Netflix Prices Went Up Again – I Bought a DVD Player Instead
aywren.com170 points by speckx 3 hours ago
170 points by speckx 3 hours ago
Not a lawyer but... if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy.
I am thinking the same thing. Most recent movies are available for under $20 per DVD - and there are tons of deals.
You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
Get the DVD. Make a legal backup. Keep the physical DVD in storage.
You now "own" the movie (or TV show), not a "license".
In my neighborhood you will often see people selling DVD collections where you get 10-20 discs for $10 or less - varies. I'm sure that is the case elsewhere.
NAS + Apple TV with Infuse app installed = Better than Netflix (and others) imho.
(Note: I do recommend the one-time lifetime license for Infuse app = $99.99)
Reference:
- "Backup DVD Copies Legal Says Electronic Frontier Foundation" https://www.eff.org/effector/16/7#I
- "2026 DVD Digital Copyright Laws in US, UK, Japan, Australia..." https://www.winxdvd.com/resource/dvd-copyright-infringement-...
Also with this approach, you actually have a real collection and it's fun to collect things.
My son has autism and viewed his Netflix homepage as his personal curated collection. But then, of course, Netflix renegotiates licensing deals and entire seasons or shows just go away. And it really crushes him because it's like they were stolen from his personal collection.
So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
> So now when I hear him play, the super villain trying to destroy the world is always named Reed Hastings.
That is absolutely hilarious and it totally sounds like a villain's name
It is interesting that Netflix alone gets blamed, as opposed to the parties they are negotiating with.
Netflix is ultimately responsible for what they put on the platform, for delivering a consistent product to their users, and for setting expectations.
Netflix is exceptionally shitty at letting people what is leaving their platform and when, and even letting them know when the shows they saved or were in the middle of watching have been removed. Netflix has been around for ages but we still have to depend on third party websites to tell us what's coming/leaving. Some items will have a "leaving soon" banner on the thumbnail, but that's only good for shows netflix decides to push at you. There's no section or search that will find all that stuff (searching for "leaving soon" will show you some of them)
Netflix chose to negotiate revocable licenses to save money and draw in users, so it does seem valid to assign blame to Netflix for signing such contracts.
> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.
The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.
As a kid I watched Fantasia on VHS so many times that the tape quality started to decay and my parents stored it away for special occasions. The quality decay didn’t bother me at all.
"Own" the movie in quotes is interesting. Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted and can be treated in some ways like a license still. It is possible to obtain a legal copy of physical media and not be legally allowed to view it in certain ways.
Backups are legal (assuming you keep the physical DVD, like youve said, and dont just "make a backup" and then sell the original), but you don't just have carte blanche to the content still (ie, region coding has weird legalities to it, public viewing is still not allowed, because you havent licensed that right.)
That said, I still fully agree with you. I just find the "license" vs "ownership" topic interesting for physical copies. The fact that media companies are so strongly trying to limit your rights just means you need to make sure you keep what rights you do have. I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
Reference:
https://language-studio.clas.ufl.edu/copyright-law-and-educa...
>Because you own the physical medium, but the data encoded on it is still copyrighted
Yes, and it turns out I also own the hard drives that it's stored on. The thumb drives. The SSDs. And there is no copyright police in my utility room. But there is a Plex server. The "Netflix sucks and I don't have enough control over my shows" problem was solved years ago. Seriously, you can stream this to any device you own, whether you're at home or in some hotel a continent away. You can stream it for your friends.
>I spent 3 years personally backing up my wife's 1400 DVDs, because with that many of them, at some point the discs are bound to go bad.
I made a list of our DVDs, then gave them away and spend a few weeks downloading those. In many cases, like Star Trek TNG, I ended up getting improved versions... god help me, interlace comb.
So if I rent out the device that I own, I can make $$? Also, the everybody is my friend. $$$$.
I have seen, quite recently, on sites like Amazon and Ebay, 4-26tb refurbished hard drives filled with digital media for sale.
So, yes, you can. Is it legal? No. But neither is selling cocaine in a nightclub yet many people fund their entire lifestyle doing just that.
The vertical resolution of a DVD is either 480 (NTSC) or 576 (PAL). This usually matched the visible vertical resolution of the TV you were using.
A 1080p screen has 6 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.
A 4k screen has 24 times as many pixels as an NTSC DVD.
Most movies and tv shows are available for similar prices on blue rays, often in 4k versions.
While the resolution may be higher on streaming, the bitrate is often significantly worse. Beyond that Netflix has done upscaling in the past with middling success.
Nevermind the horrendous AI upscaling they tried last year. https://futurism.com/netflix-ai-upscaling-old-shows-horrific
I’ve noticed that a lot of newer releases, particularly TV shows, are not getting Blu-ray releases.
Resolution isn't the only problem. SD resolution (particularly PAL) is quite tolerable, if it's well-encoded from a good source.
DVDs are not well-encoded, and the sources are typically poorer, too.
DVDs store MPEG-2 Part 2 (H.262) video streams. It's an extremely old, inefficient codec. (It was published in 1996! Next month, it'll be 30 years old!) It looks best when the encoder is given a bitrate limit north of 20 megabits per second, but DVD-Video has a hardware limit of 10 Mbps, and that includes the audio and subtitle streams. Most video streams on DVDs get 4-5 Mbps. MPEG-2 also isn't a very good codec; no matter how much bandwidth you get it, it's never really considered to be “transparent” (that is, encoding artifacts are always visible).
If you take a Blu-ray copy of a film (FHD or UHD, doesn't really matter), scale it down to SD resolution, and run it through a good HEVC (H.265) encoder, you'll usually find that a DVD-equivalent encoding takes about a third, maybe a quarter of the space. Or, if you go the other way and let the encode take as much space as the MPEG-2 one on the DVD, you'll almost certainly see an obvious difference, particularly in action scenes.
Starting a physical media collection? Fantastic. Good for you (seriously). But get Blu-rays wherever possible. You'll mostly have to forego the thrift shop, fine, but if you're ever actually going to watch the film, you'll vastly prefer it.
I have both Blu-ray and DVDs and I've found its the content that determines which is good enough. Kids in care not one bit about image quality. Obviously: people still like retro games, too. But then other movies, like anything by Villenueve or Nolan, or Baraka, really want to be on 4K Blu-ray. But kids movies on DVD are perfectly fine, and sitcoms like Community. (Personally I'd pay extra to NOT see Pierce in 4k).
I recently purchased the Firefly Blu-ray and it was an interesting case because it's image quality isn't that much better than the DVD (but definitely better) however it's sound quality was astonishingly better than the DVD. I imagine this has a lot to do with the source material, how it was mastered, etc. I still stream, but I like that I have a core collection that will never disappear without warning, or be edited behind my back (which happens all the time, without notice, especially on YouTube and on Amazon Prime).
Yes, for older TV titles, the main reason to opt for Blu-ray is the better sound quality. Although DVD supports uncompressed audio (LPCM), that was rarely used outside Japan, and regular stereo audio typically used pretty mediocre compression.
When using subtitles, another reason is the higher-resolution fonts.
On paper yes it feels like a downside. Practically if the movie/show is good, you don't really mind.
I have been watching a number of french and mexican movies from the 50's and 60's these last few weeks and video resolution was not an issue. Sound quality and mixing on the other hand was more of a problem if I didn't wanted to turn the volume too high, especially the mexican ones (Cantinflas).
I don't know what is it with mexican movies, even movies to this day tend to have a terrible sound mixing. It is annoying because actors tend to speak in a much more natural and pleasant way than their US counterparts and their ugly vocal fry (women) or ridiculous mumbling (men).
I don’t think DVDs look bad on a 1080p TV, others that assume they will may be surprised!
I think too many people remember DVDs but mostly remember them on Interlaced displays.
Or hooked their DVD player to the HDTV with an RCA cable and were disappointed.
On the flipside, if you had a DVD player capable of progressive scan and Component or HDMI-out, it's fine for couch viewing.
That said, there are plenty of DVDs out there (extreme case, single layer DVD with extras on same disc as movie) where the bitrate can show, but that's not a fault of the format.
I am watching DVDs on a 1080p projector to the large wall of my living room. It is a 10y old cheap aliexpress one so it is not the sharpest you can get and it actually makes the DVD enjoyable as it smoothen a bit the whole thing. I don't really know what is at play but I can only say it seems to blur the image in a pleasant "optical way", not like if I was applying a gaussian blur and was watching it on an high dpi screen.
Makes perfect sense; old CRT TVs had the same kind of effect in making low resolutions bearable. (If you think DVD is bad, you'd have loved long-play VHS at around 230p...)
It really depends on the size of the unit I think. When you get over 50", it seems to me you can really tell 480p vs 1080p, especially if you watch lots of 2160p content.
If your TV is under 50", I don't think you'd notice quite so much.
If you buy one that has a VUDU code, and go on moviesanywhere.com you can now link your VUDU account, your Apple iTunes account and your Google Movies account, and whoever else, and the movie unlocks on all those other streaming services. So if you buy a BluRay movie, you can stream it on your favorite streaming service provider thanks to MovisAnywhere (run by the movie industry - the one rare good thing they did).
I buy movies only when its one I really want and there's either an iTunes code or a VUDU code.
It's good to note that moviesanywhere.com, Kanopy, and VUDU (now Fandango at Home) sell your data and use it for market research (in addition to other things, there's no telling what it will be used for after it's sold). That said, for those of us in California "Kanopy does not sell your information. Kanopy does not share your information with third parties for money or other valuable consideration."
It's also worth looking into if your local library offers Kanopy services.
Big ups on that! Not to mention your local library's collection of DVDs. Or, their inter-library loan system for the ultra weird and rare.
One note on Kanopy - they use a ticket system (10-15 tickets per library customer). So if you have a couple people in your household, all of your library card numbers contribute tickets to the login. And, if you have two library systems like we do here (KCLS and SPL) you can double dip on all the cards again. No hack required - Kanopy actually has a very nice way of failing over to other cards as your quota is used up.
And if that's not enough, try Scarecrow Video out of Seattle. They are the masters of physical digital film media right now. It's fun to try to stump them. And they provide mailorder system similar to the old red envelopes of NetFlix.
eBay has DVD collections go up for sale all the time. Fun to buy the "box of movies" for $100 and see what you get.
Another big haul for me is from local thrift stores - usually 50 cents to 2 bucks a disc.
I do the same. Minor correction - it's no longer Vudu, it's now called Fandango at home. You also have to watch out for expiry dates on the codes. US only.
Paramount and Lionsgate are the only studios which don't participate IIRC.
> if you have the DVD its legal to make a backup digital copy.
Is this actually true? I thought there was inherent illegality to cracking the DRM on DVDs.
Granted, I doubt anyone is going to come after you for making a backup of a legitimate copy, but I think strictly speaking it's still illegal.
I am also not a lawyer.
This was a big issue back in the DVDCSS days. The DMCA explicitly forbids bypassing protective measures. Doesn’t matter who owns the media, the copyright holder owns the content.
17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A)
Which was the beginning of the end for ownership vs purchasing a license. That thing you paid for isn’t yours.
Possibly in some countries...
But at least in the US, it is a DMCA violation.
DMCA gets a little weird; Basically unless you're distributing it is a civil penalty (which, I could be wrong but would mean you'd get a Jury trial, even assuming it ever came up) and I doubt you would ever run into legal issues so long as you were only backing up for personal use.
It's where you get into distribution that anyone starts to care, and it's when you do distribution on a large scale that criminal penalties come into play.
However there may be countries where possession of an 'illegal number' or 'DRM Breaking software' is considered legal for personal use.
I am not a lawyer, but yeah I think there seems to be like a distinction in the United States between copying a "protected DVD" versus an unprotected one.
It's still sort of confusing to me because would that mean then that if you are making a personal backup in the United States, would it technically be allowed if you pointed a video camera at your own TV screen?
Yeah as I said, I doubt they’re going to send the FBI after you if you’re just ripping for your own backups; I think they care a lot more about people putting it on ThePirateBay or something.
Yes, DMCA made the mere act of breaking DRM illegal, even if what you do with the media is legal.
I am also NAL, but it almost certainly is legal to make backups for personal use. Breaking the encryption is the usual legal hangup, though there is no real enforcement on this front and nobody is stopping you from using Handbrake or MakeMKV.
More importantly however, is the fact that there isn't a meaningful argument that making backups of physical media you own is ethically wrong.
Oh I don’t think it’s ethically wrong in the slightest. If you own the DVD you have given the copyright holder due compensation; I think it’s ethically fine to make a backup of media that you legally purchased.
I was just saying that I don’t think it’s actually legal to do so for a DVD since those usually have CSS encryption.
The EFF doesn't decide what is legal. Unauthorized copies of commercial videos are still a copyright violation in the US. The DMCA anti-circumvention provisions aren't relevant. The AHRA permits private copies of audio recordings with the proviso that SCMS (or equivalent) must be implemented to prevent multi-generational copying. That last requirement has never been enforced and is now unworkable but it's still in effect.
Just say you’re training a multimodal language model and in this weird parallel universe we live in suddenly you’re not breaking copyright. Bonus points if your model reproduces the original 1:1. Definitely not a copy though
It's also fairly trivial these days to backup 4k blurays. You can also buy them very cheap second hand. The quality difference between streaming and 4k BR is nuts.
I run jellyfin and on iOS infuse is the only player that seems to work with all codecs
I've had some luck with Swiftfin though the UI is no where near as polished as Infuse.
TrueNAS + AppleTV + Infuse + Tailscale is my setup.
Also iTunes has Movies for $5, but it has DRM, which bit me since I always remembered their mp3s being DRM-free back in the day being a big deal.
That's ok if you don't care about sound much. Apple prevents local playback apps from playing back Atmos audio. It's fine if you only want 5.1 though.
There used to be some limitations with Dolby Vision as well, but I think those have mostly been straightened out now.
Yeah if Apple ever allows audio passthru then the appleTV would dethrone the aging Nvidia shield as the best streamer on the market
I have a modest AVR and 7 channel setup and still watch movies on my shield which is still getting android updates
wait. If I use VLC (for example) on AppleTV to play something from my network using SMB or DLNA, I cannot get Dolby Atmos?
Right. I'm under the impression that it's a licensing thing. It also can't do TrueHD Atmos in general. Just lossy Dolby DD+ for audio. It also doesn't do Dolby Vision properly, only supporting the profiles meant for streaming that use less data.
Similarly, It CAN do Atmos for E-AC3 audio, but E-AC3 is meant for streaming, so it's really rare to have that in a file you're playing back locally.
Basically, it just falls back to whatever the next best thing it can support is at the hardware level.
This is one area where Android wins. The Nvidia Shield, despite being ancient, is your best bet for local playback. It's still limited on the supported Dolby Vision profiles, but can just pass the audio through to your receiver without mucking with it. So you get all the bells and whistles.
Other than the shield your only alternatives are weird dedicated devices that are literally built for playing back UHD blu-ray rips (Dune HD, etc).
https://community.firecore.com/t/help-get-more-dolby-atmos-o...
Dolby TrueHD and DTS:X audio tracks (from Bluray) are played as lossless 7.1 PCM.
Only Dolby Atmos from WEB-DLs will play, and you need to use a supported player (like Infuse or VidHub).
It’s a tvOS limitation.
I'll just continue to take the DVDs out of my neighbor's trash and play those instead and disregard licensing entirely.*
* Usenet
I've been doing this since 2009. Regular 1080p blu-rays still usually provide better image quality than streaming services. It's not even a contest between streaming and 4k discs.
I've bought and watched hundreds of movies and TV shows on disc, but can count the number of times I've used an actual disc player to do so on one hand.
I cancelled all my streaming, and replaced it with a €20 seed box w/ Plex + radarr/sonarr etc. Have everything I want (and nothing else) and movies/shows don't get pulled without me doing it. Won't be turning back anytime soon.
Physical still has the downside of needing space. I have space for books, but not much else.
I've seen a few guides to setting this up but maybe you can refer to what you used to set your own system up? Right now I'm utilizing streamio plus debridio but I've read the plex + radarr/sonarr is much superior... I"m not too tech savvy so kind of hestiant to set up
The *arr stack was a pain.
You'll need prowlarr for downloading. And a Bittorrent client that works with it (e.g. Ktorrent doesn't).
Then you'll set up radarr/sonarr, and ensure they can talk to prowlarr.
Setting up Plex is straightforward. But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr.
It was definitely a pain, but once I had it set up it's been fine.
>But I think you do need to make it visible to radarr/sonarr.
Sort of. You tell Plex where your directories are for movies and TV shows. All you have to do with Sonarr/Radarr is have them dump the finished downloads into their respective directories.
Trash Guides [1] is your friend. Requires a bit of understanding whats going on but if all of these are going to be on the same computer this makes setting it up where data doesn't have to get copied around and waste time.
To be perfectly honest, the seedbox provider had all of these installed and hooked into each other. I only had to add my various logins and configure some profiles. I would think most seedboxes offer a variation of this, so you’re not starting from scratch.
I am tech savvy but hate toil. I just launched Gemini cli and ask it to install the *arr stack and it did everything for me to my satisfaction. Heck, it even recommended a few cool plugins I didn't know about. My only problem is I'm not a member of any private torrent sites :(
Gosh config of radarr and sonarr seemed impenetrable to me.
I've given up my streaming box because I find passive watching so draining and trying to focus on educational content/ course and exercise.
I was finding myself wallowing away hours per day passively watching endless episodes of the current biggest show.
Not to be "that guy that just says to use LLMs", but writing out how you want these things to work on your computer to something like Claude, or heck even Google AI mode without logging in with an account, allows you to describe your ideal "home server as a docker-compose.yml file" and for me it did a damn fine job doing it. I had done this all with a previous server manually, and with a new server I simply had provided that I was a Fedora Linux box, with these hard drives, with these containers, and these are the locations of the files, etc. It worked the first try.
This wasn't something that I didn't want to learn myself, but I have so little time with children and gardening on top of my super busy work at this point that I didn't have time to simply google everything. I did know enough about it beforehand to provide a general idea of what I want, so YMMV.
16+ years with my setup. Seedbox + Private tracker + RSS plugin + SyncThing + Dell MFF
Do note that there's a ton of media that is not very available via sailing the seas. For example, reality TV has very low availability, typically only currently airing seasons at best. Thus if you're trying to convince a family to cancel all the big streaming platforms, you may have a hard time when they learn that they can't watch old episodes of "The Real Housewives of the middle of nowhere" from 2012.
I was wondering if there is a DVD service similar to Netflix when it first came out. And of course there is, but pricing seems high!
DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee. 5 days to get your DVD doesn't seem great. They have cheaper plans but limit the number of DVDs you can take out.
Netflix was revolutionary because they shipped very eagerly and they charge $15/mo for 2 DVDs unlimited. And I think their shipping took 2 days. They shipped as soon as you shipped yours back so if you were diligent you could prob have close to a movie every night. Incredible service.
I guess the economics just isn't there.
> DVD Inbox and Cafe DVD is $20/mo for 2 discs at a time, with unlimited discs and a 5 day guarantee.
This is about what we paid for Netflix in 2006. Especially after accounting for inflation.
There's one in the UK too, Cinema Paradiso. The prices are also quite high.
Also, the turnaround times were really slow. Slow mail perhaps, but at the same time it's kind of in their interests to not turn things around so fast.
In the UK, letters get a lower priority than packages which doesn't help.
The economics for the company aren't great for people that make high frequency use of it. And I suspect that people that would pay for such a service nowadays would make good use of it.
Regarding the 5d guarantee -- I suspect that most disks would show up in 2-3 days, but if you're going to guarantee you'll need some buffer (as I think US Mail says first class is 1-5 days). And I think Netflix was just counting on it mostly being shorter (and may have even had distribution centers at some point in its history).
https://scarecrowvideo.org/ has thousands of videos you could never get on netflix.
Came here to say this! It’s the largest public video collection I’m aware of, at over 150,000 titles. Also they rent by mail. Not cheap but when you really need that movie…
> I think their shipping took 2 days
Yeah, it was fast. And yet, for it to work financially, they were still using plain old USPS. The trick (which required the levels of volume they had at the time) was to have a bunch of distribution centers positioned all throughout their service area. For a modern day service trying to do the same with significantly less volume, they won't be able to afford the extra distribution centers.
They also had an agreement with the post office to register the disk as returned the moment USPS scanned it.
We also (I worked there at the time) had software that basically said, "Joe watches all of his disks every weekend and drops them in the mail on Tuesdays, let's just assume he's going to do that and ship his new disks Monday morning". And other such predictions.
If you had a very regular viewing behavior you could have your new disks the same day as you shipped your old ones. To the customer, it was magical.
I use store-3d-blurayrental.com. They do more than 3d. It's expensive, compared to streaming, but the quality of 4k bluray can't be beat. I have a 120" screen. You notice the difference between 1080p or even high and low bitrates at that size. I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.
> I think physical media might make a bit of a comeback as screen sizes increase unless streaming services up their bitrates.
The latter sure seems a lot more likely than the former, my man.
You would think so, but the prices keep going up and the bitrate keeps going down. Some of that is up to codec and encoding improvements, but I think a lot of it is just that they know they can get away with it.
If you'd have asked me 20 years to bet on whether streaming or shiny disks would be producing better quality audio/video in 20 years my money would NOT have been on disks but here we are. Ye Olden Plastic Disk's are still kicking streaming's butt even though I have 2.5Gbps fiber now.
Prices keep going up and bitrates down because most streaming services (except for Netflix and YouTube) have been basically break-even or money losing for years now, and the appetite for that is cooling.
Also, display resolution is not scaling like it used to. The move up from 4k to 8k is far more expensive and less worthwhile than the previous jumps.
So, I think your assumptions about the business side of streaming and the way the hardware is scaling are wrong and we will, in fact, not see physical media make a comeback.
You're probably right, sadly. The best case we could reasonably expect would be better quality streams, but I don't seriously believe that will happen either.
There are some niche services like the one that you can only get on Sony TV's that stream at like 50% of UHD bluray's bitrate - and that might be as good as it gets for the foreseeable future unless these services are forced to compete on quality or people decide to care about 8k or something.
> And I think their shipping took 2 days.
Their shipping was pretty incredible. I'd drop one off early morning pickup at my college campus and have another DVD the next day aternoon in my mailbox sometimes. It was crazy how fast I could turn over discs.
Netflix made a lot of money off me in the early 2000s, the pre-streaming days (and MacOS X, and 10.1 days), when discs were sent out by mail. One could go queue up everything you wanted to watch, have a couple discs out at a time, and get new ones sent to you as watched discs were returned. There was never enough time in the day to watch them, with unwatched discs in my possession for weeks, turning into months. Yet the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet monthly subscription kept me hooked, kept me paying. The other hook was that you had a curated list of stuff to watch, and the queue would manage itself, as fast as one could watch them.
It's possible I could've saved money just renting 1 movie at a time, no different from how online rentals are now.
I think disc rentals over mail and Redbox machines still has some relevance even today. You never have to worry if a movie's taken off the streaming catalog, then having to research what other streamer has it, then contemplating if you want to go through signing-up just for 1 movie. You found the movie, you requested it, and it's getting mailed to you in hardcopy. It won't suddenly disappear in transit due to rights-holder issues.
Public libraries can also be a great source for DVDs and Blu-Rays!
Yes to this! I've ditched all streaming services and turned my local library into my go-to media stop.
I've found that intentionally going there, checking a movie out, and setting it up at my home has made me more engaged with it than ever before.
It's not a random movie that an algorithm recommended to me; it's the movie I chose. Thus, I give it more of my attention.
And it's free! With no ads! Just how I like it.
Also add Libby, Hoopla, Overdrive, for books and other media, which are also free from the library.
I recently discovered Kanopy and was surprised by the amount of A-tier movies you can stream there for free with a library membership (SFPL in my case)!
Browsing through the library DVD shelves is somewhat reminiscent of browsing through a 80s/90s mom & pop type video rental place [1]. I think it's better for randomly finding something interesting than the algorithm (tm). [1] But without the room in the back with the ADULTS ONLY sign. Your library my vary.
They also have video games now
Libraries are the single reason I got back into video games after a multi-decade hiatus.
I played very few games from 2002 to 2017. Didn't want to keep buying new computers, and did not want to bother with consoles (graphics was better on PC than a non-HD TV).
In 2010 I bought a PS3, but only to watch Blu-Ray, Netflix and stream from my PC to TV. Did not play games on it.
Then in 2016/2017, on a whim, I decided to check out a game from the library. I Googled some good games, and picked Telltale's The Living Dead.
Oh wow. One of the best games I've ever played. For the next 2 months I kept checking out games and playing them.
Then for some reason I stopped. I started again in 2022 and haven't looked back. Seriously cut down my TV watching so I can play the games. I don't use the library any more - I just buy the games.
Just recently beat Super Mario Wonder thanks to my local library lending Switch titles.
They also often have a huge backlog of older titles and consoles, I'm going to check out a Wii soon.
Libraries are one the most beloved things america really got right. Such a great value and use of tax money.
In San Francisco, the annual library budget is ~$200,000,000. That's about $10/month for each San Francisco resident (including babies, elderly people etc.).
Some of the services end up being very expensive, like ebook lending. Some publishers basically charge libraries per loan ($X for an ebook that lasts Y loans), so while it is nice for residents it's not clear that it's a good value, or that it's a good use of tax money.
I once heard from a knowledgeable source that most of library lending is bodice rippers. These are available from Amazon/etc. pretty cheaply, which undercuts the value argument. And of course, there's practically no social value of providing the public with free bodice rippers...
I'd be interested to know more about the economics of lending DVDs and Blu-rays. Hopefully libraries get a better deal on these.
> And of course, there's practically no social value of providing the public with free bodice rippers...
Why not?
> Some of the services end up being very expensive, like ebook lending
We need something like a first-sale doctrine for electronic media. Blockchains would be ideal for tracking ownership.
If most of lending were made up of educational texts, there would be a social value. Some people describe bodice rippers as porn for women, and people get addicted to them in the same way they get addicted to porn.
Would a library ever lend porn out? I'm guessing no, because of the lack of social value. To the extent that bodice rippers are like porn, the same rationale would apply.
If everyone used the library as much as people say they are great, their shelves would be empty. Libraries have to be some of the most underutilized services.
When it comes to recent popular movies, the wait times can be over 6 months. I'm usually number 480 on the waitlist or something.
I wouldn't call that underutilized. :-)
In my experience, there can be pretty high contention for certain items, so you need to be on the ball or make use of the "place hold" feature judiciously. Yeah, people are using the service.
Sadly, libraries in UK towns have very little shelf space left and what's on them is usually mass-market fiction, biography or very old non-fiction.
Honestly isn't worth the effort to visit my local one, unless I want to join a crochet club or do 'mindfulness' jigsaws.
This was exactly what happened to cable tv. The moment they got the upper hand, they piled up ads and price hikes and made stupid ton of stupid deals that made no sense.
Netflix is really not deserving 9 USD/mo and even less with ads.
I never gave up on Blu-Ray discs, or really I never adopted digital distribution. When I buy a Blu-Ray disc, the rights to watch it are perpetual and transferable, which means I can watch the movie all I want, then when I'm done with it I can sell it, relinquishing all of my rights to the new owner, making it just as valuable to the new owners as it was to me, meaning that the resale value will be pretty constant.
With digital distribution, the license to watch it will eventually terminate, and it cannot be transferred, so without a resale market it is much more expensive.
The best part is that I can go to my local flea market, and buy Blu-Ray discs for a tiny fraction of the retail price. Multiple vendors sell them for well under $1 each. Last weekend, I bought the Avengers 3D bundle and Pacific Rim, for 50¢ each.
Blu-Ray players, in a modern small form factor, are often under $10 at thrift stores, although they rarely come with a remote, but usually do have CEC, so the remote isn't always needed.
My father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those.
OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.
> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky
In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins.
I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.
I have programmed well over hundreds of DVDs, and I can assure you, there were finicky players. Apex players were infamous on how cheap they were, and finicky is an appropriate word. DVD had a spec, and there were parts of the spec that Apex players did not do well at all. The spec allowed for random play. Apex players cheaped out on an PRNG type of ability and came with a saved preset list of random values. If you programmed a disc with random playback, it would playback exactly the same way every. single. time. It really sucked when we were programming games using the random feature. The spec allowed for 99 titles. Any where over 50 titles, and there was a better than not chance that an Apex player wasn't going to even recognize the disc. There were other quirks too, but I'm hoping the point was made
I started just ripping everything when the studios started adding unskippable ads... I had a rental copy of Friday, still have never actually seen it, there was a bad scratch and it froze after 30+ minutes of unskippable previews.
I've never had a really bad player though... I have seen players that had issues with burned disks, but not mfg (unless scratched rentals).
About half of the DVDs and Blu-rays I get from the library skip at some point in my PS5. They're usually not visibly scratched, though usually the scratches that matter are on the top not the bottom.
The only problem I've ever had with Blu-Ray players is that as the player gets older the trays eventually start having trouble ejecting. Other than that, I've never had one have any play trouble, even with scuffs on the discs.
Meanwhile, my streaming box randomly loses network connectivity, despite having a wired connection, and I have to restart it, before I can stream anything.
Okay I have dvd players that work fine even still. DVDs need care - scratches and fingerprints are bad (though the error correction on a good player will make it less noticeable). I think the lifespan of a dvd player may be in its design (where dust may get to the laser?) or the environment (humidity or temp may play a role?)
It's possible that DVD players are extremely low quality now, since there are very few people still buying them.
They are, after the second Walmart cheapass dvd player died, I bit the bullet and got an Xbox Series ProMax X 360 Copilot whatever.
It's a glorified blurry player, and it works fine as such.
Beyond the pricing part of it, just having media that isn't dependent on an external device is so nice.
But for TV series in particular, watching on disc is quite clunky after a decade+ of streaming services, and DVR boxes prior to that. I'll buy them in principle, but ultimately they end up ripped and viewed via Jellyfin.
We did this with Jeremy Brett Sherlock. Boxed set is of some sentimental value, but we tired of loading the disc, finding the episode etc. Even worse if you have to stop half way.
They ended up ripped and played on kodi
At this point, I'm surprised the streaming services aren't grandfathering people into their current plan+rate like the cellular networks do. It would encourage people to keep their subscription active to keep their rate rather than cancelling it and signing up again when there is a specific show they want to watch, while also avoiding the price increase frustrations.
PS: Thanks for the reminder about the price increase, just cancelled my netflix.
I've been doing the "pause" option not just for Netflix but multiple streamers. Adding up all of the streaming subs totaled as much monthly as the cable bill I did away with which made sense when everything was on Netflix. Now each studio has their own platform with similar per month fees. There's not enough content to justify that much monthly expense.
One thing to pay attention to is that Netflix deletes your watchlist if you “pause” for longer than ten months.
I have tried to get my wife to pause some of our subs but she absolutely refuses. She says "we're not poor" (we are not) and apparently just wants to spend $70/mo on these damn things.
Even if costs were lower, I still think we should not have so many, since it spoils our kids. I don't want them to see TV as "we have access to everything all the time". I want them to see that there are tradeoffs, and understand that we could have hundreds of dollars more if we had Netflix for half the year and Disney+ for half the year, for example.
There's also something to be said for restarting a sub and being excited to watch content that you had been waiting to see.
I remember as a kid, mostly having access to HBO/Showtime etc during their "free" week/month that came along about once a year or so. I think my dad subbed for a couple months once, but that was it. Otherwise it was just basic cable and nothing else.
Even then, 90% of the time was watching local/broadcast networks via cable.
> "we have access to everything all the time"
I remember when there were 3 networks. I remember when those networks stopped broadcasting content around midnight by playing the national anthem and then playing bars or just going off the air. I used to think the concept of UHF is kind of lost, but then realized it's kind of just what YouTube has become-weird, random, wacky content produced by just about anybody that can hit record on a camera.
And Saturday morning cartoons from 5am-1pm... then they started rolling back the non-toons earlier until no more Saturday morning cartoons.
Phoenix, AZ had a local variety kids morning show, "Wallace and Ladmo" that anyone from the area born before 1985 or so probably remembers.
Dallas had the Mr Peppermint Show that was syndicated to a few places around the country.
By the time the Saturday morning cartoons were gone, there were 24/7 channels for cartoons and kid's entertainment.
I gave up on Netflix years ago, never looked back. Went back to my old reliable external HD which I can plug directly to my TV.
My wife was talking to someone in her early 20ies and mentioned DVD player and apparently that's considered ancient now. Ahh to be young and blithe about it.
We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
Just cancel your subscription. Resubscribe for a month if there's something you really want to watch. You won't miss it.
I wonder if there's a service that subscribes on demand and unsubscribes automatically. I'm picturing something that lets me browse shows and movies and pick them, with a little 'playing this will trigger a Disney+ subscription for one month, for $12'
Bet Claude could build that for you in 5 mins
Wouldn't necessarily bet on it... would likely need to use puppeteer or playwright and change the user agent to match the desktop browser. And even then, the various services likely change pretty regularly.
That said... could maybe setup a mitm service that does this for even $5/yr to manage various services... where that service takes care of updating their signon/cancel scripts. Maybe even a semi-trusted mechanical turk as necessary.
I would probably go Blu-Ray at least to have higher resolution content... Ripping isn't too bad (I use make-mkv then re-encode with handbrake). I don't really notice going up from 1080p, but really notice going below 1080p content. I also don't mind h.265's blurry handling of degradation over the blocky/chunky h.264... I haven't really observed enough lower bitrate AV1 to compare.
I have a Shield TV connected through my AVR and it works pretty well for content directly from my nas/cifs/smb via Kodi.
I support the idea of physical media 100%. It's much more dependable, and once the discs are pressed the content can't be remotely/silently censored or edited the way it can on streaming services. If you rip the content yourself there's nobody carefully keeping track of when/where/how often you view what you're watching. You don't get as much privacy with DVD/blu-ray players though. Players that are connected to the internet will phone home and report what you watch. They'll also refuse to play some media until you've connected them to the internet to get updates. Some players like game consoles will even store information on what you watch when offline and collect that data when they have a network connection.
The biggest problem I have with physical media is that increasingly shows aren't being sold at all. Sometimes it's older or genuinely obscure stuff, but sometimes even recent and popular stuff doesn't get released. I suspect that often it's intentionally done to drive subscriptions to streaming services.
There are still a lot of shows that can't be legally obtained anymore. Sym-Bionic Titan (2010) is one I've pretty much given up hope on. There are also a bunch of Disney shows like Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Amphibia, and Owl House that never got a physical release.
Prices on physical media are going down which is nice since a lot of companies played bullshit games like releasing "volumes" or "collections" instead of full seasons and you still have to do some research to know which discs have bad transfers, terrible "remasters", and which should be fullscreen vs widescreen. I recently got a really good deal on Star Trek: TOS, only to later realize that they'd replaced all the special effects and shots of the Enterprise with CGI.
I used to pay $30 a month for HBO. Premium cable wasn't cheap, but you had primo shows and there was a big movie release almost every Saturday night. Netflix is disposable background TV. This money will buy you two DVDs a month and 6-8 rentals. I just don't see the point unless you are wasting hours in front of the TV.
Compared to going to see a movie in a theater, netflix and rest are extraordinarily good value most of them time. Given that I watch mostly with my wife, we only have watch several hours of something once a month to be ahead of the theater-going cost. And most streamers have something that we want to see once a month (not 100% of the time, but most of the time).
The Netflix adaptation of "100 Years of Solitude" (part two due out this august) was one of the most astounding bits of visual story telling I've seen in a long time. Entirely the opposite of "disposable background TV".
Netlfix raises its prices for the second time in years. Prime Video ads are so invasive that I honestly can't watch any video without turning it off immediately (I refuse to pay for the ad free tier), and now I'm seeing very long ads in the middle of YouTube videos.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
Why do you refuse to pay for the ad-free tier?
I was paying for Prime, and then they introduced ads. They started comingling their video content just like their warehouses so you'd get AVOD content with your premium VOD content so it made picking something ad free very difficult. They started with "Included with Prime" labels for the ad free stuff, but then that label started showing ads. I stopped watching so many shows at the first ad break and never returned. It made me finally cancel Prime.
I wouldn't watch ad-sponsored TV either, but you either want to watch the shows or you don't; your time is extremely valuable! I wouldn't assume the price of the show is that much a factor.
I feel like netflix is definitely very cheap, with OpenClaw or whatever your favorite agent is, it's trivial to subscribe to watch one show and then have it cancel immediately.
The idea of using an LLM to manage media streaming subscriptions seems completely bonkers-nutso-crazy to me. Then again, I don't have streaming subscriptions anymore. I'll grant that streaming platforms played dark-pattern games with cancellation a decade ago, which is part of why I dropped all of them, but iOS and Android are both pretty good about routing subscriptions through their respective app stores and enforcing standardized, easy cancellation for end users.
The amount of energy in your brain it takes to do this basic thing versus the amount of energy in a datacenter somewhere, and the slide into cognitive atrophy that must result...
There are things I'll happily use LLMs to accomplish, but offloading day-to-day executive function will never, ever be on that list. And every day I understand and sympathize with the ethos of the Butlerian Jihad more and more.
It just dawned on me the other day that if I add up what I've already spent on apple music/Spotify over the years, it's very likely well above the amount it would have taken to buy a physical copy of all the music I listen to (I'm an album guy, as opposed to playlist people).
Certainly there's some convenience advantages for discovering new music, but it turns out I don't really do that often.
I wonder if you could make a bare computer (user provides the OS image) + DVD player + DVD rental company without triggering the public performance clause of copyright law because it is the user that decides what to do with it. Like Aereo or Zediva, which were shut down because they provided a user experience. But if you just rented out hardware and didn’t care what software was running, would that be considered a private playing instead of public performance + transmission?
I did the same after Netflix dropped movies I cared about.
First I tried playing DVDs straight from PC which is connected to TV. That was horrible quality and UX.
Then I bought a good quality DVD player with hardware upscaling. It provided better image quality and slightly better UX. But you still had to deal with the menus and buch of other slow loading stuff that comes with DVDs... Gave up on it.
720x480 4:2:0 YCbCr doesn't look great on modern screens
Good point, buy an old CRT in addition to the DVD player!
Or if you can find one, an RGB CRT projector, which unlike LED projectors can actually provide true black (or close to it).
In TFA they specify that it was also blu ray. This person was using DVD as an (incorrect) term meaning "some kind of plastic disc."
Though they don't say 4k/UHD blu-ray which would be a big miss if not. UHD blu-ray is superior to any other format in terms of quality. Perhaps excepting a few very niches streaming services that are tied to expensive hardware.
My BluRay player automatically upsamples DVDs. It's far from perfect but it looks pretty good most of the time.
Not sure if that's common to BluRay players or not.
I'd happily sacrifice some pixels to avoid the aggressive DNR and hack 16:9 crop treatments typical of streaming re-releases.
It's often better than a 5 Mbps 1080p
Since DVDs are ~5mbps mpeg2, no, no it isn't. 5 mbps h264 is dramatically better.
Now, when compared to blu-ray... That's different. Very, very different.
h264 is (generously) about 2x as efficient as MPEG-2, granted, but you're smearing those 5mbps across 6x as many pixels.
I would take crisp 480p over a gooey, artifact-softened 1080p for most content.
My problem is not the price but the amount of garbage you get. Instead of getting access to a vast amount of mediocre at best content I would like to have access to a small amount of good content. Netflix is just not that.
I have found that the vast supermajority of the content that Netflix provided themselves is wretched to my tastes, so I would just automatically scroll past and mentally blot out anything with that red N.
Unfortunately, it is so omnipresent throughout the application these days that it really does make it obvious how little good content they have - or are willing to let you know they have.
small amount of good content would be terrible for business, right? my wife had bunch of subscriptions (I don’t watch TV :) ) and ones she cancelled (e.g. Disney) was because “they never have anything new to watch, few new shows/movies per year.”
I recently found a Blu-ray player for $7 at Goodwill. It was missing the remote which ended up costing slightly more than the player itself, but for ~$15 I got a working Blu-ray/dvd player with a remote
This is ironic considering Netflix used to be all about sending people DVDs.
For the past 10 years I found most movies to be unwatchable and not worth the time. Last one I saw was Project Hail Mary at a cinema and it was really bad in spite of a huge budget (more than Interstellar!).
So long, Hollywood.
I have a 4TB hard drive that contains thousands of movies and tens of thousands of TV episodes. It feeds into a Jellyfin server.
Spotify, Netflix, HBO, Paramount, HULU, MUBI, etc etc etc and a couple of Video Game publishers are making a very strong case to revert back to piracy.
DVD discs is not good for long term storage. it can get scratch and became unusable. you want a NAS/PC then rip the dvd and use plex or Jellyfin to watch your collection.
DVDs are extremely robust against scratches, even more so than CDs. Unlike CDs, which have the data protected by only a thin layer of lacquer under the label, DVDs sandwich the data between two layers of polycarbonate. The error correction is improved too.
Unlike hard disks, they're practically immune to shock (e.g. being dropped). Unlike SSDs and unlike hard disks, they're immune to ESD. And even if you somehow manage to damage one, it's just one, not your whole collection.
We get our physical media movies from the library now.
Best strategy is to subscribe to one streaming service, watch everything good over a few months, then cancel and switch to another.
The only comment on her post is some asshat telling her to grow up. I don't understand how a person can decide to take a cheap shot on an article about buying a DVD player but, there it is. Losers roam the internet like horse flies in Texas.
I enjoy having a DVD player for the kids, it makes curating their options so much easier.
not a problem for torrent users.
I learned to share in kindergarten. I did not forget how to share.
Would we see a resurgence of Blockbuster?
There is so so little to watch.
Good timing.
I just turned a refurbished Dell Optiplex into a home server.
It is an excellent vessel for sailing the high seas and streaming the loot.
I thought this was going to happen already after they bought warner bros. But it turns out that it was going to happen anyway.
The competition in the space is going to zero and that is why NF and Disney are raising prices.
Nice - if you can find a Redbox in your area, they seem to allow _very_ long rental periods these days :)
You'll be looking really really hard.
For those unawares at the humor attempt:
https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down
How do you get around the terrible fbi screens? :( That's the only thing preventing me from starting a collection.
My cousin's friend used to rip DVDs with DVD Shrink back in the day. It would automatically remove the "Prohibited User Operation" flags or whatever that told the DVD player to ignore your skip commands.
Using MakeMKV to digitize these skips these intro screens by default (< 120 seconds), so I don't see them.
meh. it's 10 seconds out of your day. it's kind of a silly thing to bitch about
I just open ymovies.cc
*DVD/BluRay player. If it were just DVD, I'd have asked "why not pirate at that point?" since it'll be better quality than 480p, but BluRays have a superior bitrate to most rips online.
I pulled out an old working PS3 just for this. It's the only thing in my house that plays shiny round discs
yeah, 4k blu rays especially are real nice.
Players for those are kind of pricey tho.
Ps5 can play them, but the drive is a little noisy. There's a fix but I haven't tried it yet
iptorrents.com is very easy to get an invitation to as well.
Another great example of people returning to analog/physical tech!
Back when Netflix was $8/month I just had it forever without thinking about it. It was at first a great way to catch up on TV shows. Netflix was after all originally a place for studios to monetize old content, particularly TV. Even at $10/month, it was fine. But it kept going up.
I think I finally cancelled it at $14-15 but I go back for 1-2 months a year to catch up on stuff I want. I basically cycle streaming services.
I've searched for data on how often people do this. I'm 99% sure it's a small minority but I bet it's growing. There is an inertia with subscriptions of every type. People are lazy to cancel things they don't use. It's the entire basis for the gym model.
So somebody is doing the math in the background of working out how much they can raise prices and lose people to subscription cycling vs lazily not cancelling and it still favors raising prices. I suspect at some point that'll change and, when it does, it'll be too late to do anything abou tit.
My suspicion is that this kind of analysis will be a textbook example of a company making short-term optimizations all the way into extinction.
The only research I've found is on comparing to move to cable to streaming and how many streaming services people have. I haven't found anything about streaming churn. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
> I've searched for data on how often people do this
I've just started doing this late last year. I'm down to one active service at a time. I heard of it from someone else, so that's at least +2 to your tally
Netflix has a lot of non US content which still puts them far above HBO and Disney. I am trying to cut down on my daily dose of American cultural subjugation.
There’s nothing to watch anyway since movies and shows have been enshittified as well
There is still good stuff coming out. I think people look at the past with rose colored glasses. We've always had to sift through a sea of shit to find good stuff.
The amount of trash released to VHS during the heyday of Blockbuster is something most people forget about. Most people browsed along the walls for the new releases, but all of those shelves in the middle of the store were full of straight to home video releases that were really really not good. Think Hallmark channel content but with even less talent. Think Troma again, with less talent. Think Jack Black recreating movies bad, but without meaning to be that bad
People do this with music too. People forget that for every Fiona Apple there was 10 other studio manufactured slop artists just shoved out there by the industry, and these have largely been forgotten about.
Not quite the same though. If you picked up a dud from Blockbuster, it's no big as it was a cheap rental. For music, you had to buy it and then be stuck with it if you didn't like it. There was no music rental business. A lot of that has been forgotten because most people didn't buy it.
Even the Fiona Apples of the world had duds on their albums. Most albums had a few choice tracks and then filler. This is why so many people were happy for the $0.99 per track of the tracks you wanted instead of the $19.99 for the full album with songs you will forever hit skip.
The "right to copy" is a made up concept. Just sayin'...
plex is still cool, right?
Plex is so far down the enshittification funnel it's a wonder it hasn't collapsed yet.
The only reason I haven't canceled my Plex is because I bought a lifetime pass a decade ago so I literally can't. :/ I almost wish I hadn't specifically so I could cancel it and send that signal.
But yes Plex is quite enshittified now. Would definitely start with Jellyfin or something else these days.
It's awful. I use Emby now, and have been for years. They even get 5 bucks a month from me. Apparently Jellyfin is good too, but I've had no reason to try it.
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