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Comment by benboughton1 | Hacker News Reader

If you use a media player/manager like this, where do you get your movies? Is there a online movie store that you can download in appropriate format? There was a place for this before good streaming services existed but how do you legally obtain movies and store them on a NAS to feed into JellyFin? Are people ripping their blurays? I ot out of watching all the latest and greatest movies 10 years ago where we would just torrent everything into a folder called /movies. Now it's just the odd Netflix series so I am interested to know how people manage their movie collections and how they acquire them.

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People are doing exactly what you think they’re doing. They’re building collections of content illegally from torrenting.

With everyone creating their own subscription streaming service these days piracy is about to making a roaring come back and with the advances in software out there today it’s becoming easier than ever. You can go to reddit and find 100s of Plex servers that people open up to others for a small fee or even free. These servers contain nearly everything that’s popular. Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

> Why would you want to mess around with 2-3 HDMI dongles/boxes and 4-5 streaming services when you can have it all in one place for significantly cheaper and with little technical ability other than installing the Plex app and registering for a shared server? I suspect as time goes on Jellyfin will become the go to for these types of ‘services’.

This, except for most people maintaining their own private libraries, it probably makes more sense to use Kodi to play back files in a file system, than to rename everything to fit Jellyfin/Plex's fairly inflexible file naming requirements.

If you have terabytes of media already, possibly. If your music matches iTunes naming standards it'll import easily. I've kept on top of media naming and it's pretty easy unless you're bringing in a ton of files.

TITLE (YEAR) is easy to edit, then clear metadata for the original file name so that isn't picked up. I use Rename My TV Series for shows.

As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor. Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

> As someone who ran Kodi for quite sometime I can tell you it just doesn’t quite meet the wife approval factor.

Have you tried manually adding the content to the "Movies" and "TV Shows" libraries in Kodi? Kodi seems to have much more robust and flexible library support, though the process is less "set it and go" as well.

(A huge gripe of mine is having to store TV show seasons in a prescribed format in Jellyfin — I'm just testing it with movies for now.)

> Not to mention it has basically no utilities for on the fly transcoding and remote playback which was the killer feature that pulled me to Plex to begin with.

But yes, it's lacking on the other points, and for discovery of "similar" stuff.

There's software that can rename and sort your library for you though

I haven't figured out the balance between using renaming software (I've tried the free version of Filebot, but it has horrible latency for some reason.), and being able to remain a contributing member to certain media communities.

My solution to this has been symlinks. All the media files I download maintain their original names and structures so they can continue seeding, and I maintain a separate folder structure that complies with Jellyfin's naming conventions. All the files are just symlinked so they don't take up any additional space, and I have a couple small scripts to check for missing/broken links.

I agree. Once you would go to a video shop and all the popular titles were in one location (annoying to be physically there, but central). Now you need to find out which streaming service is on, have the app, subscription (then remember to cancel if just one show interested in). It's a mess.

I did not know about these shared servers. Makes Plex/JellyFin etc interesting. All the popular media one spot ready to stream.

Note: although it is fine to add friends to your Plex server, it is against the ToS to sell access and users are shut down. Those few are probably setting the rest of us up for legal action at some point.

Absolutely, and I don’t participate in that. It’s going to ruin it for all of us and all I can say is I’m glad I’ve already been able to get several years out of my lifetime PlexPass.

I’m speculating that the rise of Jellyfin is/will be because of the coming crackdown on Plex and Emby. Github and other repository services will eventually begin shunning Jellyfin much the way Popcorntime was pushed to shadier corners of the web.

In the end this is all driven by the media companies refusing to deliver an easy and reasonably priced way to have access to most video content.

Your last sentence is dead on.

I also have Plex Lifetime but wonder if I'd have more of a voice if I was month to month vs no longer paying in.

I have Jellyfin running side by side with Plex, though the library is much less curated. I find it works for about 90% of what I want to do once I set up remote access and link in friends and family already connected to Plex. I don't have any player issues (all PC based) so the lack of apps for some products doesn't bother me.

It's a valid point. I think it all boils down to:

a) Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection).

b) Watch it on Netflix and grab it from somewhere else (which is also illegal, because you don't own it if you have Netflix)

c) Don't care at all and just download the stuff "from sources".

d) Just watch open or initially free stuff. That's even harder.

It's pretty hard to stay on the safe side for this kind of thing.

Maybe we will see the same we had with the music industry some time ago: It's possible for me to get a FLAC album without DRM nowadays from perfectly legal sources. Not every album and every niche, but I can buy it and own it. Maybe the movie industry will have the same moment in the next decade.

OK so in practice, most people utilisting this type of software are either bending or breaking the law to organise their movie collection the way they want to. I would really like to be able to manage my media on a NAS with a great piece of OS software that organises them with no ML smarts (when did people forget about alphabetical order and a few tags/categories) but what you gain in privacy and other benefits there you loose in fighting the uphill battle in acquiring the files, time, management etc. It has to be a hobby.

This issue is exactly why (imo) Plex has shifted to focus on features it’s core base actually doesn’t care about.

They’ve been trying (desperately) to present Plex as a business supporting only legitimate and legal usage.

First it was “curated” podcasts and “web shows”, then News(??), TIDAL integration, ad-supported media, and so on.

Originally it was very clear that they wanted to help you organize and play all your content without judgement and with the most beautiful experience possible.

Clearly Not Any More.

> Grab a copy of your favorite show or movie as a blu-ray and rip that (which is illegal in most jurisdictions, as you have to break the copy protection).

I was fairly certain this was allowed in Europe as long as you own the discs (or otherwise has a permanent right to watch the content?)

Anyone knows the details?

It's technically illegal in most jurisdictions, but ignored if you're doing it for personal use - i.e. you're not burning 1000 copies, selling to your friends, or re-sharing on the network. The UK passed a law in 2018 that sort of decriminalised copying DVDs, but bypassing any DRM or TPM (technical protection measures) is still technically illegal. As far as I can tell.

In Germany, a copy for private purpose is allowed. However, breaking the copy protection isn't allowed. There is a lot of uncertainty though: The wording of the law could allow "breaking" the copy protection if it is not secure (where you technically wouldn't break it any more). For instance, the DeCSS case would have been such an exception. Perhaps.

I’m not 100% on the details (everytime there’s a legal win, there’s a dozen lobby groups fighting against it), BUT in Canada it’s likely legal to “format shift” discs that you own by using the internet to download unencrypted copies of them.

You’re not breaking encryption thus are safe from that can of worms, and assuming you’re not uploading (distributing is definitely a crime, even a single chunk of a torrent) and it’s for personal use I believe that the law is on your side.

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