this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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lol - I love that I canned all my paid subs that were fucking me up the arse like this, and then used the savings to setup a half-decent Plex server for my family. Fuck those greedy cunts.
I keep telling my friends this. It was incredibly simple to do. And you can start with only a couple smaller 1 or 4 TB drives and still end up starting a decent collection
Especially if you're fine with the low image quality of streaming services. Equivalent video files aren't particularly big.
Its about ~2-3GB for a movie for me. The Quality isnt great but still better than Netflix streams.
I would recommend "spending" about 6 GB on a 1080p x265 encoding of a movie, if you can. The quality is much better, good enough to be viewed up close on a large screen, unless there's a large amount of high frequency detail, like in recent animated or very CGI-heavy movies - or unless it's an older film with strong film grain and/or large mass scenes (think Lawrence of Arabia). Those do benefit from higher bitrates and resolutions, even if your screen isn't 4K.
These owners forgot that media is 100% discretionary spend AND has superior alternative that can be had close to free and a bit of labour....
I know owners thinks we are all brain dead and only able to consoom... Is we tho?
Pretty much the only one i'm still happy with is crunchyroll. They don't fuck around despite being basically the only game in town.
Netflix I pay for begrudgingly but if they raise the price substantially or add mandatory ads EVER they are gonna be gone. I'm already pissed they are axing Kaos, like so many other good shows before it.
Already axed prime last year due to them adding ads, I don't even miss the expedited delivery because all the big box stores deliver for free, some even same day, at equivalent prices.
Disney recently boned me out of account sharing, so my plex server is getting pimped out. $1000 buy gets you substantial NAS storage for 6-7 years. That's ~$14/mo if you replace nothing for 6 years. By the time drives start dying the sizes double and you can expand your raid as they die off one by one.
Anywho, Plex servers (and other FOSS alternatives now) usually have no problems transcoding and serving multiple 1080p and 4k streams concurrently. Plus you can download media for offline play within the respective server's app on all kinds of devices, and for plex the server owner doesn't need to license guests. That being said, non-plex options are what i'd go with because they are as good or better without any license cost. I just use plex because I bought a lifetime sub before the alternatives were mature. It's nice having a library that only grows, never shrinks. No temporary licenses or content runs so I can have a massive backlog and not worry if I don't get around to it for years. Just a lot of wins, no downsides that I know of.
Crunchyroll has its own bullshit too tbh. It just happens to be that the industry is worse than their bs, so Crunchyrolls shenanigans is really just the anime industry.
Our household has gone full in on Plex. Bought an 8 TB hardrive to run the sever off my 10 year old gaming PC. Wife and I have been binging Downton Abbey. Digitized the series off blue-rays from the local local. However the blue-ray set didn’t have the Christmas Specials. My wife did not want to wait til I tracked down the specials. So we started to watch the specials on Amazon Prime Video. The picture encoding was awful. Not to mention all the bloody annoying ads. Not able to stomach the horrible picture quality anymore I hurriedly found a 1080p file and added it to our plex server. It was like night and day. I am not a high definition snob. Honestly I cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. But the fact that I can stream better video quality from my 10 year old PC than through a multi billion dollar company is absurd.