This last round was the line for me. Canceled the whole Hulu/D+ mess and haven't looked back. My Jolly Roger is a little tattered these days, but I still know how to fly it.
I quit years ago, back when for me the easiest way to watch what I pirated on my TV was slapping it on a flash drive and walking to the tv like some kind of pleb.
I started seeing ads when playing (some) Amazon/paramount videos, plus the Netflix and Disney+ password crackdowns, and the price increases, I'm so over this crap.
I’m feeling the same way. I was getting pissed off that my kids couldn’t watch Netflix when they were at grandmas house first. Now they got mid-roll ads and I’m so over it.
Remember when they’d grandfather accounts in so you keep the old rate and features as a token of appreciation for your loyalty as a customer?
Yeah that’s an ancient relic these days. Your loyalty as a customer means dick.
I don’t even pay for Netflix or Disney. They are covered by my phone (TMobile) and credit card (Amex BCP) respectively.
Still, GabeNs Law has proven accurate once again. Ahoy.
Mmm it’s really sad but some of the nonstandard acquisition sites (even free ones) are better for content discovery than any service has ever been.
Because they don’t fucking recommend each other do they? No.
But the alternative market knows no boundaries. They don’t give a fuck who put what out. “Hey fyi since you like this, you might like this handful of similar things that we make nothing directly off telling you about , but indirectly benefit because you come back”
The Reddit megathread is one of the only things on that site I still reference. Not great, but better than the alternatives (until I get automation set up then it’s all over).
The last season of the Mandolorian wasn't even good. It spent most of it's time setting up other crap I am not interested in. There really isn't anything they can do that will make the premise for the sequels not a lazy regressive pile of garbage and it's dragging this show down with it. I didn't even bother with Ashoka since that looked like it was going to be even more of that.
I wasn't even planning on cancelling Disney+. I wanted to downsize from the Hulu combo package because I found i never watched Hulu, but it wouldn't let me switch directly. I had to let the combo membership run out before I could start a new D+ membership.
And, well, I just have gotten around to that yet...
Can you imagine if a streaming service did something good? "We're updating the terms of service. Now each profile under your account can have their own usernames and passwords to access the service, the profile limit has been doubled, and the number of concurrent logins per profile tripled!"
For my wife's 1300 DVDs, it took me 3 years (it's not an automated process, so obviously this wasn't 3 years of 100% uptime).
The hardest part for me has been dealing with DRM. Some movies will have their scenes scrambled 1000 ways, and then the DRM is just knowing which playlist is the right one. MakeMKV usually handles this, but sometimes it gets it wrong. so I have some scrambled movies that Ive never gone back to re-rip. It's VERY frustrating when it doesn't work, but very simple when it does.
Overall, still worth it for independence to me though. When The Office/Friends/etc got yanked from Netflix, but I still had physical copies and jellyfin, I felt REAL vindicated.
The step that takes the longest is the "transcode with Handbrake" one. On my fairly slow mobile Ryzen 7, it takes about an an hour and a half.
The thing is, you can tweak settings in Handbrake to be faster at the expense of video quality and/or file size.
What I do is to set up a bunch of files and let Handbrake run overnight. In the morning, everything's done and I can work on the next batch. It helps that I work from home.
Ripping from disc takes about 20 minutes. Copying is as fast as your network. Updating metadata can be done whenever.
I was trying to think of a way to work in a Pirates of the Caribbean joke about the Terms and Conditions and the pirate code before I realized that was literally what you just said 😩 I’m tired man