Oh, Streaming...well, it's mostly a blocky mess, And at certain times (when many People are home i guess) it simply stops working. so it's a nice idea but does not work well for me. I still have BluRays sent to my home via a rental service (that how "old-Git" I am).
I used to use Lovefilm postal for Blu-rays - who's still offering this service and what's the cost like?
I use KODI as well and love it. I scored a DroboPro near the end of 2015 with 11Tb in it for only $250. I've slowly upgraded it as drives have died or as I've gotten close to capacity. I just get whatever is cheapest per TB, which is usually some shuckable external thing. None of my new drives have died as of yet, but I've almost filled the max 16Tb volume virtualized drive in windows. I may have to make another and split parts of my collection up.
I have the cheapest solution, a 3TB WD-Mybook external USB3 drive plugged into my internetrouter. This has a "NAS" function that's not very fast, but uses no extra power and is fast enough for KODI A dedicated NAS would be (a lot) faster, but would require more power and I don't use the Speed anyway.
I buy DVD's when they get cheap at Tesco et al, MakeMKV and Handbrake to put it on the NAS then the DVD goes on the shelf. I don't buy Blu-rays as we don't have a player (well, only the boy's PS4 which he has erected a force field around) and 1080p is good enough for us.
^ very much so The PS4 upscales very well but you can still see the difference between a dvd on PS4 and a BR.
Yeah...for the kid's movies uncompressed DVD quality is enough, especially since they watch them on a tablet or in the car anyway. For at home on a beamer...it's not great but better than streaming artifacts.
The real bummer is with the advance of streaming, People around me have become less quality sensitive. The dark parts of a movie are a blocky mess? nobody sees it. Smoke has grey bands? irrelevant. Purple pixel artifacts throughout the entire screen? don't matter. But hey, I'm streaming on a 4K screen, must be better than a Blu-Ray on a full HD-Projector.
Well this christmas was a time for going back to hard media for me it seems! Upgraded the media pc in general, and so now includes a DVD/BR drive, buying a new dvd/br player for my parents after their dvd player broke. Bought a bunch of studio ghiblio combo dvd/brs for my other half and may have just accidentally bought ep 1-8 and rogue one steelbooks for myself/her hah.
All my UV films came from the codes that came with any BR/DVD's I bought, and a couple are still showing as MIA in the flixster migration page. 2 of them were Sony films so I contacted Sony for them (1 of which for some reason was disapeared from my list in my Flixster account but was still listed under the Sony media ultraviolet site (Bladerunner 2)). They sent me a Google play key for Bladerunner 2 and for whatever reason couldn't send me a code the other film (Streetfighter (the JCVD one, bought for the cheese factor)) so gave me a choice of films I could have a code for instead.
This is my favourite post of 2020 so far. I did the whole archivist thing for a while, but ripping BRs is SOOO SLOOOOW and space consuming. I'd actually rather just have a shelf of blu-rays and take them down to play them. That's the format I most enjoy. And the quality's maxxed out with no hassle. The BR DRM thingy and online firmware bollocks is tiresome in theory, but in practise it's just not a problem. If I were going to start being salty about things requiring updates and calling home to carry on working, I'd have to bin basically every platform, account and service in the modern world. A 20-second firmware download every few months is nothing compared to what Steam, Battle.net and the like do with my internet connection without my permission. I'm not a massive nerd about lossless HQ formats (I think lossless audio is pointless unless you're going to work with the files or burn them back to physical media) but BR compared to online streaming is one where I really, really notice it. Even my huge BR rips with Handbrake turned all the way to silly mode don't look as good as the original BR, and I can see it. My own fault for buying an amazing TV. #firstworldproblems
