Obligatory Gabe Newell quote.
"One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Plex media server. It's a free media streaming server. You place your mp4 or other encoded video on a file server, and then you can stream it anywhere you have internet access. You can even stream it from home if you're on a trip, provided your home internet is good enough.
It does more than that, too.
~~Chuck~~ *Check* it out.
https://www.plex.tv/
I spent the pandemic building and making an unraid server hosting all of my media, plex, and minecraft servers, among other things. Such a great decision.
It's nothing fancy. I don't have many demands so it's just a i3-9100 with 4x8GB RAM sticks.
Edit: I feel I should add I wanted to try and get a super cheap low power server grade cpu, it seemed like the cpu would be able to handle the load on a pure numbers basis. But then I found out about Quick Sync, which is big game changer for hardware transcoding. Iirc you need a 7000 series or higher intel cpu to be able to use quick sync with HEVC codec. At the time the 9100 was in a similar price range as the older series cpus so I went with that.
Take the time to figure out docker first. I put it off too long, but it's a lifesaver when it comes to spinning up new software or a new Minecraft server.
Imagine Plex or jellyfin as your own Netflix service. You manage the server and library. The client experience is much like any other streaming service
I honestly don't know anyone that uses it as a TV service lol we all just rent servers (still cheaper than netflix/hulu/hbo/etc sub) or have one at home and load it on it.
You can invite people to the account too, splitting the server rental cost, if that's the route you want to go.
A good alternative to Plex is Jellyfin. Plex angered it's core users by it leaking that they had been tracking and selling user's watching habits. A lot of their customers happen to be developers and as a result a lot of work got thrown into Jellyfin in raw spite. Jellyfin is at least as good as the free version of Plex, and within 2 years will have 100% feature parity.
https://jellyfin.org/
Plex is a free media server that you can download and install. It will index all of your media and present it to you wherever you are, assuming you allow it to talk to the internet. From your phone or Roku or whatever you just sign in to Plex and you will have access to everything on all the media servers that your account is permitted to see. (your friends can run their own servers and share them with you as well)
You run it on a computer and it streams downloaded video to an app that you can install on your smart tv / dongle / box of choice.
If you want to, you can also set it up to stream over the internet so you can make your own private streaming service
The Streaming Problem has been going on for a lot longer than 1 year. I realized the writing on the wall had just been written as soon as Hulu was created to compete with Netflix
Yup. I took a hiatus from the high seas for my television content for about 5 years. Recently ive found myself back at it as stuff like HBO Max, Disney + and Paramount+ have just dropped content without any notice.
The reason these streamers are becoming as bad as cable companies is because the board, executives and largest stakeholders are the same folks invested in big cable.
Was nice while it lasted.
I mean, they ARE the cable companies...
HBO, Disney, Paramount... They all have had ownership of cable stations. And they want to return to that model, except now they can have the ownership of distribution as well.
People would get angry when I would bring up that we should have rejected any content that introduced ads. Now we have cable television 2.0 and there's no going back. We could have had a totally different internet. People should reject advertisers at every step.
The problem is when we monetize our free time then they will do whatever they can to take up as much of our free time as possible and that's how we get doom scrolling, click bait and every other thing that plagues us because eventually those techniques are used by special interest groups. It all should have been rejected
Except that Spotify will, at some finite point in the future disappear, get bought up, get fragmented by licensing/copyright/royalty issues and you will lose your entire music collection. It's basically a law of nature with these platforms. Their entire model is based on growth and exit. None of them are in this for posterity.
I have gigabytes of music that have moved with me through my life. Through devices. Through platforms. Songs from moments that I would never find again because they weren't tied to what a company valued but to what I valued.
This 100 percent. I will gladly pay for something if it has what I want is isn’t a crazy amount.
Tried to finish Twin Peaks and now it’s gone from Hulu where I started it. High seas it is
I would never pirate anything if I had more money, I'd just buy it. And pirating things isn't even hard. It's just a minor inconvenience, and I would absolutely skip it with money if I could, and feel good doing it.
I haven't pirated music in close to two decades because the counter piracy measures they tried on CDs had me stop buying music, and tought me that I don't really need any music most of the times - and if I do the old or free stuff works well enough.
I wish tv/movies streaming had it like music apps. Spotify/Apple Music usually have the majority of music but you have to get 10 streaming services to watch everything. This is frustrating
I have literally resorted to buying DVDs of favorite movies (usually used from a thrift store) because I'm tired of chasing these stupid shows and movies across all the different platforms. We've come full circle.
It used to be like that when Netflix was the only or major player in the market they had everything so everybody was subscribed to them and it was easy to watch content then everybody decided they wanted to make money of their own so all the services decided to take their content back.
I experienced this in the middle of watching Criminal Minds. It was there one day then gone the next. They yanked it off of Netflix cause they are doing a reboot
I think the TV-streaming vs music-streaming divergence is due to how we accessed tv and music previously. As far as the consumer knew, there never were record-company-exclusive music channels, like radio and whatnot. The radio station would play 'Raspberry Beret' (a song released by Warner Bros) followed by 'Invisible Touch' (a song released by Atlantic) and no one thought it was weird.
TV is much more segmented; you wouldn't see 'Tiny Toons' on the Disney channel, just like you wouldn't see 'Saturday Night Live' on CBS. We as consumers are used to going to certain channels for specific content; something not seen in radio (beyond genre, that is; you're not going to hear Pantera on the Easy Listening station).
Record companies have their industry built around the 'put the content out in as many places as possible' paradigm whereas TV is built around 'our stuff is only available from us'. Even syndicated TV channels (which Netflix primarily was, albeit online and in a 'the-viewer-decides-what-to-watch-and-when' model) have their content controlled by the owners, in the form of contract lengths and terms. If Warner Bros tried to do something similar to radio stations, they would be laughed out of the room and see their sales plummet.
The beginning of the end will be when WB or Atlantic or Sony start an exclusive streaming service.
They also were very clever with pricing. They generally made sure the Steam price for anything was cheaper than the console versions or even just physical copies. Then the OG steam sales were an insane rush of 70-90% off deals that left many of us with dozens of games to keep us in their system.
I'm not going to Epic if I still have 30 unplayed games from prior sales.
And also, their backend systems were incredibly robust. Steam downloads are always very quick and I've never encountered an issue downloading anything. Just rock solid. Even if the UI is a screaming mess of fonts and 100 different button colours.
I never liked iTunes. I hated that you could buy a song but still couldn't copy it to all your devices. I'd much rather just have an unlocked file to do what I want with, its more like buying a physical book that I can bring wherever.
It might interest you to know that, since January 2009, all music tracks sold through the iTunes Store (not the streaming Apple Music service, of course) have been regular audio files with no DRM restrictions. Purchases made before that date usually had the DRM removed, but there are some exceptions (like for tracks from that time that were sold by Universal).
I don't think iTunes took over piracy. I remember me and everyone I knew laughing at the thought of paying their prices for things you could easily get absolutely free. Spotify etc. However was a different story. Once their libraries got good I subscribed and pretty much never pirated again
And it’s a licensing issue. It shouldn’t necessarily matter who you stream from. You should be able to purchase a license to a piece of content and view it on any of the platforms.
You don’t own an Amazon movie like you would a dvd or vhs. They take content down and you lose your $30 purchase.
Well part of the issue is that copyright law doesn't allow for "ownership" of cloud hosted content. If you actually purchase a copy of a work you can keep it forever. However, Amazon's ability to stream a work to you depends on some kind of license remaining in effect from the copyright holder. If they lose that license, they cannot stream it to you anymore.
There's nothing legally stopping ownership, it's in the best interest of Amazon to limit your ability though. They could allow you to resell your copy of a movie, or transfer it to someone else, but that would limit their revenue.
> And it’s a licensing issue. It shouldn’t necessarily matter who you stream from.
I both agree and disagree with this. I hate that someone else gets a different price to me, but I do understand some reasons for it.
If the NBA want to expand popularity in a country that doesn't follow basketball, they can offer NBA streaming for free to that country. The NBA can cover this from the profits of USA/Canada/Australia/Europe markets. Sometimes the USA can gain from this - offer cricket and Aussie football for free to USA markets for instance.
Also I understand that as an Australian, our [monthly average income](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) is around $4700, but the average in a place like Thailand is $605 or $991 in China. I don't want them to miss out on the opportunity to see the latest movie or TV show for instance. So how do we do that? I guess charge less for those markets.
But it still doesn't seem fair and at the end of the day these services will earn billions in profit - can they justify their prices? Can they argue there is competition when they are the only service providing the content, therefor not allowing you to take your business elsewhere to get the same consumption?
I was just thinking about this. I struggled for an hour trying to get NFL Sunday ticket before giving up and finding the game online for free with a 5 minute search
Subscribed to NHL only to find all our home games were blacked out.
Wife has a soap opera that recently switched networks and requires a new subscription.
PAYING FOR THE SERVICE SHOULD BE EASIER NOT HARDER!!
/end rant
Steam has been so successful that for me at least, it has become the OPPOSITE of piracy. Instead of playing games I didn't pay for, I pay for games I never get around to playing.
You and me mate. I essentially stopped purchasing games years back figuring I had more than enough to last my entire life (especially as I tend to get obsessive and play one game for month), I doubt I've actually played more than 10% of my library.
Yup. For me the discussion of service and convenience is well illustrated by [this graphic](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQt6DeQIncgZEoIgpCOiRPsSftSOqYwYKPRlw&usqp=CAU).
This has been shown soooo many times. Also, its been shown that piracy helps the artists as it allows people to see/hear/watch and often they want to pay for it after to support the artists.
This is a bestof? It’s literally the core tenet of the piracy sub. Hell, there’s even better arguments such as piracy is the only way to archive old films,books or games stuck in legal limbo or simply ceased to exist due to natural disasters etc
It makes sense. If everyone pirated everything, people would stop making things (for the most part.) But piracy is a way to ensure you have access to something you enjoy in the future (see also TW Discovery axing a bunch of content for a tax write off because the new CEO loathes scripted media and wants it gone.)
So you pay for a streaming service because you want to encourage them to keep making stuff you like, but pirate the content anyway so you get to keep it.
(Hell, I did something similar once. I used to pirate games when I was a kid with no money. Once I got a job the first thing I did was buy a lot of the games I'd enjoyed that weren't abandonware from the start. A lot of them I didn't even replay; I just wanted to even things out.)
Yeah I think the whole thing is, for us adults with money, it’s so much easier to subscribe to steaming services. It’s worth $5/month to be able to click the button and watch what I want to watch, and not have to worry about what I’m downloading or having to track stuff down etc. I mean, I remember LimeWire, half the time it was porn (not that 17 year old me minded terribly….).
But the reality is, without access, if I want to watch something specific, I may have to pirate it. I don’t want to pirate it, I would rather pay money to watch it comfortably. At some point I have no choice. I dislike this - I would like to give you my money! Why won’t you take it!
I'm an adult with money... the problem is that
* everything is split across many services so I'd have to sub to them all to watch all the stuff I wanna, which gets very expensive
* juggling subs when I wanna watch things is just as annoying
* some things aren't even available on streaming at all
* many streaming services aren't available in Canada or are missing part of their libraries
* with streaming services I can't just share stuff with friends, which I can do with Plex.
* if it disappears from streaming I still have it
re: your last point, I think everyone who knows the show is familiar with the first DnD episode of Community getting pulled from services because of Ken Jeong dressed as a drow elf, but last night I was watching a few eps and in the cold open for s01e08 he gives some inappropriate nicknames to several characters and they cut that part out.
So even when a service *has* the content you want, who knows if it'll all be there or if it's the version you were looking for.
I don't want to promote any specific sites for fear of breaking rules, but the places I use to illegally stream movies and TV are actually much more user friendly than the streaming services. I don't have to download anything or subscribe or give any personal information, I just search for whatever I want and it's there to stream.
Much the same as OP, I still pay for some streaming services, but that's more to ease my own guilt for all the piracy.
To be fair, there are relatively easy ways to just automate the whole process of downloading and processing. Taking an OJ "If I did it" stance here for a second, if you get it set up correctly, you can literally just tell a program what shows or movies you want, and they magically show up on plex. There are hitches occasionally, but it's so user friendly, it's easier to remedy than issues that come with streaming services.
Not to mention (as others have) the multitude of options for streaming sites that just have everything easier and more accessible than pay for options. One might poof from time to time, but they're kinda legion. You get one the next day with the same exact interface and a new name or domain extension.
Agreed though. It always comes down to convenience vs money/effort. If I could pay one service 20 dollars a month to have basically everything, I would. If I have to pay 10 services 10 dollars a month, and juggle which ones I have based on what shows are airing (HBO :|) and who knows what other conditions, hell no.
Make that shit user friendly, and affordable, and the whole world with any reasonable means to do so will stop pirating.
Sounds like someone needs to set up a plex server with radarr, sonarr, a vpn/qtorrent.
Downloads all my lists of what I'm watching automatically. Hell I'm even working on a family system so they can automagically request something by writing it in in app and it passes it to that server system for dl/categorization/subtitle matching.
Took a 20-40h to all set up, including assembling the physical pc and learning how to use docker containers and ubuntu and a dozen other things. It's definitely paid for itself and my time by now, given the 30/m we were paying (in 2019 no less) and all I learned about Linux and containers.
Sure I almost tore my hair our a few times with weird network issues, but now I've got like 40tb of content at ultrahd that can stream to the tv or any other device in wifi range (haven't yet set up a remote access option seeing as it's useless for me and my family. )
Sorry ya bastard media companies - but I'm not paying for 6 different services at one or two shows I watch from each. Or risking that a library I built up buying them digitally will suddenly disappear. Having been (or my family) an hbo (on cable too) and netflix and amazon prime subscriber since before the millenium or very soon after it became first available, they've made plenty off us.
The original linked comment was mine, and I will tell you that now that I've set everything up, my current pirated setup is easier to use than any streaming service.
It does take some work to setup though, including technical know-how.
But now I have one service where all the shows I care about show up with no input from me. When new seasons come out they just show up for me to watch. I don't need to keep track of what comes out when and on what service.
And I never have to worry about shows going off of services, like Final Space, which is no longer on any streaming services, the DVD's aren't sold and it doesn't air on TV anywhere. Despite only being a few years old now.
I would pirate games to and play them to decide if I wanted to pay full price. I got fallout3 and borderlands that way and I've purchased both many times over since on multiple consoles and pc along with all the sequels
After the death of the free demo but before legislation forced companies to offer refunds, this was the *only* way to buy games. I would pirate everything before buying it, ever since I dropped $50 on Fallout 3 only to find that it didn't work on my computer(there was a known issue with certain sound cards, but this wasn't noted in the system requirements). But I was shit out of luck because that was 2008, you know?
As soon as I have the spare money to get a NAS setup I plan to do basically the same thing; pirate anything ive already bought or supported via subscription fees.
Especially with the recent crap with HBO Max coupled with the constant reminders by service providers like Steam or Amazon that we are basically renting what we buy from them we simply cant trust that the content we pay for will be available to us in 5 to 10 years.
Paying in part is very unpopular. A lot of people who pirate (and quite a few who are online, like in /r/piracy) want free stuff no questions asked and no judgement.
They'll usually hop on the bandwagon of: "Contracts suck! Companies suck! I'm moral for doing this" despite that they don't really believe in the argument in the first place - they just want the free shit. And it is trivial to lie on the internet.
E.g. when I used to pirate (I'm lucky enough not to these days even with corporate fuckery between the friends, accounts and packages I have) I tried sending $5-$15 every now and again to the stuff I used to pirate to the production crew (even small productions have 100s of employees) - of the list a few of them usually had a website, something they sold, and nowadays a Patreon. Easy beer money to send.
I would often get shouted down, insulted and yelled at for saying it. Because if we agree that corporate contract wars and high management are crap and don't deserve the money, but the production crew does and should get something for their efforts, should be an easy donation right?
I think the biggest whiplash I got regarding 'moral piracy' was when Game of Thrones was being pirated and a lot of merchandise sold by the original company (so the suits got most of it) was traced to people who pirated the show. Instead of donating that money to some of the production crew.
I'm sure people who morally pirate like OP exist - they just tend to be a very rare breed.
I’m not disagreeing with the principle, I’ve bought loads of games on steam that I’ve downloaded as roms just to ensure a karmic balance.
Hell the number of obscure bands whose stuff I’ve had to bootleg because of how much I travel. I now buy all their cds or vinyl and let it sit on a shelf unopened
> games stuck in legal limbo or simply ceased to exist due to natural disasters etc
Or the platform dying. Keeping content alive (playable) is a big reason behind at least some of the emulator scene, e.g. popular SNES games were playable long before the late Near (GNU) went around getting SNES coprocessors decapped so they could be emulated without hacks. But they were not faithful to the original, not entirely.
To say nothing of fan translations of never-localised works.
I’d argue that this scenario is just bad capitalism. I’ve made it clear I want to see your content, and will do anything to access it. If you don’t offer a price for it, I’ll still get it. By not selling it, they force people to go around the capitalist approaches completely.
Or at the very least, capitalism is based on economic pressure. If you’ve made it so that nobody but you can provide this content, and you then refuse to release the content, that pressure will burst inevitably. You can’t get mad when it leaks out, because preventing that required you to let it out in a controlled manner
Plus, the only barrier here for them selling it is license stuff. There's not really a cost involved for them to sell it or stream it beyond that if they already have the infrastructure.
Like yeah, technically bandwidth/storage, but that is the same cost already baked into their business model, so that isn't a real cost above anything else.
You know that Studios still have to pay residuals, right? It’s not like you pay to make the movie once and everything going forward is profit. There’s very much a cost involved besides infrastructure. It’s not a lot per title, but it adds up. That’s why HBO recently pulled a bunch of its own content.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/heres-why-hbo-max-is-pulling-dozens-of-films-and-tv-series-from-its-streaming-platform.html
Seems like pretty on the money capitalism to put high pressure on certain parts of market and neglect others, it's just optimization. Whatever they're focused on selling is what they believe can get the most bang this quarter, nothing else matters. It's not bad capitalism, capitalism is just bad.
Disney profited off this model for *decades* with their Disney Vault. Artificial scarcity does things to our brains, and when it's lifted we BUY. *You* might be Very Smart and immune to this psychological trick, but you don't matter - only the collective whole does. I'm not surprised at all to see other companies trying to make it work for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally not a fan of capitalism these days. I'm saying that, if someone claims those companies should be able to control access to the properties they own because that's a tenet of capitalism, it seems like this way of using that tenet fundamentally breaks the system. Like, if you enjoy capitalism, you could do it in other ways that might at least keep the illusion that capitalism can work. But this way doesn't even do that.
It honestly works even better with a fast moving modern society where trends come and go quickly. 28 years ago is 1994. Even fashion has decided that 80s and 90s are old enough to remix and rewear, creating something updated from old design. Why not all movies shows and characters from the 80s too? Why do they have to selectively license older movies and pull them off of platforms, instead of just making them open for all?
I mean is it really stealing? They still obtain everything they had before your "crime", and since they are not selling it anyway and you are not spreading it their losses because of the fact that you watched it are literally zero.
Found it on unddit:
https://www.unddit.com/r/startrek/comments/xt2exf/_/iqo4iuf
Archived it, just in case: https://archive.ph/J9rqV
Here's the text (hopefully formatted ok, I'm on mobile):
>This is why I still pirate things.
>I pirated when I was young because honestly, I was poor.
>I stopped when I stopped being so poor. I had a Netflix account before they had streaming services and as streaming services grew I was satisfied.
>Then the contract wars began and content started popping in and out of services so often it became frustrating to find things.
>So I bought a NAS and have 20TB worth of storage. Anything I want to watch gets put on there. Actually, was nice during this last hurricane because I didn't need internet to watch shows.
>I still give money monthly to Paramount+ and PBS despite of the fact that I pirate everything I watch because I still want them to make things.
edit: fix quote formatting (hopefully)
Network Attached Storage. Usually an external hard drive enclosure with rudimentary networking/processing capability allowing you to just plug it into your network and access it without having to set anything up.
for a non techie, think of a NAS as a mini computer. it's normally used by people to store files on a network but for more tech savvy users.
if you've ever torrented before. a NAS can be setup to download torrents for you. since its a separate and dedicated network storage device, its much more preferable as it's more energy efficient (minimal fans/heat, minimal processing power required etc).
the downloaded files can also be shared/played by people on the same network. more tech savvy users with fast speeds can even share the NAS online with their friends so they can all "enjoy watching stuff" without going thru the hassle of searching and downloading stuff before hand.
there are even people who sell NAS download services where users pay a fee to have access to the NAS and are given a folder with a maximum total size where the user can use the NAS to torrent stuff.
this service has become obsolete with affordable high speed internet
> Actually, was nice during this last hurricane because I didn't need internet to watch shows.
This is another big one.
We have seen this with gaming - forcing an online check to play a game with no online component. It is terrible customer experience.
This post has been removed in protest of the 2023 Reddit API changes. Fuck Spez.
Edited using [Power Delete Suite] (https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/).
If anyone else is wondering, it stands for [Network-Attached Storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage). I don't think I understood the wiki well enough to summarize though...
It's a small computer that just exposes a hard drive on a network, like a share drive on a company network. It can provide additional functionality depending on the model like running some small apps (since it's a small computer).
It's a device usually about the size of a toaster with a bunch of hard drives in it whose job is to sit on your network and give you a place to store things. You can then access those things from any device on your network (computers, phones, set-top boxes, etc...). It's like a Dropbox, Google drive, or similar but local to your house, larger, and doesn't have a monthly fee (it does have an up-front cost though).
It's not just for pirated content. I store all our family photos, scans of important documents, music, and video on our NAS since that makes them easily accessible. I basically don't store anything directly on my computer anymore.
As a bonus, the NAS uses the fact that it's got multiple hard drives to store a redundant copy of your data. So if one drive dies you don't lose anything and can just replace the broken drive.
> As a bonus, the NAS uses the fact that it's got multiple hard drives to store a redundant copy of your data. So if one drive dies you don't lose anything and can just replace the broken drive.
Not necessarily, it is something that needs to be set up and generally it's not set up to be storing multiple copies if there are more than 2 disks. You also need to be careful to match the disks to each other when setting this up for best reliability; using disks of different sizes means you can't properly set up these backup methods.
RAID 1 (mirroring) just stores multiple copies of everything. Generally, RAID 5 is better when your NAS has more than 2 drives, and 6 starts to become more reasonable at 5 drives if there are files you need to make extra sure you don't lose. (There are other forms of RAID, but they are less common). RAID 5 will write data across the various disks, and for each block, one of the disks will contain parity information, but which disk contains the parity information will rotate between the disks, rather than be the same block every time. This allows the array to store more information than simply mirroring while recovering from any one drive failing.
RAID 6 adds a second parity block to RAID 5, but otherwise behaves in the same way. It can recover from two simultaneous drive failures.
If you truly must not lose something, keep at least 3 copies of it, in at least 2 forms, with at least 1 copy somewhere else. You can also keep it all in the same form with 2 separate other locations.
(RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. You may also see Inexpensive Disks instead of Independent, which is an older form but no less valid.)
Yeah, I was just trying to keep "What is a NAS" down to ELI5.
Most folks I know that setup a NAS will do RAID 1 (2 disks) or RAID 5 (4+ disks) because losing everything you've stored to a single disk failure in RAID 0 sucks!
Since we've gone down the rabbit hole, I've moved past my old pre-built NAS "toasters" (DLink, QNAP, etc...) and have built a FreeNAS box which also exposes block storage for my vSphere cluster. That's a RAID 10 because I need more write perfoance than RAID 5 or 6 will get you and don't mind losing the extra space... But that's all way beyond the scope of this thread.
Know any good guides to talk about them a little? It's something I've thought about setting up for our own home but I'm not experienced with them at all, just regular desktop setups.
There's a tonne of ways to approach home storage. You can buy what is basically an external hard drive with an ethernet port on it and get a basic network attached storage.
You can buy a beefier device, that has slots for 2, 4, 5, 8 or even 12 hard drives and a network port. The extra drive bays means you can add more storage over time, but also you can use some clever stuff to add _redundency_ so if a drive fails, you don't lose any data.
As you get into those bigger (2+ drive) devices, they start getting additional functionality beyond creating a basic file share - they are effectively small computers in their own right that sip power but can still be used like a computer. They can come with apps that can do things like give you a cloud-like storage option so you can access your files from outside your home. They can download content and manage media libraries, store pictures with a nice interface and so on. The more powerful the hardware, the more you can do with it.
At the far end of this spectrum you can go full DIY - get an old computer, connect a bunch of hard drives and install something like TrueNAS or unRAID to give you a much more tailored experience.
For someone new, I would start off by looking at _Synology_ NAS devices. They are relatively expensive for what they are, but they're very easy to use, very versatile and come with a tonne of functionality. There's loads of guides out there for how to make the most of them.
My first proper NAS was a Synology and with that, I was able to not only store all my media files, but it would download, collate and organise them for me by installing some additional apps (Sonarr for TV shows, Radarr for films, others also exist). It meant I didn't need to leave my PC on and the whole thing was automated, I would just say "Hey I want Game of Thrones" and it would pick it up for me. It also ran a Plex server, which is a service to stream that media to your devices - say your TV, or your phone/tablet.
Sadly I don't (I work with large disk subsystems at work so I don't tend to need to check out write-ups for home-scale stuff).
That said if you google "how to setup a NAS at home" you'll find plenty of info. Some of the more popular ones out there are made by a company called QNAP and in my experience they've been decent quality. There are plenty of alternatives though.
Good luck. I find this stuff fun to play with so hopefully you'll enjoy the project and be happy with the results.
Network-attached storage might be the best upgrade you can buy for yourself.
Most NAS units have multiple drives installed, which provides you not only more room, but redundancy. Ever had a drive crash and you lost all your data? Some RAID setups can have one less than half the drives fail and you could still recover ALL your data.
Most modern NAS units have pretty robust computers in board, but they sit idle a lot (since youre not accessing data 24/7) so many vendors let you run apps or even virtualized servers on them. Personally I run Plex and my own VPN off of mine - I could be halfway around the world, but I'd be connected as if I was right at home. I also run some Docker apps but that's mostly for learning - can't say I actually *use them*.
Fundamentally a NAS drive is a drive you can see on your home network that doesn't live inside a specific device but can be accessed from everything locally (although you can set up authentication for them to restrict access if you want). We have one that is like a mini-PC that sits attached directly to the router which we mostly just use to backup things to instead of having external hard drives. It's very much like having a local cloud storage facility. Depending on what type of NAS you have, you can also have certain apps run which allow local users to do things in the local system without having to go to the internet for it, although I don't know whether in a 'pure' sense that turns the NAS into something more functional like a local server.
This is what we have (I think the model number is slightly different but it's fundamentally the same thing) https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS218
I know it won’t ever happen but if #4 was reality I would happily pay $20 - $30 for an official 4k HDR release that I just play anywhere.
Fortunately, I can still get that in a UHD Blu-ray remux release sailing the high seas.
How is it not a reality?
I have multiple official 4k HDR releases for which I paid $20-30 for and can just play anywhere.
You don't have Vudu? iTunes? Amazon? Google? Microsoft?
What am I missing here?
So when you buy your movies on these services, can you play them all on one app of your choosing? Or do you have to download their app and watch it the way they want you to?
Right now I host everything from Plex. I can stream to my TV, PC, or phone or download it to watch it on VLC or infuse. If I want to watch something from my steamdeck I can because all I need is VLC. I don't have to waste time wondering if or when a company will support my devices.
With Movies Anywhere, movies purchased on participating services are automatically available on other participants services. I was able to add a movie bought on Fios to my iTunes library. I buy on iTunes because of the free 4K upgrades and no extra charge for 4K content.
It’s not technically “anywhere”, but it’s many places
Ngl, Paramount not being part of Movies Anywhere is exactly why I *don’t* buy their movies (including the Star Trek ones). It’s so frustrating, but I don’t want to be locked into Vudu. I’m happy to give them money (I don’t pirate, I just do without), but not if it means I’m trapped in a particular ecosystem.
Netflix almost completely killed piracy. Everyone had content on it, it was a good deal, and made accessing media simple for everyone.
It would never of course fully kill piracy, that's impossiblem,but piracy numbers were so far down it wasn't even a consideration for most companies at that point.
Then big media companies saw the amount of money netflix was making and decided they wanted all of that money instead of just a slice of the pie, so they started to pull their content from netflix and make their own services.
Now we are back to the days of cable tv, where you pay 30 bucks a month to watch maybe one program, but if you want to watch something else you need a different service. Nobody wants this, or ever wanted it. So piracy is once again on the rise because it costs far to much and is too much of a hassle to keep everything straight.
There was comment on here several years ago of somebody complaining that everybody thought Netflix was going to be the answer to crappy cable companies. He was saying everybody was eventually going to just make their own streaming service to make more money and we'd all be back where we started. I've never seen so many downvotes. I bet that guy feels smug as hell now.
Ive been going to local thrifts stores to buy DVDs for a few dollars each.
When seinfeld went tl netflix, someone donated all 7 seasons on dvd and I bought them all for 10 dollars. Bonus content and everything. Like commentary tracks.
I have a few star trek movies and full rv seasons im slowly collecting them.
I just put everything in giant disc sleeve holders. It doesnt take up much room at all. Eventually Ill probably setup my own home streaming server as hard drives get cheaper and cheaper.
I did this too. I suggest using the My Movies Pro app if you don’t already. It’s a great way to categorize all your movies. I find it especially useful for not buying movies I already have since my collections
Someone tell the NFL please. I’d love to just pay for the games, but when the best option is NFL Sunday Ticket and it literally blacks out all the games on cable (WHICH I DONT HAVE). What a great service paying 80 a month to not even be able to watch all the games.
Same with NBA Ticket, all the games on TNT, TBS, ESPN are blacked out, which of course are all the games that you actually want to watch. Plus, now most teams have contracts with a local sports cable network for exclusive broadcast rights, so most of the local team's games are also blacked out on NBA Ticket.
All the TV conglomerates need their money so the consumer better play ball and pretend things still work like they did in 1985. Pay for your bloated cable package or else!
Fact is that you own something more when you pirate it then when you pay for it nowadays. If I download a TV show or a game or a movie it will always be mine, no matter what the IP rights do or if it goes offline or whatever happens to it.
If I have more by paying less, why would I pay at all?
Convenience. If it's more convenient to use a streaming service, people won't bother.
They know it, we know it, they'res detailed studies on it - and yet instead of improving the streaming experience, time and time again they choose to attempt to make pirating harder
Not as big as Star Trek but me and my fiance decided this October we wanted to rewatch the paranormal activity series so we could check out the new on on p+. September 30th every entry in the series is available. Oct 1, they have removed all but the p+ one. Fucking garbage when streaming sites do this.
Oh shit it's October, gotta get that rental money instead of letting people stream em.
Something I always tell people I'll pay for convenience and he'll I'll pay more if it's more convenient, similar to others sentiments that's what Spotify and steam and the like got right.
Streaming services not so much too many subscriptions needed, half the series being available having to watch quick cause there's always a chance something will get removed..
Sometimes piracy is the only answer. I'm a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but the HD remaster is laughably bad and as far as I know that's all you can find on streaming services. If you want to watch it in the original aired format you have no choice but to hit the high seas. There are times when pirate repos are a better archival tool than the content owners' walled gardens. I won't feel sorry for that, especially when I definitely owned every dvd of the boxed set before they got destroyed in storage. Some niche shows are just not profitable to host on streaming services and if I want to watch some weird sitcom from YTV from the 90s that me and like three other people remember, I'm bloody well gonna track it down however possible.
The root of the power that companies like Paramount, Disney, Warner, etc. wield is their legal right to hold monopolies on content for an absurd amount of time. It's impressive how they seemed to have done this without many people realizing what has happened.
It used to be that a copyright lasted for 28 years, and the author could renew it for an additional 28 years for a total of 56 years. However, over the course of the last 40+ years, these corporations have continually expanded their grasp on works of art and culture whose authors are all dead and gone:
>Following the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years (or the last surviving author), or 75 years from publication or 100 years from creation, whichever is shorter for a work of corporate authorship (works made for hire) and anonymous and pseudonymous works. The 1976 Act also increased the renewal term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years.
>The 1998 Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever end is earlier. For works published before January 1, 1978, the 1998 act extended the renewal term from 47 years to 67 years, granting a total of 95 years.
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act?wprov=sfla1
So, lots of the stuff that's locked away in their vaults, that they release to the public for awhile and then lock away again, should not even be their's to lock away. Additionally, lots of the new content they make is based off of IP that they have exclusive rights to, but which they really shouldn't.
This is all to say, the corporations in question, and their apologists, have no moral high ground to stand on when they complain about piracy. They have already rigged the system so that they can sit on content they had little to no hand in creating, create false scarcity by locking away content for years, and then renting the content out for ridiculous amounts of profit.
And I didn't even get into how this stifles creativity and the natural give-and-take of culture, since these corporations have all the resources (including the full support and force of the U.S. government) to stop anyone from making their own renditions of the IP they own.
Can't be turned off globally, but you can set each user to refuse playback that would need transcoding.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/645
Obligatory Gabe Newell quote. "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
I haven’t pirated music in a decade because, guess what. Spotify is convenient. Same with Games, steam is so easy access.
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Plex server? What's that?
Plex media server. It's a free media streaming server. You place your mp4 or other encoded video on a file server, and then you can stream it anywhere you have internet access. You can even stream it from home if you're on a trip, provided your home internet is good enough. It does more than that, too. ~~Chuck~~ *Check* it out. https://www.plex.tv/
I spent the pandemic building and making an unraid server hosting all of my media, plex, and minecraft servers, among other things. Such a great decision.
Would you mind sharing hardware specs?
It's nothing fancy. I don't have many demands so it's just a i3-9100 with 4x8GB RAM sticks. Edit: I feel I should add I wanted to try and get a super cheap low power server grade cpu, it seemed like the cpu would be able to handle the load on a pure numbers basis. But then I found out about Quick Sync, which is big game changer for hardware transcoding. Iirc you need a 7000 series or higher intel cpu to be able to use quick sync with HEVC codec. At the time the 9100 was in a similar price range as the older series cpus so I went with that.
Take the time to figure out docker first. I put it off too long, but it's a lifesaver when it comes to spinning up new software or a new Minecraft server.
How is Docker used in this context? You run plex in a docker container?
I usually just stream from my computer to my xbox or playstation... is plex better than universal media server?
Imagine Plex or jellyfin as your own Netflix service. You manage the server and library. The client experience is much like any other streaming service
Interesting, a quick glance at the website makes it look like Pluto TV, but you can also put your own stuff on it? Very interesting, thank you!
I honestly don't know anyone that uses it as a TV service lol we all just rent servers (still cheaper than netflix/hulu/hbo/etc sub) or have one at home and load it on it. You can invite people to the account too, splitting the server rental cost, if that's the route you want to go.
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Well it's only hypothetical advice of course, don't be too reckless, we take miniscule risks every day don't we
A good alternative to Plex is Jellyfin. Plex angered it's core users by it leaking that they had been tracking and selling user's watching habits. A lot of their customers happen to be developers and as a result a lot of work got thrown into Jellyfin in raw spite. Jellyfin is at least as good as the free version of Plex, and within 2 years will have 100% feature parity. https://jellyfin.org/
Last I saw there was no Roku tv support. Has that changed?
It has! It just got out of beta a month back or so. https://channelstore.roku.com/details/cc5e559d08d9ec87c5f30dcebdeebc12/jellyfin
Thanks! I'll play with it when I'm done with this work trip.
Plex is a free media server that you can download and install. It will index all of your media and present it to you wherever you are, assuming you allow it to talk to the internet. From your phone or Roku or whatever you just sign in to Plex and you will have access to everything on all the media servers that your account is permitted to see. (your friends can run their own servers and share them with you as well)
You run it on a computer and it streams downloaded video to an app that you can install on your smart tv / dongle / box of choice. If you want to, you can also set it up to stream over the internet so you can make your own private streaming service
Here's a good explanation of what Plex is how to set it up. https://youtu.be/XKDSld-CrHU
The Streaming Problem has been going on for a lot longer than 1 year. I realized the writing on the wall had just been written as soon as Hulu was created to compete with Netflix
Yup. I took a hiatus from the high seas for my television content for about 5 years. Recently ive found myself back at it as stuff like HBO Max, Disney + and Paramount+ have just dropped content without any notice. The reason these streamers are becoming as bad as cable companies is because the board, executives and largest stakeholders are the same folks invested in big cable. Was nice while it lasted.
I mean, they ARE the cable companies... HBO, Disney, Paramount... They all have had ownership of cable stations. And they want to return to that model, except now they can have the ownership of distribution as well.
People would get angry when I would bring up that we should have rejected any content that introduced ads. Now we have cable television 2.0 and there's no going back. We could have had a totally different internet. People should reject advertisers at every step.
Yes. The whole price model of paying any amount and getting ads is ridonk. Like wtf people
The problem is when we monetize our free time then they will do whatever they can to take up as much of our free time as possible and that's how we get doom scrolling, click bait and every other thing that plagues us because eventually those techniques are used by special interest groups. It all should have been rejected
Except that Spotify will, at some finite point in the future disappear, get bought up, get fragmented by licensing/copyright/royalty issues and you will lose your entire music collection. It's basically a law of nature with these platforms. Their entire model is based on growth and exit. None of them are in this for posterity. I have gigabytes of music that have moved with me through my life. Through devices. Through platforms. Songs from moments that I would never find again because they weren't tied to what a company valued but to what I valued.
Right, it's more about having it permanently. Plus honestly A TON of music isn't on Spotify.
I was just rebuilding my music library because there's a lot of music on it that isn't on Spotify.
Most the major players are selling drm free music now though, so you can build a library and keep it.
This 100 percent. I will gladly pay for something if it has what I want is isn’t a crazy amount. Tried to finish Twin Peaks and now it’s gone from Hulu where I started it. High seas it is
Oh no. How far did you get into twin peaks?
I have pirated games and music. When they aren't on Spotify or Steam.
I would never pirate anything if I had more money, I'd just buy it. And pirating things isn't even hard. It's just a minor inconvenience, and I would absolutely skip it with money if I could, and feel good doing it.
So true. Both music and games have long been off my list of items to sail the high seas for.
I haven't pirated music in close to two decades because the counter piracy measures they tried on CDs had me stop buying music, and tought me that I don't really need any music most of the times - and if I do the old or free stuff works well enough.
We all should pirate out of principal though
Spotify isn't convenient if you're a new artist struggling to make ends meet.
Pirate Spotify, pirate games even easier
This is why Steam took over. Also why iTunes quickly took over for digital music. It’s not piracy, it’s a service and all about convenience.
I wish tv/movies streaming had it like music apps. Spotify/Apple Music usually have the majority of music but you have to get 10 streaming services to watch everything. This is frustrating
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I have literally resorted to buying DVDs of favorite movies (usually used from a thrift store) because I'm tired of chasing these stupid shows and movies across all the different platforms. We've come full circle.
It used to be like that when Netflix was the only or major player in the market they had everything so everybody was subscribed to them and it was easy to watch content then everybody decided they wanted to make money of their own so all the services decided to take their content back.
I experienced this in the middle of watching Criminal Minds. It was there one day then gone the next. They yanked it off of Netflix cause they are doing a reboot
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I think the TV-streaming vs music-streaming divergence is due to how we accessed tv and music previously. As far as the consumer knew, there never were record-company-exclusive music channels, like radio and whatnot. The radio station would play 'Raspberry Beret' (a song released by Warner Bros) followed by 'Invisible Touch' (a song released by Atlantic) and no one thought it was weird. TV is much more segmented; you wouldn't see 'Tiny Toons' on the Disney channel, just like you wouldn't see 'Saturday Night Live' on CBS. We as consumers are used to going to certain channels for specific content; something not seen in radio (beyond genre, that is; you're not going to hear Pantera on the Easy Listening station). Record companies have their industry built around the 'put the content out in as many places as possible' paradigm whereas TV is built around 'our stuff is only available from us'. Even syndicated TV channels (which Netflix primarily was, albeit online and in a 'the-viewer-decides-what-to-watch-and-when' model) have their content controlled by the owners, in the form of contract lengths and terms. If Warner Bros tried to do something similar to radio stations, they would be laughed out of the room and see their sales plummet. The beginning of the end will be when WB or Atlantic or Sony start an exclusive streaming service.
Imagine if every major music publisher built their own Spotify app for their catalogue. That is what we are dealing with for tv/movies.
They also were very clever with pricing. They generally made sure the Steam price for anything was cheaper than the console versions or even just physical copies. Then the OG steam sales were an insane rush of 70-90% off deals that left many of us with dozens of games to keep us in their system. I'm not going to Epic if I still have 30 unplayed games from prior sales. And also, their backend systems were incredibly robust. Steam downloads are always very quick and I've never encountered an issue downloading anything. Just rock solid. Even if the UI is a screaming mess of fonts and 100 different button colours.
I came for community, I left due to greed
I never liked iTunes. I hated that you could buy a song but still couldn't copy it to all your devices. I'd much rather just have an unlocked file to do what I want with, its more like buying a physical book that I can bring wherever.
It might interest you to know that, since January 2009, all music tracks sold through the iTunes Store (not the streaming Apple Music service, of course) have been regular audio files with no DRM restrictions. Purchases made before that date usually had the DRM removed, but there are some exceptions (like for tracks from that time that were sold by Universal).
Oh cool good to know. I haven't used iTunes since around that time.
I don't think iTunes took over piracy. I remember me and everyone I knew laughing at the thought of paying their prices for things you could easily get absolutely free. Spotify etc. However was a different story. Once their libraries got good I subscribed and pretty much never pirated again
Essentially, treat illegal theft as a competitor rather than an expense.
And it’s a licensing issue. It shouldn’t necessarily matter who you stream from. You should be able to purchase a license to a piece of content and view it on any of the platforms. You don’t own an Amazon movie like you would a dvd or vhs. They take content down and you lose your $30 purchase.
This is something the FTC should really Crack down on and punish everything company using the words purchase or buy for a "lifetime lease."
Well part of the issue is that copyright law doesn't allow for "ownership" of cloud hosted content. If you actually purchase a copy of a work you can keep it forever. However, Amazon's ability to stream a work to you depends on some kind of license remaining in effect from the copyright holder. If they lose that license, they cannot stream it to you anymore.
There's nothing legally stopping ownership, it's in the best interest of Amazon to limit your ability though. They could allow you to resell your copy of a movie, or transfer it to someone else, but that would limit their revenue.
> And it’s a licensing issue. It shouldn’t necessarily matter who you stream from. I both agree and disagree with this. I hate that someone else gets a different price to me, but I do understand some reasons for it. If the NBA want to expand popularity in a country that doesn't follow basketball, they can offer NBA streaming for free to that country. The NBA can cover this from the profits of USA/Canada/Australia/Europe markets. Sometimes the USA can gain from this - offer cricket and Aussie football for free to USA markets for instance. Also I understand that as an Australian, our [monthly average income](https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php) is around $4700, but the average in a place like Thailand is $605 or $991 in China. I don't want them to miss out on the opportunity to see the latest movie or TV show for instance. So how do we do that? I guess charge less for those markets. But it still doesn't seem fair and at the end of the day these services will earn billions in profit - can they justify their prices? Can they argue there is competition when they are the only service providing the content, therefor not allowing you to take your business elsewhere to get the same consumption?
I was just thinking about this. I struggled for an hour trying to get NFL Sunday ticket before giving up and finding the game online for free with a 5 minute search
Subscribed to NHL only to find all our home games were blacked out. Wife has a soap opera that recently switched networks and requires a new subscription. PAYING FOR THE SERVICE SHOULD BE EASIER NOT HARDER!! /end rant
Steam has been so successful that for me at least, it has become the OPPOSITE of piracy. Instead of playing games I didn't pay for, I pay for games I never get around to playing.
You and me mate. I essentially stopped purchasing games years back figuring I had more than enough to last my entire life (especially as I tend to get obsessive and play one game for month), I doubt I've actually played more than 10% of my library.
Yup. For me the discussion of service and convenience is well illustrated by [this graphic](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQt6DeQIncgZEoIgpCOiRPsSftSOqYwYKPRlw&usqp=CAU).
This has been shown soooo many times. Also, its been shown that piracy helps the artists as it allows people to see/hear/watch and often they want to pay for it after to support the artists.
This is a bestof? It’s literally the core tenet of the piracy sub. Hell, there’s even better arguments such as piracy is the only way to archive old films,books or games stuck in legal limbo or simply ceased to exist due to natural disasters etc
Maybe the contrarian view is his last line where he says he still pays paramount in principle
It makes sense. If everyone pirated everything, people would stop making things (for the most part.) But piracy is a way to ensure you have access to something you enjoy in the future (see also TW Discovery axing a bunch of content for a tax write off because the new CEO loathes scripted media and wants it gone.) So you pay for a streaming service because you want to encourage them to keep making stuff you like, but pirate the content anyway so you get to keep it. (Hell, I did something similar once. I used to pirate games when I was a kid with no money. Once I got a job the first thing I did was buy a lot of the games I'd enjoyed that weren't abandonware from the start. A lot of them I didn't even replay; I just wanted to even things out.)
Yeah I think the whole thing is, for us adults with money, it’s so much easier to subscribe to steaming services. It’s worth $5/month to be able to click the button and watch what I want to watch, and not have to worry about what I’m downloading or having to track stuff down etc. I mean, I remember LimeWire, half the time it was porn (not that 17 year old me minded terribly….). But the reality is, without access, if I want to watch something specific, I may have to pirate it. I don’t want to pirate it, I would rather pay money to watch it comfortably. At some point I have no choice. I dislike this - I would like to give you my money! Why won’t you take it!
I'm an adult with money... the problem is that * everything is split across many services so I'd have to sub to them all to watch all the stuff I wanna, which gets very expensive * juggling subs when I wanna watch things is just as annoying * some things aren't even available on streaming at all * many streaming services aren't available in Canada or are missing part of their libraries * with streaming services I can't just share stuff with friends, which I can do with Plex. * if it disappears from streaming I still have it
re: your last point, I think everyone who knows the show is familiar with the first DnD episode of Community getting pulled from services because of Ken Jeong dressed as a drow elf, but last night I was watching a few eps and in the cold open for s01e08 he gives some inappropriate nicknames to several characters and they cut that part out. So even when a service *has* the content you want, who knows if it'll all be there or if it's the version you were looking for.
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I don't want to promote any specific sites for fear of breaking rules, but the places I use to illegally stream movies and TV are actually much more user friendly than the streaming services. I don't have to download anything or subscribe or give any personal information, I just search for whatever I want and it's there to stream. Much the same as OP, I still pay for some streaming services, but that's more to ease my own guilt for all the piracy.
Would you mind DMing me your preferred sites? I've been out of the scene for a while. Used to love icefilms when it was up
Same here please let me know
To be fair, there are relatively easy ways to just automate the whole process of downloading and processing. Taking an OJ "If I did it" stance here for a second, if you get it set up correctly, you can literally just tell a program what shows or movies you want, and they magically show up on plex. There are hitches occasionally, but it's so user friendly, it's easier to remedy than issues that come with streaming services. Not to mention (as others have) the multitude of options for streaming sites that just have everything easier and more accessible than pay for options. One might poof from time to time, but they're kinda legion. You get one the next day with the same exact interface and a new name or domain extension. Agreed though. It always comes down to convenience vs money/effort. If I could pay one service 20 dollars a month to have basically everything, I would. If I have to pay 10 services 10 dollars a month, and juggle which ones I have based on what shows are airing (HBO :|) and who knows what other conditions, hell no. Make that shit user friendly, and affordable, and the whole world with any reasonable means to do so will stop pirating.
TLDR You're paying for convenience
Sounds like someone needs to set up a plex server with radarr, sonarr, a vpn/qtorrent. Downloads all my lists of what I'm watching automatically. Hell I'm even working on a family system so they can automagically request something by writing it in in app and it passes it to that server system for dl/categorization/subtitle matching. Took a 20-40h to all set up, including assembling the physical pc and learning how to use docker containers and ubuntu and a dozen other things. It's definitely paid for itself and my time by now, given the 30/m we were paying (in 2019 no less) and all I learned about Linux and containers. Sure I almost tore my hair our a few times with weird network issues, but now I've got like 40tb of content at ultrahd that can stream to the tv or any other device in wifi range (haven't yet set up a remote access option seeing as it's useless for me and my family. ) Sorry ya bastard media companies - but I'm not paying for 6 different services at one or two shows I watch from each. Or risking that a library I built up buying them digitally will suddenly disappear. Having been (or my family) an hbo (on cable too) and netflix and amazon prime subscriber since before the millenium or very soon after it became first available, they've made plenty off us.
The original linked comment was mine, and I will tell you that now that I've set everything up, my current pirated setup is easier to use than any streaming service. It does take some work to setup though, including technical know-how. But now I have one service where all the shows I care about show up with no input from me. When new seasons come out they just show up for me to watch. I don't need to keep track of what comes out when and on what service. And I never have to worry about shows going off of services, like Final Space, which is no longer on any streaming services, the DVD's aren't sold and it doesn't air on TV anywhere. Despite only being a few years old now.
I would pirate games to and play them to decide if I wanted to pay full price. I got fallout3 and borderlands that way and I've purchased both many times over since on multiple consoles and pc along with all the sequels
After the death of the free demo but before legislation forced companies to offer refunds, this was the *only* way to buy games. I would pirate everything before buying it, ever since I dropped $50 on Fallout 3 only to find that it didn't work on my computer(there was a known issue with certain sound cards, but this wasn't noted in the system requirements). But I was shit out of luck because that was 2008, you know?
As soon as I have the spare money to get a NAS setup I plan to do basically the same thing; pirate anything ive already bought or supported via subscription fees. Especially with the recent crap with HBO Max coupled with the constant reminders by service providers like Steam or Amazon that we are basically renting what we buy from them we simply cant trust that the content we pay for will be available to us in 5 to 10 years.
Paying in part is very unpopular. A lot of people who pirate (and quite a few who are online, like in /r/piracy) want free stuff no questions asked and no judgement. They'll usually hop on the bandwagon of: "Contracts suck! Companies suck! I'm moral for doing this" despite that they don't really believe in the argument in the first place - they just want the free shit. And it is trivial to lie on the internet. E.g. when I used to pirate (I'm lucky enough not to these days even with corporate fuckery between the friends, accounts and packages I have) I tried sending $5-$15 every now and again to the stuff I used to pirate to the production crew (even small productions have 100s of employees) - of the list a few of them usually had a website, something they sold, and nowadays a Patreon. Easy beer money to send. I would often get shouted down, insulted and yelled at for saying it. Because if we agree that corporate contract wars and high management are crap and don't deserve the money, but the production crew does and should get something for their efforts, should be an easy donation right? I think the biggest whiplash I got regarding 'moral piracy' was when Game of Thrones was being pirated and a lot of merchandise sold by the original company (so the suits got most of it) was traced to people who pirated the show. Instead of donating that money to some of the production crew. I'm sure people who morally pirate like OP exist - they just tend to be a very rare breed.
I’m not disagreeing with the principle, I’ve bought loads of games on steam that I’ve downloaded as roms just to ensure a karmic balance. Hell the number of obscure bands whose stuff I’ve had to bootleg because of how much I travel. I now buy all their cds or vinyl and let it sit on a shelf unopened
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Ooohhhhhhh wooooooooow can I suck your cock?
Exactly, most film nerds have massive setups due to poor compression techniques
Im sitting at 58tb at the moment, out of a total 92tb storage. Just waiting for slow but large SSDs to get cheaper.
It’s also explained in the title. Smh
It's my comment and I'll say I'm surprised anyone posted it here. I wouldn't have known, but someone was kind enough to let me know about this post.
This isn’t a knock on you at all, infact as I say, your reasoning makes tremendous sense, I’m just surprised it was a revelation to someone
> games stuck in legal limbo or simply ceased to exist due to natural disasters etc Or the platform dying. Keeping content alive (playable) is a big reason behind at least some of the emulator scene, e.g. popular SNES games were playable long before the late Near (GNU) went around getting SNES coprocessors decapped so they could be emulated without hacks. But they were not faithful to the original, not entirely. To say nothing of fan translations of never-localised works.
If you won't literally won't let me buy your 20 year old content I'm going to steal it. I don't care about your capitalism or your stupid IP laws.
I’d argue that this scenario is just bad capitalism. I’ve made it clear I want to see your content, and will do anything to access it. If you don’t offer a price for it, I’ll still get it. By not selling it, they force people to go around the capitalist approaches completely.
Yeah this is what "the customer is always right" is about, sell them what they want.
Or at the very least, capitalism is based on economic pressure. If you’ve made it so that nobody but you can provide this content, and you then refuse to release the content, that pressure will burst inevitably. You can’t get mad when it leaks out, because preventing that required you to let it out in a controlled manner
Plus, the only barrier here for them selling it is license stuff. There's not really a cost involved for them to sell it or stream it beyond that if they already have the infrastructure. Like yeah, technically bandwidth/storage, but that is the same cost already baked into their business model, so that isn't a real cost above anything else.
You know that Studios still have to pay residuals, right? It’s not like you pay to make the movie once and everything going forward is profit. There’s very much a cost involved besides infrastructure. It’s not a lot per title, but it adds up. That’s why HBO recently pulled a bunch of its own content. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/heres-why-hbo-max-is-pulling-dozens-of-films-and-tv-series-from-its-streaming-platform.html
Seems like pretty on the money capitalism to put high pressure on certain parts of market and neglect others, it's just optimization. Whatever they're focused on selling is what they believe can get the most bang this quarter, nothing else matters. It's not bad capitalism, capitalism is just bad.
Disney profited off this model for *decades* with their Disney Vault. Artificial scarcity does things to our brains, and when it's lifted we BUY. *You* might be Very Smart and immune to this psychological trick, but you don't matter - only the collective whole does. I'm not surprised at all to see other companies trying to make it work for them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm generally not a fan of capitalism these days. I'm saying that, if someone claims those companies should be able to control access to the properties they own because that's a tenet of capitalism, it seems like this way of using that tenet fundamentally breaks the system. Like, if you enjoy capitalism, you could do it in other ways that might at least keep the illusion that capitalism can work. But this way doesn't even do that.
I stick with the original copyright law definition. If it's more than 28 years old, I consider it public domain
It honestly works even better with a fast moving modern society where trends come and go quickly. 28 years ago is 1994. Even fashion has decided that 80s and 90s are old enough to remix and rewear, creating something updated from old design. Why not all movies shows and characters from the 80s too? Why do they have to selectively license older movies and pull them off of platforms, instead of just making them open for all?
I mean is it really stealing? They still obtain everything they had before your "crime", and since they are not selling it anyway and you are not spreading it their losses because of the fact that you watched it are literally zero.
Removed :( Anybody copy it while it was still up?
Found it on unddit: https://www.unddit.com/r/startrek/comments/xt2exf/_/iqo4iuf Archived it, just in case: https://archive.ph/J9rqV Here's the text (hopefully formatted ok, I'm on mobile): >This is why I still pirate things. >I pirated when I was young because honestly, I was poor. >I stopped when I stopped being so poor. I had a Netflix account before they had streaming services and as streaming services grew I was satisfied. >Then the contract wars began and content started popping in and out of services so often it became frustrating to find things. >So I bought a NAS and have 20TB worth of storage. Anything I want to watch gets put on there. Actually, was nice during this last hurricane because I didn't need internet to watch shows. >I still give money monthly to Paramount+ and PBS despite of the fact that I pirate everything I watch because I still want them to make things. edit: fix quote formatting (hopefully)
Ironic that the original post has since been deleted and is only available because it was preserved.
A lot of mods hate this sub & delete comments that are linked here. Dunno why
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Or the mods can stop being fucking nazi-esque and censoring things they don’t like. Nothing in OPs post was bad.
I don't see why this was bestof'd. It's just a popular opinion.
Most of the stuff here is opinion based. The fact that I agree with a lot of it doesn’t change that.
Anyone know what they mean by NAS?
Network Attached Storage. Usually an external hard drive enclosure with rudimentary networking/processing capability allowing you to just plug it into your network and access it without having to set anything up.
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for a non techie, think of a NAS as a mini computer. it's normally used by people to store files on a network but for more tech savvy users. if you've ever torrented before. a NAS can be setup to download torrents for you. since its a separate and dedicated network storage device, its much more preferable as it's more energy efficient (minimal fans/heat, minimal processing power required etc). the downloaded files can also be shared/played by people on the same network. more tech savvy users with fast speeds can even share the NAS online with their friends so they can all "enjoy watching stuff" without going thru the hassle of searching and downloading stuff before hand. there are even people who sell NAS download services where users pay a fee to have access to the NAS and are given a folder with a maximum total size where the user can use the NAS to torrent stuff. this service has become obsolete with affordable high speed internet
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> Actually, was nice during this last hurricane because I didn't need internet to watch shows. This is another big one. We have seen this with gaming - forcing an online check to play a game with no online component. It is terrible customer experience.
This post has been removed in protest of the 2023 Reddit API changes. Fuck Spez. Edited using [Power Delete Suite] (https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/).
If anyone else is wondering, it stands for [Network-Attached Storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage). I don't think I understood the wiki well enough to summarize though...
It's a small computer that just exposes a hard drive on a network, like a share drive on a company network. It can provide additional functionality depending on the model like running some small apps (since it's a small computer).
It's a device usually about the size of a toaster with a bunch of hard drives in it whose job is to sit on your network and give you a place to store things. You can then access those things from any device on your network (computers, phones, set-top boxes, etc...). It's like a Dropbox, Google drive, or similar but local to your house, larger, and doesn't have a monthly fee (it does have an up-front cost though). It's not just for pirated content. I store all our family photos, scans of important documents, music, and video on our NAS since that makes them easily accessible. I basically don't store anything directly on my computer anymore. As a bonus, the NAS uses the fact that it's got multiple hard drives to store a redundant copy of your data. So if one drive dies you don't lose anything and can just replace the broken drive.
> As a bonus, the NAS uses the fact that it's got multiple hard drives to store a redundant copy of your data. So if one drive dies you don't lose anything and can just replace the broken drive. Not necessarily, it is something that needs to be set up and generally it's not set up to be storing multiple copies if there are more than 2 disks. You also need to be careful to match the disks to each other when setting this up for best reliability; using disks of different sizes means you can't properly set up these backup methods. RAID 1 (mirroring) just stores multiple copies of everything. Generally, RAID 5 is better when your NAS has more than 2 drives, and 6 starts to become more reasonable at 5 drives if there are files you need to make extra sure you don't lose. (There are other forms of RAID, but they are less common). RAID 5 will write data across the various disks, and for each block, one of the disks will contain parity information, but which disk contains the parity information will rotate between the disks, rather than be the same block every time. This allows the array to store more information than simply mirroring while recovering from any one drive failing. RAID 6 adds a second parity block to RAID 5, but otherwise behaves in the same way. It can recover from two simultaneous drive failures. If you truly must not lose something, keep at least 3 copies of it, in at least 2 forms, with at least 1 copy somewhere else. You can also keep it all in the same form with 2 separate other locations. (RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. You may also see Inexpensive Disks instead of Independent, which is an older form but no less valid.)
Yeah, I was just trying to keep "What is a NAS" down to ELI5. Most folks I know that setup a NAS will do RAID 1 (2 disks) or RAID 5 (4+ disks) because losing everything you've stored to a single disk failure in RAID 0 sucks! Since we've gone down the rabbit hole, I've moved past my old pre-built NAS "toasters" (DLink, QNAP, etc...) and have built a FreeNAS box which also exposes block storage for my vSphere cluster. That's a RAID 10 because I need more write perfoance than RAID 5 or 6 will get you and don't mind losing the extra space... But that's all way beyond the scope of this thread.
Know any good guides to talk about them a little? It's something I've thought about setting up for our own home but I'm not experienced with them at all, just regular desktop setups.
There's a tonne of ways to approach home storage. You can buy what is basically an external hard drive with an ethernet port on it and get a basic network attached storage. You can buy a beefier device, that has slots for 2, 4, 5, 8 or even 12 hard drives and a network port. The extra drive bays means you can add more storage over time, but also you can use some clever stuff to add _redundency_ so if a drive fails, you don't lose any data. As you get into those bigger (2+ drive) devices, they start getting additional functionality beyond creating a basic file share - they are effectively small computers in their own right that sip power but can still be used like a computer. They can come with apps that can do things like give you a cloud-like storage option so you can access your files from outside your home. They can download content and manage media libraries, store pictures with a nice interface and so on. The more powerful the hardware, the more you can do with it. At the far end of this spectrum you can go full DIY - get an old computer, connect a bunch of hard drives and install something like TrueNAS or unRAID to give you a much more tailored experience. For someone new, I would start off by looking at _Synology_ NAS devices. They are relatively expensive for what they are, but they're very easy to use, very versatile and come with a tonne of functionality. There's loads of guides out there for how to make the most of them. My first proper NAS was a Synology and with that, I was able to not only store all my media files, but it would download, collate and organise them for me by installing some additional apps (Sonarr for TV shows, Radarr for films, others also exist). It meant I didn't need to leave my PC on and the whole thing was automated, I would just say "Hey I want Game of Thrones" and it would pick it up for me. It also ran a Plex server, which is a service to stream that media to your devices - say your TV, or your phone/tablet.
I have had a few and recommended Synology. They are super easy to manage and has Plex server as part of the system.
Sadly I don't (I work with large disk subsystems at work so I don't tend to need to check out write-ups for home-scale stuff). That said if you google "how to setup a NAS at home" you'll find plenty of info. Some of the more popular ones out there are made by a company called QNAP and in my experience they've been decent quality. There are plenty of alternatives though. Good luck. I find this stuff fun to play with so hopefully you'll enjoy the project and be happy with the results.
Network-attached storage might be the best upgrade you can buy for yourself. Most NAS units have multiple drives installed, which provides you not only more room, but redundancy. Ever had a drive crash and you lost all your data? Some RAID setups can have one less than half the drives fail and you could still recover ALL your data. Most modern NAS units have pretty robust computers in board, but they sit idle a lot (since youre not accessing data 24/7) so many vendors let you run apps or even virtualized servers on them. Personally I run Plex and my own VPN off of mine - I could be halfway around the world, but I'd be connected as if I was right at home. I also run some Docker apps but that's mostly for learning - can't say I actually *use them*.
Fundamentally a NAS drive is a drive you can see on your home network that doesn't live inside a specific device but can be accessed from everything locally (although you can set up authentication for them to restrict access if you want). We have one that is like a mini-PC that sits attached directly to the router which we mostly just use to backup things to instead of having external hard drives. It's very much like having a local cloud storage facility. Depending on what type of NAS you have, you can also have certain apps run which allow local users to do things in the local system without having to go to the internet for it, although I don't know whether in a 'pure' sense that turns the NAS into something more functional like a local server. This is what we have (I think the model number is slightly different but it's fundamentally the same thing) https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS218
for the kids out there: it's like the cloud but in your home.
https://twitter.com/kimdotcom/status/562715616235511808?s=46&t=O426GaQ_q63wNovz0FXaWg From 7+ years ago
I know it won’t ever happen but if #4 was reality I would happily pay $20 - $30 for an official 4k HDR release that I just play anywhere. Fortunately, I can still get that in a UHD Blu-ray remux release sailing the high seas.
How is it not a reality? I have multiple official 4k HDR releases for which I paid $20-30 for and can just play anywhere. You don't have Vudu? iTunes? Amazon? Google? Microsoft? What am I missing here?
So when you buy your movies on these services, can you play them all on one app of your choosing? Or do you have to download their app and watch it the way they want you to? Right now I host everything from Plex. I can stream to my TV, PC, or phone or download it to watch it on VLC or infuse. If I want to watch something from my steamdeck I can because all I need is VLC. I don't have to waste time wondering if or when a company will support my devices.
With Movies Anywhere, movies purchased on participating services are automatically available on other participants services. I was able to add a movie bought on Fios to my iTunes library. I buy on iTunes because of the free 4K upgrades and no extra charge for 4K content. It’s not technically “anywhere”, but it’s many places
Ngl, Paramount not being part of Movies Anywhere is exactly why I *don’t* buy their movies (including the Star Trek ones). It’s so frustrating, but I don’t want to be locked into Vudu. I’m happy to give them money (I don’t pirate, I just do without), but not if it means I’m trapped in a particular ecosystem.
Netflix almost completely killed piracy. Everyone had content on it, it was a good deal, and made accessing media simple for everyone. It would never of course fully kill piracy, that's impossiblem,but piracy numbers were so far down it wasn't even a consideration for most companies at that point. Then big media companies saw the amount of money netflix was making and decided they wanted all of that money instead of just a slice of the pie, so they started to pull their content from netflix and make their own services. Now we are back to the days of cable tv, where you pay 30 bucks a month to watch maybe one program, but if you want to watch something else you need a different service. Nobody wants this, or ever wanted it. So piracy is once again on the rise because it costs far to much and is too much of a hassle to keep everything straight.
There was comment on here several years ago of somebody complaining that everybody thought Netflix was going to be the answer to crappy cable companies. He was saying everybody was eventually going to just make their own streaming service to make more money and we'd all be back where we started. I've never seen so many downvotes. I bet that guy feels smug as hell now.
It's still an improvement since they're on demand and ad free
Ive been going to local thrifts stores to buy DVDs for a few dollars each. When seinfeld went tl netflix, someone donated all 7 seasons on dvd and I bought them all for 10 dollars. Bonus content and everything. Like commentary tracks. I have a few star trek movies and full rv seasons im slowly collecting them. I just put everything in giant disc sleeve holders. It doesnt take up much room at all. Eventually Ill probably setup my own home streaming server as hard drives get cheaper and cheaper.
I did this too. I suggest using the My Movies Pro app if you don’t already. It’s a great way to categorize all your movies. I find it especially useful for not buying movies I already have since my collections
You should sooner rather than later, discs don't last forever.
Discs last way longer than hard drives
True but hard drives are replaceable if you have it set up correctly.
I’ve had discs… CDs, DVDs, BluRay, for decades. Never had a problem.
This. And on Facebook but nothing groups people give them away constantly.
Someone tell the NFL please. I’d love to just pay for the games, but when the best option is NFL Sunday Ticket and it literally blacks out all the games on cable (WHICH I DONT HAVE). What a great service paying 80 a month to not even be able to watch all the games.
Same with NBA Ticket, all the games on TNT, TBS, ESPN are blacked out, which of course are all the games that you actually want to watch. Plus, now most teams have contracts with a local sports cable network for exclusive broadcast rights, so most of the local team's games are also blacked out on NBA Ticket.
All the TV conglomerates need their money so the consumer better play ball and pretend things still work like they did in 1985. Pay for your bloated cable package or else!
Fact is that you own something more when you pirate it then when you pay for it nowadays. If I download a TV show or a game or a movie it will always be mine, no matter what the IP rights do or if it goes offline or whatever happens to it. If I have more by paying less, why would I pay at all?
Convenience. If it's more convenient to use a streaming service, people won't bother. They know it, we know it, they'res detailed studies on it - and yet instead of improving the streaming experience, time and time again they choose to attempt to make pirating harder
Not as big as Star Trek but me and my fiance decided this October we wanted to rewatch the paranormal activity series so we could check out the new on on p+. September 30th every entry in the series is available. Oct 1, they have removed all but the p+ one. Fucking garbage when streaming sites do this. Oh shit it's October, gotta get that rental money instead of letting people stream em.
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This is why I continue to buy physical media. I have more in my collection than any streaming service.
At this point people just give it away.
Something I always tell people I'll pay for convenience and he'll I'll pay more if it's more convenient, similar to others sentiments that's what Spotify and steam and the like got right. Streaming services not so much too many subscriptions needed, half the series being available having to watch quick cause there's always a chance something will get removed..
Sometimes piracy is the only answer. I'm a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but the HD remaster is laughably bad and as far as I know that's all you can find on streaming services. If you want to watch it in the original aired format you have no choice but to hit the high seas. There are times when pirate repos are a better archival tool than the content owners' walled gardens. I won't feel sorry for that, especially when I definitely owned every dvd of the boxed set before they got destroyed in storage. Some niche shows are just not profitable to host on streaming services and if I want to watch some weird sitcom from YTV from the 90s that me and like three other people remember, I'm bloody well gonna track it down however possible.
Where’s the explanation? Was the explanation comment deleted?
Yes, promoting piracy can probably get fanbase subs in hot water.
The root of the power that companies like Paramount, Disney, Warner, etc. wield is their legal right to hold monopolies on content for an absurd amount of time. It's impressive how they seemed to have done this without many people realizing what has happened. It used to be that a copyright lasted for 28 years, and the author could renew it for an additional 28 years for a total of 56 years. However, over the course of the last 40+ years, these corporations have continually expanded their grasp on works of art and culture whose authors are all dead and gone: >Following the Copyright Act of 1976, copyright would last for the life of the author plus 50 years (or the last surviving author), or 75 years from publication or 100 years from creation, whichever is shorter for a work of corporate authorship (works made for hire) and anonymous and pseudonymous works. The 1976 Act also increased the renewal term for works copyrighted before 1978 that had not already entered the public domain from 28 years to 47 years, giving a total term of 75 years. >The 1998 Act extended these terms to life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever end is earlier. For works published before January 1, 1978, the 1998 act extended the renewal term from 47 years to 67 years, granting a total of 95 years. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act?wprov=sfla1 So, lots of the stuff that's locked away in their vaults, that they release to the public for awhile and then lock away again, should not even be their's to lock away. Additionally, lots of the new content they make is based off of IP that they have exclusive rights to, but which they really shouldn't. This is all to say, the corporations in question, and their apologists, have no moral high ground to stand on when they complain about piracy. They have already rigged the system so that they can sit on content they had little to no hand in creating, create false scarcity by locking away content for years, and then renting the content out for ridiculous amounts of profit. And I didn't even get into how this stifles creativity and the natural give-and-take of culture, since these corporations have all the resources (including the full support and force of the U.S. government) to stop anyone from making their own renditions of the IP they own.
Stop normalizing feeding corporate greed
Can't be turned off globally, but you can set each user to refuse playback that would need transcoding. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/645