this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Buy the box set, rip it to .mkv, drop in Plex, rinse and repeat.
Oh, wait, this isn’t c/piracy?
This is not only a good way to handle media, it's one of the best.
It blows my goddamn mind that TV manufacturers didn't develop a streaming portal "endpoint" player and band together to require content from Netflix/Hulu/etc meet that standard for delivery. It's made TVs just app boxes.
Can you just imagine being able to see what is available on all services from one interface, all at once, and then start a stream of it seamlessly from whichever you movie profile page you have access to?
Instead we have half-assed lookup apps in some TVs that even when they find it a film then just launch a separate app.
Build a good Plex library and never look back. Buy Blurays and DVDs and lookup how to automate good handbrake encoding. Once you know how, you can honest to god automate most of it, and in my case, I have it auto-launch and rip any disc if it detects a Blu-ray film or DVD film and drop the resulting file in my NAS storage to be sorted. Blurays drives are cheap too now, so you can buy 2-3 and dump a whole library in just a few days.
Apple TV has that single place, but Netflix doesn’t want to use it and now Amazon and a bunch of other streaming services sell “channels” which they pollute the results with content you can’t watch despite paying for the service.
Also, Netflix has the worst UI/UX on AppleTV boxes. The experience is vastly different and better on a Sony or Microsoft device in the Netflix software. It’s pretty odd imho.
What , specifically, do you find irksome on the Netflix ATV interface?
Only thing I dislike is the snippet/trailer autoplay. Everything else, works well for me.
First off, and mainly UX based, different feature sets. For example the way Netflix feeds ‘New and Upcoming’ items, notifications for those items, etc.
I do understand that AppleTV has just recently really solidified their decisions on how they want their controller/remote to work so that may be a factor in designing the software for the navigation across all legacy AppleTV devices. The control schemes on consoles and other media boxes have been a constant for years and years now which probably benefited the look and feel of the flavor of the app on ATV.
This same issue generally happens across other media streaming services. For instance, the Disney app; even slight FFWD is abominable. It’s just pickiness, however I’ll still switch over to the Roku or a console to watch anything on Disney+.
/tome
Although the controls on the second and third gen Apple TV are absolute hell I’ve always liked the fact that Netflix had a native look and feel on them. It actually makes be fairly annoyed when an app has a separate non-native UI.
It’s because Apple provides a very easy to integrate with SDK. A lot of apps I use have the same native UI, like YouTube and Plex, because of this.
You see the utopian version of this with UI navigation perfection. I see what would likely have come of out such a collaboration being a screen 75% full of ads with user telemetry vacuumed up by hundreds of companies I can't opt-out of that would have access to all my viewing data because they're part of the collaboration.
When I was little, we used to have a box plugged into the CRT TVs of the time that, when connected to a network, would allow you access to something similar to what you're saying. Typically, you'd be able to open an electronic program guide to see a menu that displayed all the different services that you're subscribed to and be able to switch between streams seamlessly. Granted, the biggest difference is that the individual service providers had a set schedule as to what was streaming at the time, so if you missed content scheduled at a certain time, you'd hope they'd rebroadcast it at some point.
Maybe we could have something similar, but with the ability to pick anything from each individual service providers' library on demand?
Although there was a problem with this system, but I don't really remember what it was. The service providers banded together and started raising prices, I think? But, then again, aren't they doing something similar now?
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Do you have a "cheap" drive recommendation?
Watch https://diskprices.com/ and Amazon.com for lightning deals. Check any good deals against their historic lows. That's how I got my 12tb and 20tb drives for way cheaper than they regularly go for.
That said, drives are a commodity and you will ha E to spend proportional to the space you want.
It's odd to me that there are places that would consider that piracy
In my country (the Netherlands), to my knowledge, you have the right to do whatever you like with your copy of a movie as long as you don't distribute it.
That includes ripping it, and putting the mkv on your personal server. That is precisely what the home-copy tax is for afterall..
There doesn't seem to be a common consensus on whether it is in the US. Some people say it's fine as long as you paid for the disc. Others say the act of breaking DRM and producing a copy is a crime in itself.
In the US, my understanding is that there's a weird catch-22 where it's legal to make digital copies of media you own for personal use thanks to Fair Use laws, but it's illegal to break copy protection under DMCA law. So you end up unable to exercise your right to copy DVDs and Blu-ray discs because they have copy protection, but it's perfectly legal to copy music CDs for personal use because they don't have copy protection.
Personally, I find it extremely unlikely you'll get jailed or fined for ripping your discs for personal use. It's only if you start redistributing it that you increase your likelihood of legal problems.
Technically, you could dump the disc as an iso, then restore it to a disk later with the encryption intact.
Possibly not the best idea from a future access standpoint, mind!
That's a good point I hadn't considered from a legal standpoint before. I believe there's also some network media players out there that can load up iso files, so in theory you could have a library of iso files that you load up as if you were playing the disc, complete with menus and all.
I have no idea if this is any better from a legal standpoint though, since you'd still be using what I assume is unauthorized software to bypass the DVD and Blu-ray encryption whenever you play the iso.
Long story short, they really need to carve out a DMCA exception for this specific conflicting case (which they've done for other conflicting situations), but I suspect there's some strong lobbying against it by interested parties...
Ironically, there's disc drm cracking software called... Fair Use!
Australia: If you do that for interoperability (in this case you want it accessible from your library) it's legal.
I am Mexican and at this point I think I have more pirated stuff than purchased, in a nutshell, I know my shit and what OP said ain't piracy whatsoever.
It's that way in the US too.
Copying isn't piracy, it's fair-use.
Depending on where you live, I believe the loop hole is that ripping media for personal use is legal but breaking the DRM and/or sharing the DRM breaking program is illegal.
Yes to all of that, except for Plex. Use Jellyfin. It's open source, and most importantly, doesn't force authentication from proprietary servers that you can't control. When those auth servers go down, as they've been known to do, you can't stream your media from your own server (unless you want to disable auth, which is a joke).
Always think it'w funny how lemmy users tear you a new hole for mentioning proprietary software instead of (F)OSS but will usually happily recommend Plex in any case (and Arch).
I like jellyfin too as an option. But my parents and relatives and friends do not have jellyfin apps or ease of library sharing via jellyfin.
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Yeah this way you don't need to buy a Blu-Ray player either.
Something something synology. Rent a disc, rip and repeat.
I either claim the digital copy with the disc or I just pirate a copy because it's less hassle than ripping lol.
I def still ☠️ the one offs, movies mostly.