The Basic plan is getting discontinued in France, US. Netflix will discontinue the Basic plan in the United States and France. The cheapest ad-free plan...
Cool, I was planning to cancel this month anyway. I just finished ripping all of our DVDs and Blurays, so I have quite a bit of content ready to go. I have told my wife and kids I'll buy whatever they want, within reason, and rip it to our private streaming service. I think we'll end up saving quite a bit of money eventually this way, and we have no ads with our self-hosted video service.
A 5TB portable hard drive only costs as much as three months and can hold most of the stuff you ACTUALLY wanna watch. To be fair, DVDs and BluRays can get expensive but at least that's yours forever and you don't have to worry about the studio suddenly deciding you need to subscribe to THEIR bullshit too. If it's not available outside of streaming, well Gabe Newell said it best.
Yup. If I can get it legally to own, I will. If I can't, I'll find other methods...
I used Netflix because they had fantastic selection, a pretty decent UI, and good features on their apps. We recently went on a road trip, and both Disney+ and Netflix had "expired" our downloads (which we had downloaded like 2 weeks prior), so our kids couldn't watch most of what we had planned for during the trip. So their features are lacking, pricing sucks, and selection is more limited than when I signed up.
So yeah, if I'm going to have crappy selection anyway, I'll just buy what I want and save the monthly sub.
This may be more involved than most people are willing to go but just wanna add:
This can be painfully slow without a dedicated GPU. Even low-mid range dedicated is gonna be a huge upgrade over CPU or integrated GPU so get one of those (if you can) or prepare to leave it overnight.
I recommend playing with Handbrake settings a little. Use options with HEVC (x265) or AV1 for significantly smaller file sizes at the same level of quality. If you're leaning towards x265, an Nvidia card using the NVENC option is gonna be significantly faster.
Handbrake has a preview feature which outputs a 30 second segment at the given settings. Very useful if you wanna tune the quality/file size.
Bonus: Look into Jellyfin for a streaming service like interface