its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim.
maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.
There’s plenty of services like this that people use a firestick to connect too.
My friend uses one but I forget the name of it. You can find them online but people usually buy a package of say 20 connections and then sell them to friends and family. I’ll try and remember what to search for and come back.
IPTV is the name of the pirated cable TV streams. Personally, I consider commercialized piracy to be a bit distasteful compared to the free and open source route, and I have the know how to self host my own streaming service.
Although it's not piracy, another free option to consider for live TV, if you're within range of TV broadcasters, is a digital TV antenna. I'm looking into that since not only is it free and legal, it's also the best picture quality, not compressed like IPTV (legit or pirated) or even cable.
You can get 12tb renewed drives for $100. A lot will even have decent warranties. If you’re lying for like, 3 streaming services, and cancel all three in favor of saving your own media locally it pays for itself quickly. Especially if you download stuff from like HBO Max.
This is doubly true now that streaming services have started raising prices and pay walling content.
really large hdds are still really expensive, the prices have somewhat plateaued at this rate. Nobody really needs such massive drives, and their isn't exactly an incentive to produce larger drives, especially now that everyone seems to be moving to ssds.
that's also renewed storage, and i guess compared to the last decade it's pretty good.
But even then compared to the continual creep of file sizes, it's debatable. I mean 4k took off the last 5-10 years. I have yt videos ranging from 1-20 GB for 4k content now.
How did you convert to hvec? I'd love to do that on my entire library but don't know where to start. I'd also love to burn subtitles into some foreign films since Plex is generally terrible at doing subtitles...
Up until now, I've been using the convert tool in Emby server. You can select a whole library and convert it, or individual items/playlists/collections; with options to automatically convert new media as it's added.
Tbh, I've been having a bit of trouble with it re-converting media it's already done, so I was looking for another solution.
Someone in this thread mentioned tdarr, so I'm going to be looking into that this weekend. Seems like a much more manageable tool with more powerful options.
/edit; I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.
I should also mention, this is a long process. Using an rtx4080, it was almost 3 full months non-stop to convert my entire media library from mostly h264 -> h265.
and if you're looking to do software conversion you're easily looking at years, but considering how long most media servers will be up for, it might actually be worthwhile to aggressively automate that so it just runs in the background while you aren't looking. Also eats up additional CPU time which might be a benefit for someone.
183,200 TV episodes is pretty modest compared to alternative "non-approved" sources.
One datapoint is one source (that has a rule against any TV/show content released in the last 5 years) has a total number of 19.5K shows and TV movies/specials, with ~80 K releases. For many shows a single release can be a full season.
Not trying to sound elitist, but...all the content combined still isn't worth $10. Mind you the last TV show I liked was Better Call Saul, the last Hollywood movie I liked was...let me think...The Irishman, I guess?
Since 2000 the amount of TV shows I truly enjoyed watching and would watch again was maybe 8. The amount of movies maybe 20. So less than one per year.
And because I don't have to watch stuff when it comes out, but am totally fine with watching things years later, when it's cheap or free, I'd wager I spend less than $10 per year on TV and movie entertainment.
Yes, they have been. But Succession is an example of a show which I thought I would like, and did for one season, but never finished, because the writing was so lazy and repetitive, and what's worse constantly pretending huge things happened while nothing actually happened.
its a character study, not a bombastic thriller. Same as the shows most folks rave about: Sopranos, Mad Men, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Arrested Development.. its fine to not like anything but I'm not sure why you'd take time to write about how you don't like anything. Do you find posts about, say, an art heist and post about how you haven't liked any paintings in a couple centuries
Ouch, comparing Succession to an absolute masterwork like the Sopranos hurts...and shows that you probably don't actually watch those shows but have them on in the background. And if Succession is such a character study, why do the writers pretend it's something else? It was a really bad show, man.
what you dont know could fill a book
I wouldnt put succession on the same tier as sopranos (very little comes close), all I was saying is its not about crazy plot twists, and more about the way the emotionally crippled kids of logan roy cosplay as human beings. I enjoyed it- jeremy strong and brian cox did a great job imo
Hollywood has been sucking ass lately, but lots of small indie films have been kicking ass. Everything from A24 has been fantastic recently. Lots of good foreign films too
All the comments in here are so damn tedious. Copyright is a mess, but holy shit, people tie themselves in knots to make excuses for pirates being careless and stupid
