this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?

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[–] [email protected] 113 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm back to sailing the high seas and dumping my loot into Plex.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I was always 100% on board with paying 50-100 bucks a month for being able to watch anything I wanted, whenever I wanted, in perpetuity — for the rest of my life.

Instead, capitalism chose to fracture all content behind multiple paywalls that don't even host the content I want to watch, or censor/change it so that I can never watch the OG versions I want to watch, so I've instead been spending 50-100 bucks a month on computing hardware to download it and host it myself for over a decade.

I'll continue to fucking do it too, because these soulless sociopath leeches don't deserve a cent from me. They don't even fucking pay their content creators or staff a decent wage, and will spend 10x more just to screw their workers. At this point I'd prefer them to fail and collapse, so I'll continue not giving them money — I'm doing my part!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Can we stop over-simplifying corporate greed as "capitalism"?

Ten years ago Netflix gave is the solution all of us wanted, and that was also capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I wholeheartedly agree. Capitalism isn't the issue here, corporate greed and not understanding the market is the issue. A free market allows better solutions to come into play, hopefully driving the price down of a greedy service.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Don't forget the taxes they surely pay very diligently.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Use your local library! Thousands of Blu-ray/DVD titles for free you can check out and rip freely. And then you don’t have to worry about any nasty letters from your ISP.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Or just not getting the content via torrenting

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly didn't even include a DVD/BluRay drive in my PC build, so can't really use those. And I tunnel all that traffic through Proton VPN, so ISP isn't an issue.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you have a spare USB 3 port and a spare power outlet, then you can get an external 4K Bluray drive for $100 or less.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It may be cheaper to just buy an old PC for this purpose.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

An old, sub-$100 PC isn’t going to be able to read 4K blurays, and if you only want a regular bluray reader then those drives are even cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Most libraries always give you access to Kanopy to steam movies/documentaries. Just need your library card and the app.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Love this! Supporting your community library and building your trove of booty at the same time lol.

I also like to collect physical media from my favorite artists, so I also rip from those disks and get the best of all worlds :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

leave the house

nope.avi

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My local library only has DVDs with kids movies, matey.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed however that would necessitate having an optical drive

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

They’re pretty cheap, I have one that can read 4K blurays. About $70. I get access to all sorts of hard to find movies, and my library will even order blurays for me if they don’t have it in their catalog (up to 30 per year)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, this is much less chaotic. It's not even about the cost so much as the convince now.

BTW I use the plex discovery search to find stuff across streaming services. This deserves a shoutout here. Could be better but I haven't found a better solution. Google voice search on my nvidia shield used to be good at this but it's really degraded lately.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Justwatch.com works well for finding the service hosting the show you want to watch.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's particularly bad at MAX right now. Several times I've been told a title was available and it wasn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

How do you use Plex? Can it work on a fire stick?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yes. There is a legit plex app on fire stick and roku. It comes with free live TV and on Demand content, but you can also run your own server on your network with your own downloaded content. If you have an IPTV service you can stream that through plex as well.

Note that Jellyfin is a similar app/server that works the same way and is totally free. Plex is also free, but there are additional features behind the pay wall like GPU decoding, PVR service for IPTV, and others.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Plex - in the way users here are describing (important context since Plex’s management has recently shifted heavily to trying to be like Pluto.TV with less emphasis on its original purpose) works as an application that acts like a library for your own media collection.

There are 2 required parts to it :

  1. A “server” or “host” which acts as your library.
  2. A client - like an NVIDIA Shield, your phone, PlayStation, Roku, or eve your Fire Stick.

Without your own server with content stored on it, or at least a friend’s server credentials you can connect to, you are limited to the “Pluto.TV” type ad-driven media collection.

So the answer is “yes it works on a fire stick,” but you will need #1 also for it to be the single source library for your content and not just another ad-riddled garbage service.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You need something to host it on like a PC or even a Shield plus storage space

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes you can get plex on firestick