Technology

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.

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..

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).

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Yeah this way you don't need to buy a Blu-Ray player either.

What are you on about? In the US at least, there's no legal restriction on you playing 4K Blu-Ray movies on a PC.

But don't you know. They put a do not copy sticker on the disc. That means that you super Dooper can't copy this disc or you'll be in trouble.

I have considered buying or building a second NAS and putting it in my parents house for offsite backup.

Or just get an M-disc burner and burn discs that'll last a good hundred years.

My father who used to be able to pirate entire music libraries has been reduced to an apple subscriber its crazy

My mkv software says otherwise.

It's way easier to break. And even ignoring that, for these technologies at least, as long as you keep/find a working player, it's fine-ish. You can still do backup/duplicate too. As far as conservation is concerned, physical media gives these options.

Yes; but DRM can be cracked, and it rarely makes DVDs and Blu-Rays unusable.

Do Blu rays require to phone home periodically to validate drm over the Internet? Genuine question., as I have read here that right to play them can be revoked.

I buy lots of cassette tapes on bandcamp (thousands by now) and also download lossless digital for the archive. Streaming sucks and I like to support artists, so piracy is out (for music only, I’m not buying video content).

I have a 12tb external HDD for now, set it up with an Emby server so I can access it anywhere. Total cost was around $200. Gonna replace it with a NAS with like 80TB so I can keep it safe forever. This is the way.

Yup. "Buying" a movie online is a grift, since all you're actually doing is buying a license to stream as long as they decide they want to host it. Companies can, and have, removed movies people have bought because of things like studio distribution agreements expiring.

My dream would be for UHD Blu-ray quality (or better) DRM-free digital movie purchases, much like you already can with high res music. But until that becomes a thing, I'll be buying a physical copy of any movies or shows that I want to own (rather than rent).