MGS said:

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Zombie Jon Snow said:

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FYI

Mission Impossible 6 movie bundle currently $24.99 in HDX or UHD. usually $69.99

on Vudu

Seems like a hell of a deal.

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As you noted, Paramount doesn't do MA, you'd be stuck watching them only on Vudu.

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Actually irrelevant in this case. If you buy bundles they are not transferable across MA anyway regardless of studio.

One of the downsides but the cost offsets that. But I really don't mind using Vudu, the app is fine on Roku.

I tend to think of Vudu as my movie repository anyway especially now that it merged with FandangoNOW. If you have Fandango you need to go merge any movies there to Vudu. But it reduced my movie locations by one.

Physical media and you are at the mercy of technology advancements and distribution to locations aside from where the physical media (and player) are located.

Relying on any company's digital platform is also a recipe for disaster. I've still got some MLB full game videos I paid for way back in the day that the platform no longer exists so the video can no longer be viewed. You never own the media in this situation, you are just renting it.

All digital for me, distributing anywhere I want with Plex. Home server, and not restricted to any platform. So 15 years from now I can still watch all these movies just the same.

In 2009, my entire dvd and cd collection was stolen out of my car while I was moving. I probably had a couple hundred cds and 50 or so dvds. I haven't purchased either since.

Damn that sucks.

I had all my CDs stolen out of my car in high school.

Correction - I have some bundles from Vudu that are crossing platforms now through Movies Anywhere. Guess they made an update or something. they just show up as individual movies on the other platforms and they did not used to.

But my Tarantino Bundle does not cross platforms. Those are all Miramax which is Paramount. so maybe bundles are working across platforms now except for Paramount cuz they are still refusing to join MA.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Damn that sucks.

I had all my CDs stolen out of my car in high school.

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What's crazy is that they left my X-Box 360 and SNES that was sitting right next to them.

I did buy the first 6 Star Wars movies and Jaws again, but those are the only 7 dvds I own. They're collecting dust though as I no longer have a DVD player.

That is bizarre.

In my case they took the whole car, but it was a beater, so all I really cared about at that age was the CDs.

For those with a media server, did you transfer the full uncompressed video and audio files? Do you mount a blu-ray drive on the server so you view them that way? At 50 gigs a piece, that seems like a lot of storage. And if you haven't transferred them uncompressed, doesn't that kind of leave you in the same place as using the lossy digital files they normally give you?

This is what I've always wondered. I've thought about digitizing my entire collection and running it through Plex, but I can't even begin to imagine how big the hard drive would need to be, especially for 4K Blu-rays. Seems like it would be insane.

You can pretty much do it any way you want to. Uncompressed if that's how you want it, or any kind of compression and/or audio format that fits what you want.

The concept really isn't that different than buying the bluray, its simply the storage method is different.

Sure you could run into a storage issue, but with tech improving every day I feel like the chances of you running into a storage issue is far less than running into either a format or platform issue. I mean, lets be honest... many of you likely had the movie on VHS, laserdisc, DVD and now Blu-Ray. Which means it won't be long before you have to upgrade to a new standard.

I know most Blu-rays are roughly, on average, about 30GB each. I've never digitized a 4K Blu-ray before, but Google is telling me they're roughly 100GB each.

Quick estimate of my collection, I have around 115 4K Blu-rays and 230 Blu-rays (not going to factor in DVDs).

115 x 100GB = 11,500GB
230 x 30GB = 6,900GB

11,500GB + 6,900GB = 18400GB

18,400GB = 18.4TB

So I would need a 20TB drive *just* for my current collection, with barely any room to grow, and no room for bonus features, only room for the uncompressed movies themselves.

But let's say I went ahead and bought two 20TB drives and paired them, at roughly $500 each (on the cheap side). That's $1K for the server alone + the time it would take to digitize roughly 350 movies (again, with no bonus features). And as I understand it, it would be best if the server were basically an entirely different computer essentially, since whatever server Plex is paired with needs to always be on, and always connected to a WiFi source, correct? So that's likely a bit more dough as well for that whole setup.

I don't know, it just seems like a lot of time, effort, and $$$ to have a truly digitized, uncompressed library, not dependent on any other studio, cloud, or platform. I totally get the appeal, it just doesn't seem worth the massive headache, and feels like a million little things could go wrong in the process.

It'd definitely be a lot of work.

It's also definitely nice I can walk into any room in my house and have immediate access to the movie in any format I want. On the road and want to kill time watching on my phone? On a flight and want to watch on a tablet? No problem.

I think you'd probably also find you actually *watch* the films more when accessibility is that easy.

But this is also coming from someone who had a pretty hefty DVD collection before realizing how much of a sunk cost it winds up being once tech advances.

Just FYI, most of my collection is already on Apple TV. So I can already watch anything from anywhere, anytime, as long as I have a WiFi connection, and I have all bonus features to boot.

Also, I don't understand how Plex fixes any kind of sunk costs aspect, seeing as I'd still want to upgrade a movie to 4K when/if the 4K version is released. Plex doesn't solve that. To me, the *only* thing Plex fixes is the hypothetical where, for some reason, either Apple TV or the studio edits/takes down a copy of the movie I own on the cloud. And don't get me wrong, that's a legit concern, but other than that I don't see what potential "tech advances" Plex proofs against? What am I missing?

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Damn that sucks.

I had all my CDs stolen out of my car in high school.

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I thought that was basically a rite of passage in the 90's.

TCTTS said:

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Just FYI, most of my collection is already on Apple TV. So I can already watch anything from anywhere, anytime, as long as I have a WiFi connection, and I have all bonus features to boot.

Also, I don't understand how Plex fixes any kind of sunk costs aspect, seeing as I'd still want to upgrade a movie to 4K when/if the 4K version is released. Plex doesn't solve that. To me, the *only* thing Plex fixes is the hypothetical where, for some reason, either Apple TV or the studio edits/takes down a copy of the movie I own on the cloud. And don't get me wrong, that's a legit concern, but other than that I don't see what potential "tech advances" Plex proofs against? What am I missing?

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Nothing.

And I neglected to mention I did PLEX for a while too. A lot of work is the biggest factor. Not worth it IMHO.

Good to know.

Brian Earl Spilner said:

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Growing up we had hundreds of VHS + DVDs, and looking back on it, it's crazy to me that we only ever had them in random order.

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Before streaming:

I organize the DVDs or CDs into some order.

IF she remembers to put away the DVD, my wife decides that whatever DVD she is putting away is going to go into the slot of whatever DVD she just took out. Or it will just be left out.

"Honey, why is the Lion King DVD in between Season 1 and Season 3 of Scooby Doo, Where are You?" x 1000.

So thankful for streaming.

I had an organization system that was not alphabetical but worked for me.

I did not have a big place to store everything so I had like 7 shelves in 3 different places.

I decided to organize like so

Shelf
1. Collections with 3 or more in a set (only 2 in a set would be in the genres below)
2. Comedies
3. TV series
4. Action/Superhero
5. War/Mob/other dramas
6. Musicals and Kids/Disney/Pixar movies
7. Documentaries and Concerts

So I knew where to go for what I wanted to find.

And everyone else in my house knew to never reshelve anything. If you play it leave it out on the TV stand and I'll put it away.

I have what I believe to be is one of the first Sony 4K Blu-ray players, which I bought way back in 2017, the UBP-X800. That said, it still works like a charm and upscales beautifully. So you might be able to find a used one for cheap, though it wasn't that expensive to begin with (I think a little over $200), and I'm sure any models released after it are obviously even better.

I have a Panasonic DP-UB420-K that I like a lot. Looks like it's $220 at Best Buy right now.

Huge Vudu fan here.

Side topic since the audience is so knowledgeable, anyone know why some titles like King of the Hill cannot be found on any streaming service?

bearamedic99 said:

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Huge Vudu fan here.

Side topic since the audience is so knowledgeable, anyone know why some titles like King of the Hill cannot be found on any streaming service?

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King of the Hill is on Hulu. All 13 seasons.

I use these sites to search for where soemthing is streaming

https://www.jus****ch.com/

the **** is

jus t w a t ch

because of stupid filters.

https://reelgood.com/

Another question - I haven't found any streaming services that have secondary audio with a commentary track. Is it out there?

Vudu has a couple of serious deals right now.

Star Trek 10 movie collection from Star Trek (1979) through Star Trek Nemesis (2002) for $34.99 that's less than $3.50 per movie for movies of TOS through TNG era.



And the 6 movie extended versions of LOTR trilogy and The Hobbit trilogy for $39.99

For those that are into that sort of thing, the Criterion Flash Sale is going on now. All in stock stuff is 50% off. If you are subscriber to the Criterion Channel, you should have gotten a $10 off coupon as well last week.

Also, Prime has some deals going as well. I picked up The Northman 4K today for $15.

Just unloaded a lot of our DVDs today (most weren't blu-ray). We still kept about 2/3 of what we have even though we haven't used a single one in recent memory. We didn't have a ton to begin with, but it's still nice to have a bit of room back in our tv stand drawers.