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Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
- sarimkx 7mo agoAnother great example of people returning to analog/physical tech!
- tonyponydong 7mo agoplex is still cool, right?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- vages 7mo agoI have heard that Jellyfin is the new kid on the block
- platevoltage 7mo agoIt's awful. I use Emby now, and have been for years. They even get 5 bucks a month from me. Apparently Jellyfin is good too, but I've had no reason to try it.
- hamdingers 7mo agoPlex is so far down the enshittification funnel it's a wonder it hasn't collapsed yet.
- kllrnohj 7mo agoThe only reason I haven't canceled my Plex is because I bought a lifetime pass a decade ago so I literally can't. :/ I almost wish I hadn't specifically so I could cancel it and send that signal. But yes Plex is quite enshittified now. Would definitely start with Jellyfin or something else these days.
- WCSTombs 7mo agoPublic libraries can also be a great source for DVDs and Blu-Rays!
- abnercoimbre 7mo agoRecent shows or movies make it there regularly!
- satvikpendem 7mo agoAlso add Libby, Hoopla, Overdrive, for books and other media, which are also free from the library.
- TheDom 7mo agoI recently discovered Kanopy and was surprised by the amount of A-tier movies you can stream there for free with a library membership (SFPL in my case)!
- sergiotapia 7mo agoLibraries are one the most beloved things america really got right. Such a great value and use of tax money.
- dylan604 7mo agoIf everyone used the library as much as people say they are great, their shelves would be empty. Libraries have to be some of the most underutilized services.
- dingaling 7mo agoSadly, libraries in UK towns have very little shelf space left and what's on them is usually mass-market fiction, biography or very old non-fiction. Honestly isn't worth the effort to visit my local one, unless I want to join a crochet club or do 'mindfulness' jigsaws.
- j3th9n 7mo agoI installed Transmission again.
- pixel_popping 7mo agoEnjoy the ISOs!
- satvikpendem 7mo ago*DVD/BluRay player. If it were just DVD, I'd have asked "why not pirate at that point?" since it'll be better quality than 480p, but BluRays have a superior bitrate to most rips online.
- wombat-man 7mo agoyeah, 4k blu rays especially are real nice.
- BirAdam 7mo agoPlayers for those are kind of pricey tho.
- wombat-man 7mo agoPs5 can play them, but the drive is a little noisy. There's a fix but I haven't tried it yet
- satvikpendem 7mo agoBuy a used PS3, works great.
- wombat-man 7mo agoI don’t think it plays 4k disks
- dylan604 7mo agoI pulled out an old working PS3 just for this. It's the only thing in my house that plays shiny round discs
- sergiotapia 7mo agoHow do you get around the terrible fbi screens? :( That's the only thing preventing me from starting a collection.
- mikestew 7mo agoRip 'em to a NAS and put the DVD in the attic?
- profdevloper 7mo agoUsing MakeMKV to digitize these skips these intro screens by default (< 120 seconds), so I don't see them.
- dylan604 7mo agomeh. it's 10 seconds out of your day. it's kind of a silly thing to bitch about
- RiverCrochet 7mo agoMy cousin's friend used to rip DVDs with DVD Shrink back in the day. It would automatically remove the "Prohibited User Operation" flags or whatever that told the DVD player to ignore your skip commands.
- bowmessage 7mo agoNice - if you can find a Redbox in your area, they seem to allow _very_ long rental periods these days :)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dylan604 7mo agoYou'll be looking really really hard. For those unawares at the humor attempt: https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down
- expedition32 7mo agoNetflix has a lot of non US content which still puts them far above HBO and Disney. I am trying to cut down on my daily dose of American cultural subjugation.
- gfody 7mo ago720x480 4:2:0 YCbCr doesn't look great on modern screens
- geoffeg 7mo agoGood point, buy an old CRT in addition to the DVD player!
- iamnothere 7mo agoOr if you can find one, an RGB CRT projector, which unlike LED projectors can actually provide true black (or close to it).
- Giefo6ah 7mo agoIt's often better than a 5 Mbps 1080p
- kllrnohj 7mo agoSince DVDs are ~5mbps mpeg2, no, no it isn't. 5 mbps h264 is dramatically better. Now, when compared to blu-ray... That's different. Very, very different.
- hamdingers 7mo agoh264 is (generously) about 2x as efficient as MPEG-2, granted, but you're smearing those 5mbps across 6x as many pixels. I would take crisp 480p over a gooey, artifact-softened 1080p for most content.
- Giefo6ah 7mo agoMost feature DVDs are 8 Mbps. It's certainly blurrier than Netflix, but dark scenes, grain and textures are usually much more detailed on a DVD nonetheless.
- mapontosevenths 7mo agoIn TFA they specify that it was also blu ray. This person was using DVD as an (incorrect) term meaning "some kind of plastic disc." Though they don't say 4k/UHD blu-ray which would be a big miss if not. UHD blu-ray is superior to any other format in terms of quality. Perhaps excepting a few very niches streaming services that are tied to expensive hardware.
- atum47 7mo agoI gave up on Netflix years ago, never looked back. Went back to my old reliable external HD which I can plug directly to my TV.
- an0malous 7mo agoThere’s nothing to watch anyway since movies and shows have been enshittified as well
- seattle_spring 7mo agoThere have been tons of great TV series over the last decade.
- an0malous 7mo agoI think there’s been a steep decline since around 2020 and enough people agree that there’s a Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Television_(2000s%E2%80%932023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Television_(2000...
- platevoltage 7mo agoThere is still good stuff coming out. I think people look at the past with rose colored glasses. We've always had to sift through a sea of shit to find good stuff.
- dylan604 7mo agoThe amount of trash released to VHS during the heyday of Blockbuster is something most people forget about. Most people browsed along the walls for the new releases, but all of those shelves in the middle of the store were full of straight to home video releases that were really really not good. Think Hallmark channel content but with even less talent. Think Troma again, with less talent. Think Jack Black recreating movies bad, but without meaning to be that bad
- platevoltage 7mo agoPeople do this with music too. People forget that for every Fiona Apple there was 10 other studio manufactured slop artists just shoved out there by the industry, and these have largely been forgotten about.
- bko 7mo agoI was wondering if there is a DVD service similar to Netflix when it first came out. And of course there is, but pricing seems high! DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out. Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service. I guess the economics just isn't there.
- benoliver999 7mo agoThere's one in the UK too, Cinema Paradiso. The prices are also quite high. Also, the turnaround times were really slow. Slow mail perhaps, but at the same time it's kind of in their interests to not turn things around so fast. In the UK, letters get a lower priority than packages which doesn't help.
- hdgvhicv 7mo ago$15 back in 2006 is $25 today
- mapontosevenths 7mo agoI use store-3d-blurayrental.com. They do more than 3d. It's expensive, compared to streaming, but the quality of 4k bluray can't be beat. I have a 120" screen. You notice the difference between 1080p or even high and low bitrates at that size. I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.
- KK7NIL 7mo ago> I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates. The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.
- 7mo ago
- donohoe 7mo agoNot a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy. I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals. You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea. Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage. You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license". In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere. NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho. (Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99) Reference: - "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I - "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-laws.htm https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...
- tim-tday 7mo agoIt is, but it is illegal to break the copy protection. So if you have the license, download a legal fair use back via “alternate distribution channels”.
- yellottyellott 7mo agoTrueNAS + AppleTV + Infuse + Tailscale is my setup. Also iTunes has Movies for $5, but it has DRM, which bit me since I always remembered their mp3s being DRM-free back in the day being a big deal.
- mapontosevenths 7mo agoThat's ok if you don't care about sound much. Apple prevents local playback apps from playing back Atmos audio. It's fine if you only want 5.1 though. There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.
- mingus88 7mo ago
- commandlinefan 7mo agoMy father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those. OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.
- whycome 7mo agoOkay I have dvd players that work fine even still. DVDs need care - scratches and fingerprints are bad (though the error correction on a good player will make it less noticeable). I think the lifespan of a dvd player may be in its design (where dust may get to the laser?) or the environment (humidity or temp may play a role?)
- jerlam 7mo agoIt's possible that DVD players are extremely low quality now, since there are very few people still buying them.
- kllrnohj 7mo ago> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins. I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.
- craftkiller 7mo agoAt this point, I'm surprised the streaming services aren't grandfathering people into their current plan+rate like the cellular networks do. It would encourage people to keep their subscription active to keep their rate rather than cancelling it and signing up again when there is a specific show they want to watch, while also avoiding the price increase frustrations. PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.
- compsciphd 7mo agolots of cell phone services are no longer doing that either.
- dylan604 7mo agoI've been doing the "pause" option not just for Netflix but multiple streamers. Adding up all of the streaming subs totaled as much monthly as the cable bill I did away with which made sense when everything was on Netflix. Now each studio has their own platform with similar per month fees. There's not enough content to justify that much monthly expense.
- apparent 7mo agoI have tried to get my wife to pause some of our subs but she absolutely refuses. She says "we're not poor" (we are not) and apparently just wants to spend $70/mo on these damn things. Even if costs were lower, I still think we should not have so many, since it spoils our kids. I don't want them to see TV as "we have access to everything all the time". I want them to see that there are tradeoffs, and understand that we could have hundreds of dollars more if we had Netflix for half the year and Disney+ for half the year, for example. There's also something to be said for restarting a sub and being excited to watch content that you had been waiting to see.
- dylan604 7mo ago> "we have access to everything all the time" I remember when there were 3 networks. I remember when those networks stopped broadcasting content around midnight by playing the national anthem and then playing bars or just going off the air. I used to think the concept of UHF is kind of lost, but then realized it's kind of just what YouTube has become-weird, random, wacky content produced by just about anybody that can hit record on a camera.
- stratts 7mo agoBeyond the pricing part of it, just having media that isn't dependent on an external device is so nice. But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.
- benoliver999 7mo agoWe did this with Jeremy Brett Sherlock. Boxed set is of some sentimental value, but we tired of loading the disc, finding the episode etc. Even worse if you have to stop half way. They ended up ripped and played on kodi
- randomNumber7 7mo agoI just open ymovies.cc
- Unbeliever69 7mo agoNetlfix raises its prices for the second time in years. Prime Video ads are so invasive that I honestly can't watch any video without turning it off immediately (I refuse to pay for the ad free tier), and now I'm seeing very long ads in the middle of YouTube videos. Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable. So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
- tptacek 7mo agoWhy do you refuse to pay for the ad-free tier?
- dylan604 7mo agoI was paying for Prime, and then they introduced ads. They started comingling their video content just like their warehouses so you'd get AVOD content with your premium VOD content so it made picking something ad free very difficult. They started with "Included with Prime" labels for the ad free stuff, but then that label started showing ads. I stopped watching so many shows at the first ad break and never returned. It made me finally cancel Prime.
- tptacek 7mo agoI wouldn't watch ad-sponsored TV either, but you either want to watch the shows or you don't; your time is extremely valuable! I wouldn't assume the price of the show is that much a factor.
- joshfraser 7mo agoJust cancel your subscription. Resubscribe for a month if there's something you really want to watch. You won't miss it.
- CobrastanJorji 7mo agoI wonder if there's a service that subscribes on demand and unsubscribes automatically. I'm picturing something that lets me browse shows and movies and pick them, with a little 'playing this will trigger a Disney+ subscription for one month, for $12'
- joshfraser 7mo agoBet Claude could build that for you in 5 mins
- tracker1 7mo agoWouldn't necessarily bet on it... would likely need to use puppeteer or playwright and change the user agent to match the desktop browser. And even then, the various services likely change pretty regularly. That said... could maybe setup a mitm service that does this for even $5/yr to manage various services... where that service takes care of updating their signon/cancel scripts. Maybe even a semi-trusted mechanical turk as necessary.
- CobrastanJorji 7mo agoAlso I have to assume that some of those services have some sort of catchall where they stop letting you resubscribe after the fifth or sixth time you cancel in a year.
- jmyeet 7mo agoBack when Netflix was $8/month I just had it forever without thinking about it. It was at first a great way to catch up on TV shows. Netflix was after all originally a place for studios to monetize old content, particularly TV. Even at $10/month, it was fine. But it kept going up. I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services. I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model. So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit. My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction. The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
- dylan604 7mo ago> I've searched for data on how often people do this I've just started doing this late last year. I'm down to one active service at a time. I heard of it from someone else, so that's at least +2 to your tally
- chaseadam17 7mo agoBest strategy is to subscribe to one streaming service, watch everything good over a few months, then cancel and switch to another.
- MangoCoffee 7mo agoDVD discs is not good for long term storage. it can get scratch and became unusable. you want a NAS/PC then rip the dvd and use plex or Jellyfin to watch your collection.
- mrob 7mo agoDVDs are extremely robust against scratches, even more so than CDs. Unlike CDs, which have the data protected by only a thin layer of lacquer under the label, DVDs sandwich the data between two layers of polycarbonate. The error correction is improved too. Unlike hard disks, they're practically immune to shock (e.g. being dropped). Unlike SSDs and unlike hard disks, they're immune to ESD. And even if you somehow manage to damage one, it's just one, not your whole collection.
- platevoltage 7mo agoiptorrents.com is very easy to get an invitation to as well.
- adamors 7mo agoI cancelled all my streaming, and replaced it with a €20 seed box w/ Plex + radarr/sonarr etc. Have everything I want (and nothing else) and movies/shows don't get pulled without me doing it. Won't be turning back anytime soon. Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.
- _Turk_ 7mo agoI've seen a few guides to setting this up but maybe you can refer to what you used to set your own system up? Right now I'm utilizing streamio plus debridio but I've read the plex + radarr/sonarr is much superior... I"m not too tech savvy so kind of hestiant to set up
- adamors 7mo agoTo be perfectly honest, the seedbox provider had all of these installed and hooked into each other. I only had to add my various logins and configure some profiles. I would think most seedboxes offer a variation of this, so you’re not starting from scratch.
- ZeWaka 7mo agoUsed YAMS myself which is basically just a glorified docker-compose file.
- AndroidKitKat 7mo agoTrash Guides [1] is your friend. Requires a bit of understanding whats going on but if all of these are going to be on the same computer this makes setting it up where data doesn't have to get copied around and waste time. [1] - https://trash-guides.info/ https://trash-guides.info/
- bethekind 7mo agoMe too
- BeetleB 7mo agoThe *arr stack was a pain. You'll need prowlarr for downloading. And a Bittorrent client that works with it (e.g. Ktorrent doesn't). Then you'll set up radarr/sonarr, and ensure they can talk to prowlarr. Setting up Plex is straightforward. But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr. It was definitely a pain, but once I had it set up it's been fine.
- alecco 7mo agoFor the past 10 years I found most movies to be unwatchable and not worth the time. Last one I saw was Project Hail Mary at a cinema and it was really bad in spite of a huge budget (more than Interstellar!). So long, Hollywood.
- midtake 7mo agoProject Hail Mary was not bad.
- renegade-otter 7mo agoI used to pay $30 a month for HBO. Premium cable wasn't cheap, but you had primo shows and there was a big movie release almost every Saturday night. Netflix is disposable background TV. This money will buy you two DVDs a month and 6-8 rentals. I just don't see the point unless you are wasting hours in front of the TV.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoCompared to going to see a movie in a theater, netflix and rest are extraordinarily good value most of them time. Given that I watch mostly with my wife, we only have watch several hours of something once a month to be ahead of the theater-going cost. And most streamers have something that we want to see once a month (not 100% of the time, but most of the time). The Netflix adaptation of "100 Years of Solitude" (part two due out this august) was one of the most astounding bits of visual story telling I've seen in a long time. Entirely the opposite of "disposable background TV".
- renegade-otter 7mo agoThere is a good movie here and there. Maybe one per year. I am paying $400 a year for that?
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoThe adaptation of Solitude ran about 8 hours, so call that 4 movies. There have been some excellent documentaries, and certainly more than 1 film a year that I considered worth watching. $400 is about 10-11 movies for 2 people. So one a month is pretty much even-stevens with that. If you live (or watch) alone, the math changes a bit, perhaps.
- bloodmoon 7mo agonot a problem for torrent users.
- robertclaus 7mo agoWe get our physical media movies from the library now.
- tracker1 7mo agoI would probably go Blu-Ray at least to have higher resolution content... Ripping isn't too bad (I use make-mkv then re-encode with handbrake). I don't really notice going up from 1080p, but really notice going below 1080p content. I also don't mind h.265's blurry handling of degradation over the blocky/chunky h.264... I haven't really observed enough lower bitrate AV1 to compare. I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
- dooku0721 7mo agoWould we see a resurgence of Blockbuster?
- KaoruAoiShiho 7mo agoI feel like netflix is definitely very cheap, with OpenClaw or whatever your favorite agent is, it's trivial to subscribe to watch one show and then have it cancel immediately.
- sfRattan 7mo agoThe idea of using an LLM to manage media streaming subscriptions seems completely bonkers-nutso-crazy to me. Then again, I don't have streaming subscriptions anymore. I'll grant that streaming platforms played dark-pattern games with cancellation a decade ago, which is part of why I dropped all of them, but iOS and Android are both pretty good about routing subscriptions through their respective app stores and enforcing standardized, easy cancellation for end users. The amount of energy in your brain it takes to do this basic thing versus the amount of energy in a datacenter somewhere, and the slide into cognitive atrophy that must result... There are things I'll happily use LLMs to accomplish, but offloading day-to-day executive function will never, ever be on that list. And every day I understand and sympathize with the ethos of the Butlerian Jihad more and more.
- QuiEgo 7mo agoIs it really that hard to just hit cancel yourself? When you're holding a hammer all the world looks to be nails or something. EDIT: Also, there's no way in hell I'd let any of the AIs near something with my credit card info saved in their current state.
- yonran 7mo agoI wonder if you could make a bare computer (user provides the OS image) + DVD player + DVD rental company without triggering the public performance clause of copyright law because it is the user that decides what to do with it. Like Aereo or Zediva, which were shut down because they provided a user experience. But if you just rented out hardware and didn’t care what software was running, would that be considered a private playing instead of public performance + transmission?
- gossamer 7mo agoThis is ironic considering Netflix used to be all about sending people DVDs.
- bilekas 7mo agoSpotify, Netflix, HBO, Paramount, HULU, MUBI, etc etc etc and a couple of Video Game publishers are making a very strong case to revert back to piracy.
- mrazomor 7mo agoI did the same after Netflix dropped movies I cared about. First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX. Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
- oojuliuso 7mo agoNetflix made a lot of money off me in the early 2000s, the pre-streaming days (and MacOS X, and 10.1 days), when discs were sent out by mail. One could go queue up everything you wanted to watch, have a couple discs out at a time, and get new ones sent to you as watched discs were returned. There was never enough time in the day to watch them, with unwatched discs in my possession for weeks, turning into months. Yet the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet monthly subscription kept me hooked, kept me paying. The other hook was that you had a curated list of stuff to watch, and the queue would manage itself, as fast as one could watch them. It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now. I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.
- paulnpace 7mo agoBut you couldn't watch 8 hours of movies and shows in a single sitting.
- supliminal 7mo ago[dead]
- Cider9986 7mo agoI learned to share in kindergarten. I did not forget how to share.
- autoexec 7mo agoI support the idea of physical media 100%. It's much more dependable, and once the discs are pressed the content can't be remotely/silently censored or edited the way it can on streaming services. If you rip the content yourself there's nobody carefully keeping track of when/where/how often you view what you're watching. You don't get as much privacy with DVD/blu-ray players though. Players that are connected to the internet will phone home and report what you watch. They'll also refuse to play some media until you've connected them to the internet to get updates. Some players like game consoles will even store information on what you watch when offline and collect that data when they have a network connection. The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services. There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release. Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.
- nfriedly 7mo agoI recently found a Blu-ray player for $7 at Goodwill. It was missing the remote which ended up costing slightly more than the player itself, but for ~$15 I got a working Blu-ray/dvd player with a remote
- hazbot 7mo agoI enjoy having a DVD player for the kids, it makes curating their options so much easier.
- torben-friis 7mo agoIt just dawned on me the other day that if I add up what I've already spent on apple music/Spotify over the years, it's very likely well above the amount it would have taken to buy a physical copy of all the music I listen to (I'm an album guy, as opposed to playlist people). Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.
- swader999 7mo agoThere is so so little to watch.
- mrfinn 7mo agoThe "right to copy" is a made up concept. Just sayin'...
- dev_l1x_be 7mo agoMy problem is not the price but the amount of garbage you get. Instead of getting access to a vast amount of mediocre at best content I would like to have access to a small amount of good content. Netflix is just not that.
- bdangubic 7mo agosmall amount of good content would be terrible for business, right? my wife had bunch of subscriptions (I don’t watch TV :) ) and ones she cancelled (e.g. Disney) was because “they never have anything new to watch, few new shows/movies per year.”
- anonymousab 7mo agoI have found that the vast supermajority of the content that Netflix provided themselves is wretched to my tastes, so I would just automatically scroll past and mentally blot out anything with that red N. Unfortunately, it is so omnipresent throughout the application these days that it really does make it obvious how little good content they have - or are willing to let you know they have.
- ddtaylor 7mo agoI have a 4TB hard drive that contains thousands of movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes. It feeds into a Jellyfin server.
- nashashmi 7mo agoI thought this was going to happen already after they bought warner bros. But it turns out that it was going to happen anyway. The competition in the space is going to zero and that is why NF and Disney are raising prices.
- TheAtomic 7mo agoThe only comment on her post is some asshat telling her to grow up. I don't understand how a person can decide to take a cheap shot on an article about buying a DVD player but, there it is. Losers roam the internet like horse flies in Texas.
- dlcarrier 7mo agoI never gave up on Blu-Ray discs, or really I never adopted digital distribution. When I buy a Blu-Ray disc, the rights to watch it are perpetual and transferable, which means I can watch the movie all I want, then when I'm done with it I can sell it, relinquishing all of my rights to the new owner, making it just as valuable to the new owners as it was to me, meaning that the resale value will be pretty constant. With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive. The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each. Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.
- danielodievich 7mo agoMy wife was talking to someone in her early 20ies and mentioned DVD player and apparently that's considered ancient now. Ahh to be young and blithe about it. We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
- surgical_fire 7mo agoGood timing. I just turned a refurbished Dell Optiplex into a home server. It is an excellent vessel for sailing the high seas and streaming the loot.
- motbus3 7mo agoThis was exactly what happened to cable tv. The moment they got the upper hand, they piled up ads and price hikes and made stupid ton of stupid deals that made no sense. Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.
- tim-tday 7mo agoI hear you can get hella dvds from your local library. All free!
- munib_ca 7mo agonetflix as a company is dead. if you buy any smart tv, you can just install streamio and pirate any movie/tv show you like I dont really see a reason why someone still pays for netflix.
- QuiEgo 7mo ago"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" I left when shows I enjoyed were a revolving door, and the UI felt hostile (constantly trying to shove terrible quality original content on me).
- beej71 7mo agoI'm a fan. You can also find used DVDs at thrift stores for a buck or two. And at your local public library. I rip them to jellyfin.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago"When sales are hot, you can sometimes get amazing deals on physical media - you pay the cost once and own it for good." Is the author aware that Netflix's original subscription business was sending DVDs to customers and customers returning the DVDs to Netflix all via postal mail. "DVD-by-mail rental service" There was no "streaaming"
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo ago*streaming
- nickvec 7mo agoThanks for the reminder to cancel my HBO Max subscription that I barely use!
- Jemm 7mo agoI just stopped watching movies or anything on broadcast television. Problem solved.
- dudul 7mo agoDone this a long time ago. It wasn't prices that drove me away from Netflix and Co. It was how old contents started to be "updated" for "modern audiences/values", and how movies/shows kept being moved around between platforms. Got my Bluray player, I buy a movie once in a while when I consider it a "classic" that I really want to have, otherwise local library has a lot of options. And worst case scenario, the high seas. Same principles with music and games. I still get/burn CDs.
- dominojab 7mo ago[dead]
- throwa356262 7mo agoI canceled my subscription years ago when I relaized that outside 1-2 shows per years everything is boring. You can buy old TV shows on dvd box for cheap. There are enough good shows from the past to keep you occupied for the rest of your life.
- john-tells-all 7mo agoMy friends subscribe to one service per month. They watch everything they want, and when they run out, they cancel the service and subscribe to another one. When they want to watch something on another service, they add it to a shared spreadsheet. It works really well! They get to watch everything on all services, and it's all high quality media that they want to watch.
- johsole 7mo agoMy DVD and BR collection has been growing. I just buy used for both and I can usually pick up great stuff pretty cheaply. I also subscribe to YouTube premium for both ad free YouTube and ad free YouTube Music. YouTube premium also has a number of free movies, the type of stuff you used to see on cable TV. Not the big hits
- hank808 7mo agoAustin Texas has an operating video rental store. They have an amazing collection: https://www.weluvvideo.org/the-collection https://www.weluvvideo.org/the-collection
- talkfold 7mo agoPaying ads AND being told certain shows aren't in your tier is genuinely one of the worst product decisions in streaming history.
- nunez 7mo agoStreaming subscriptions are the new cable, but with "much better" video-on-demand and much stronger corporate capture. Instead of having handfuls of locally-owned television stations you could pick up by antenna or a cheap cable subscription offered by your local cable TV provider, we have apps on apps on apps all owned by Disney, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon and Comcast, with local stations being owned by huge conglomerates that are effectively franchisees. At least it's truly a la carte, which was something cable and satellite providers could never correctly implement. Actually, I wrote that and realized a few seconds later that that's not actually true. If you want to watch The Office, some footbaseketball thing, Shrinking and Real Housewives of $CITY, you've got to get Peacock, Hulu, Apple TV, and the "All-Access" packages from MLB, NBA, and/or NFL, with all of them being independent monthly subscriptions ON TOP of your Internet plan that add up to being way more than your old cable or satellite subscription + premium channels. All of those apps come with tons of filler and studio titles that you probably won't watch, just like the "thousands" of channels stuffed into the cable plan you got just to get access to the big networks, sports and HBO. This outcome was obvious the minute Netflix got out of DVDs and into streaming. And it's so much worse IMO. It was somewhat better when the streaming studios were dumping entire seasons of content, but they've been walking that back now too.
- antisol 7mo agoWelcome! Physical media is the only way to fly. Looks great on a bookshelf, works when the series of tubes is broken, and as a bonus the studios don't sneak into your house and steal them from you. The price of discs these days, particularly second-hand DVDs, is so great. The low demand is a real windfall for us physical media collectors. Not long ago I managed to score the first 15 seasons of south park on DVD for $100. I quickly did some math in my head, and at ~4 discs per season, that works out to about...uh...carry the one...yep, it's fuck-all per disc.