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> So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon. I did that too, and then went one step further, bec
by janfoeh 5y ago
> So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon.
I did that too, and then went one step further, because some fifteen years down the line, online video rental still hilariously, bafflingly sucks.
Twelve, thirteen years ago I was still renting physical DVDs. Back then, renting a physical item that was produced halfway around the world, shipped to Germany and distributed by a company with hundreds of physical locations staffed by employees was around two and a half times cheaper than downloading a file via iTunes. Apart from inflation, those prices never came down.
Adding insult to injury, the more expensive download is almost always worse:
On the majority of DVDs I get both the original and the dubbed voice track, plus subtitles in English and German.
That's important to me, because my partner vastly prefers either the dubbed version, or at least the original with German subtitles. When I watch something for myself, I vastly prefer the original - sometimes with English subtitles.
In online video rental (or purchase), I can often only get the dubbed version. If the original is available at all, it is sometimes another item to be bought separately. Either case almost never features both German and English subtitles.
And as the icing on the cake, to this day not all product pages on iTunes even _list_ the featured languages of a download, let alone their subtitle languages.
Combine that with all the other indignities of buffet streaming, such as titles being constantly rotated out or the incessant advertising on Amazon before every episode.
So — I've gone back to buying used DVDs. And since they have their own problems such as unskippables and horrible menus, I'm currently looking into building a NAS and will be ripping them into a personal media collection sometime in the future.
And then I will have come back full circle to 2005.
- dangus 5y agoYou can also do exactly this with Blu-rays and get really stunning above-streaming quality, though of course the selection and pricing isn't as desirable as DVDs. What I'm saying is invest in a USB or internal Blu-ray drive, the extra cost is worth it.
- janfoeh 5y agoYou're right, I probably should.. I'm just a little bit anxious of the extra fiddling required to find decent compression settings for BDs, since I've got no experience there.
- jbay808 5y agoI've noticed that streaming video quality is really bad, actually. Especially when the scene is very dark and grey, like Dark, you can hardly see anything because of the compression. Physical media thankfully does better.
- vorpalhex 5y agoThe NAS route is a solid one. There are a lot of fantastic tools out there these days for managing media collections.
- jbay808 5y agoPlus, for anything other than new releases you'd get the rental typically for up to a week, whereas now it's 24 hours even for a 30 year old film.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoFor un-skippable DVD previews try VLC. Or if you must rip them MakeMKV can help.
- janfoeh 5y agoThanks for the MakeMKV suggestion, I'll look into it. VLC isn't an option at the moment, because we've hooked up a 60€ player to her television. Something with a remote with physical buttons that boots up in two seconds flat, never updates, always works the same and needs zero network connections. A pretty high bar to beat.
- _archon_ 5y agoYou have described a Raspi media center with a remote and the wifi turned off. It may take a couple seconds longer to boot, but you get back VLC et al in exchange, and there are many good, free options to use it as an interface for your NAS. What a time to be alive
- janfoeh 5y agoI have one lying around anyway, so maybe that's another viable path. I'll take a look at how appliance-like I could make such a Raspi, in terms of UX.