even then I want to go bigger. Like the other commenter said, I’d like to be able to mirror big data sets.
Curate, is my advice.
I occasionally go through and cull the worst shows and movies. No point keeping mainstream crap that's readily available on all the streaming sites.
shady website that could disappear half way through a show.
this has occured to me tooo many times too.
yup happening with the one streaming site I use as of tomorrow.
For maybe a 1 off thing, like a singular episode of a show, absolutely going to stream it rather than download the whole series and then not watch the rest.
Though, I typically like having all my shows/movies available with or without internet if possible. So I think you can easoly figure out my stance.
If I had the capital, I’d mirror git repos, anna’s archives, libgen, scihub, Wikipedias, torrents, usenet, sketches, websites, portfolios, archive.org, minerva, etc. etc..
It is precisely capitalist oppressions that I haven't been able to “download everything.” Otherwise I would, and then some.
I don't think capitalist oppression is why hard drives aren't free
It is why they are preposterously expensive currently.
Along with ram and a whole bunch of other shit.
I hoard. Physical media is getting harder to come by, but I've ripped all my DVD's, TV shows, all BDs, all UHD BDs, and 3D. About 2k discs in total. A lot I've found used, local video shop closeouts, etc. My dad has about 400-450 retail CDs. I've backed up all his stuff too.
I've got 8x 16TB drives (RAID5+spare), 10x 8TB drives (RAID5 +spare), and some 2TB SSDs (RAID10) for personal files for my family.
I've purchased a new 24x bay Rosewill case for the next expansion 😅. My wife doesn't like the noise emanating from the basement. ✈️
I still grab everything and cold storage older/unwatched stuff onto blurays and this stack of ancient hdds i got from work. Seeing as space is so expensive now, I can see your view and would probably be taking that if I didn't already have a huge pool before the rampocalypse.
i don't really pirate music any more, i get 90% of what i want to listen to from podcasts, internet/community radio and youtube mixes. trying to get in the habit buying stuff i really like from bandcamp to actually support artists.
my mate put me on his family spotify... so use that very rarely, mostly for nostalgia hits.
movies/tv 100% 🏴☠️
Games also 98% mainly old games btw.
if wasnt so time poor id probs spend more $$$ on indie games... but capitalism be sucking me dry.
at least if i download some roms and dont play them i wont feel guilty for wasting my money.
Recent years capitalism is really a big problem. Recession after inflation. After recession. After AI boom and more price increases. After shrinkflation.
i do, my network sucks so there's the occasional buffering + streamed videos usually seem to have terrible quality/watermarks etc. also the ability to use custom subtitles (in my native lang and not english) is useful
I like the idea of still have everything available if I ever move somewhere without access to internet. It actually happened to me once temporarily last time I moved, for a few months I only had internet on my phone.
I download everything, I just may not ultimately keep it long-term if it turns out to be uninteresting or bad. Streaming and downloading transfer the same amount of bits, one just has higher demands for timeliness.
I do. Streaming sites (official or pirate) can still remove content or go offline all together. Also the pirate sites often have low quality.
With downloading I have full control over everything. And the collecting itself is fun, too!
The only real downside is HDD/hardware prices.
I would if I could afford the storage. I'd download and archive every YouTube video I watch instead of streaming it. But I hoard and with like 20tb of collective storage, I'm still always moving things around.
I've been wanting to make a collection, but ironically now as storage solutions are becoming more expensive I'm between a rock and a hard place. I could spend the stupid prices for more hard drive space and then grab more. Alternatively I could take some existing smaller hard drives and use them for storage.
If I hadn't gotten laid off last month I likely would have just expanded while things are still (relatively) affordable. But idk now. I might just stretch things where I can and hope that the bubble pops sooner rather than later
Right now my idea is to store things i find that are more niche or less likely to be shared in the future and i'll cycle things that are more popular or that will stand the test of time
Streaming is awesome, but I've stopped paying for streaming in most cases. Everything has gotten too expensive. When I run out of storage, I'll start culling.
I haven't backed up or collected movies or tv shows in a long while. Not much they've put out in the last ten years has been interesting to me. Music on the other hand... Lot good music has been put out recently and I'll either buy the CD or if I have to, purchase a download. Either way, it's going to be streaming from my server.

Been free streaming forever. I'm in my 50's and started with downloads to floppies. For a time over the years we had external drives with favorite TV and movies but we haven't used them in years. Our kids all free stream too. They've never known any other way.
on my server I have the entire library of NES, Master System, Game Gear, GB, GBC, GBA, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, PSX, and PS2 games. Terabytes of games. have I played them all? no way.
I got something similar for movies and series and music. I'll never see or hear it all, not enough time in a life.
I'd live to make some sort of library out it, something federated that can never die until the last server would go down... That way, everyone can enjoy this
yeah it's also the same with me for movies, shows, and music. the ROMs take up the most space naturally but I'll download new releases for movies and shows and most of the time I don't watch them. for music I'll find something I like online and then download it off soulseek and I might never hear it again as I have thousands of tracks in my library.
I don't stream anything. If I want to watch something, I will download it. The downloads for the shows I watch are all automated so I don't have to do anything except click play.
When I go on a trip, I just load up my laptop and phone with whatever I want to watch. That way I don't have to deal with an unreliable or non existent internet connection. Good luck streaming anything over the WiFi in an airplane. There's barely enough bandwidth for audio unless they have Starlink.
I don't have much time to watch, but when I do I do it on the TV, and streaming on the TV from some random website is extremely difficult to pull off because you only have a shitty browser and the remote control, just to make it full screen is almost impossible without a mouse and keyboard, let alone browsing.
So that is why I use Jellyfin which has a lot of life quality features but needs downloaded files.
To be honest, the difficult part is to find good enough movies and TV series which are worth the very limited time I have to watch them.
I buy physical discs for the stuff I really care, Steam for digital-only games, streaming and piracy for everything else.
Plus blu-ray has like five times the bitrate of streaming.
Yeah, they are also more durable then ssd/hdd
Disc rot is also a thing.
I find it's best to accept entropy, that you're going to die, that everything ends, that you will lose data, that there will be a last time you watch a movie or show, and keep running those ssd/hdds even when they're in the yellow/red warning zone.
Years back I was sorting through ten years of emails. I got so sick of it, I simply deleted everything. You know what? No drawbacks even ten years later. Such a huge relief.
Reminds me of the artist Michael Landy who chucked everything he owned - pictures, clothes, artwork, his passport - into a shredder. Performance art, reaction against consumerism. He was understandably miserable doing it, but what a relief that must have been. To be free of all the crap. It is true that the things you own often end up owning you.
My grandparents hoarded all their lives, and after they died much of what they owned ended up in a skip, because there wasn't enough time or interest to sell it. The supposedly priceless porcelain? Chucked. All the records? Sold. Furniture? Goodwill. The huge supply of sunlight soap? Really useful actually.
Disc rot is more probable on DVDs (and I mainly collect blurays).
I understand your point on collections and I'm an entropy guy too but I also appreciate a good collection of art for personal use during my lifetime, without compromises on quality/aviability, and maybe to left to someone in the future who will enjoy it after me. I'm kinda a minimalist for many things but not for art.



