Technology

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 ripped our physical media, and the experience is way better. I wish I could just buy and download a .mkv or .avi or whatever.

The best bit is that Blu-ray supports “online content” so they can update the forced intros and trailers to fresh ones!

40 seconds?

More like 10 minutes

I prefer my 10min of unskippable download time and watching it in 4k with a proper bitrate.

4K discs are so niche that this just isn’t really true, since they simply don’t bother to add that stuff anymore with the money all going to streaming. Almost every 4K disc I have just loads right into a bland generic menu with only a skippable logo for universal or whatever at the beginning. On top of that, they’re all region free. Odd that when the consumer base for physical media is smaller than it used to be, the consumer experience is better.

Now most of these 4K discs also come with a regular (often older) Blu-ray which contains the features from previous releases or whatever, and THAT’S where the bullshit you’re talking about is - lots of trailers (with it being a crapshoot whether you can skip straight to the menu, need to skip one at a time, or have to actually fast forward them), and, worst of all, defunct BD-Live stuff that in some cases you have no way to skip loading at all, even if you completely disable network connectivity in the player. None of this junk is in any of my 4Ks. Sometimes the features are even on the 4K too, if you’re really lucky.

But yeah, modern 4K discs are mostly great and still absolutely way better video and audio quality than any streaming service I’ve used - the worst thing you usually get is maybe one dumb copyright notice. (LG’s 4K players were terrible anyway though making the experience bad for consumers for a different reason, but that’s for another comment).

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.

Funny that the DRM didn't even really prevent ripping the disks... A few different players were hacked to leak decryption keys and mess with the firmware to allow backing up to a PC (or piracy if that's your thing). I have all my media stored locally because I can't stand having shows being removed from streaming services.

I’ve only ever bought one single blue ray disk, and that was the final venture brothers movie, in support of Jackson & Doc

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.

Lol, i kept foolishly building HTPCs with bluray drives hoping that someday i could actually play my bluray disks...

I wish there were more/better/good choices for streaming video. We already have decent solutions for audio, games and books/audiobooks, yet video seems to be lagging behind, hugely.

I'm curious what the landscape will be like in 10 years. Hard to push 8k, HDR, and all the other TV gizmos when the only source media available is 3GB 'UHD' movies from streaming services that have been stomped all over with compression.

Their washing machines are pretty decent.

It's the thing Sony does best.