Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>
Streaming Has Reached Its Sad, Predictable Fate | What should I watch? is now a much easier question than How do I watch it?::<em>What should I watch? </em>is now a much easier question than <em>How do I watch it?</em>
I’ve heard a lot about setting up a Plex or a Jellyfin server locally, but from what I can tell they are just media storage platforms and in order to watch anything you would have to add your own content. In this age of digital content, it is very unlikely for a simpleton like me to go out and purchase hundreds of movie disks separately and manually load them into my CD drive to even have a fraction of the catalogue these streaming services combined provide. Also torrenting really isn’t a viable option for me as I personally use a free tier Proton VPN which doesn’t allow P2P, and even if I did get a proper one, I would still be limited to availability of seeds for movies I want to watch, which may or may not exist depending on the popularity of the said movie. I currently use a niche streaming site to watch my movies without any issues. Are self hosted plex/jellyfin servers really for a person like me?
Jellyfin is the way to go. Yes, you’ll have to download your own content. It’s more work, but I definitely think it’s worth it. Use qBitTorrent as your client, and sites like yts.mx are great for movies.
A lot of movies can be picked up pretty cheaply second hand. In some cases with people looking to unload massive collections all at once.
Ripping them is something you only really need to figure out once, and apps like handbrake make it pretty simple.
I don’t think someone needs to replicate something like the catalog of Netflix, they would just need the movies they actually want to watch, or ones they want to watch more than once or twice.
Another things I often think about is the future. Some of these streaming services have already pulled episodes of shows because of some content that got people upset, which can really hurt the continuity of the show. Plus, as contracts expire and change, the movies/shows may no longer be streamed or the services could shut down. I don’t know about you, but when I’m old I still want a way to watch my favorite movies. The way things are going it’s hard to know if that will be an option unless taking matters into your own hands.
For someone who only watches a couple movies per month, it would be cheaper/easier to do digital rentals from Apple or whomever, for $4/movie. Those selections are usually a lot better than the streaming selections. It’s only when you start taking about watching multiple movies per week, or getting into TV shows, that streaming services, or investing your own time and money into a self-hosted option, make sense.
This is exactly my problem. Downloading music (even crappy mp3) is basically impossible if you are not in the right, sometimes paid, tracker. In a way, copyright holders actually won their war against piracy.
I would use stremio with the torrentio addon