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Comment by newfonewhodis | Hacker News Reader

If this happens to me, I'm cancelling my Netflix and ramping my Plex server up even more. I pay for Netflix for ease of use, but the harder they make it, the more people will revert to piracy.

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Don't wait, just cancel now. Netflix has gone rapidly downhill in terms of content quality in the past couple of years. They have ceded ground to their competition by removing the broad range of content they once had, in favor of their own mediocre content.

I think there could be a genuine market opening for a streaming platform that exclusively has films made before 5-10 years ago. Somethjng curated, with less attempts at using AI to predict what you like. Something for movie enthusiasts (and perhaps TV) to enjoy good cinema, not watch the latest politically charged soap opera with poor dialogue, instagram filter cinematography, and overly safe humor.

This somewhat sounds like https://mubi.com/ or https://www.criterionchannel.com/?

I only use it because someone else lets me use their account for free. There's almost never anything worth watching on it though.

The Netflix logo on a poster is literally a stamp of bad quality. Like 90% of netflix originals are absolute trash.

The series are also getting canceled after 1 season. I stopped watching Netflix originals just like you.

I used to think so too, y watch a show that's gonna get cancelled.

Then I realized there do exist some good shows that only had very few seasons: pushing daisies, doll hiuse, sense 8. The problem is many Netflix shows are bad...

> The problem is many Netflix shows are bad...

Most shows are bad; Netflix is neither more nor less consistent with Sturgeon’s Law than any other network. They probably have far more bad shows than any single broadcast or cable channel simply because they aren't limited by the economy of time slots in how many shots they can fire to see what sticks.

Isn't that the formula? Acquire or create a series on the cheap, and axe the series instead of paying the actors/creators a higher rate for additional seasons?

> canceled after 1 season

More isn't necessarily better?

That depends on whether Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger or not.

sometimes even when watching a trailer without seeing the logo i still get a hunch that its a netflix original. i dunno what it is, maybe a combination of the camera gear they use, lighting, actors I've never seen before, the bland dialog

Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.

Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.

It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.

Bleh, ads. Spoiled by ad free Netflix for a decade...

I understand, but it's no Hulu at least. 5-10 seconds and you can click to skip and go back to the movie, like you can with other Youtube videos.

YouTube maintains an official playlist of these movies: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHPTxTxtC0ibVZrT2_WKWUl2S...

You make it sound like this is Netflix's fault, whereas tlit seems to me that 10 years ago it was mich easier to acquire licenses for streaming. now some of the big studios have their own streaming services, so licensing isich harder/impossible

They could just be logging IPs that have been used by a large number of accounts. They could also be tracking accounts that tend to hop between IPs and enforce more strictly on them.

EDIT: Oops replied to wrong comment.

Already did it, got lifetime emby premiere license, can watch whatever I want wherever I am, the ease of use and the low price were charming at the start, but I guess it was too good to last

Out of curiosity, what made you go with Emby over Plex?

the Kodi plugin, emby integrates itself by reusing existing elements, including the Kodi player and Kodi libraries so you can scroll in movies both local files and emby files and use the same flow regardless, Plex last time I tried it, had a full blown view on top of Kodi which was detached from the system, so you either go full Plex or it's not a nice experience

I would be furious if, being a legitimate user (which I am) I was blocked and then told to "contact my ISP" about it.

But ramping up Plex with what content? Netflix has the content…

Bittorrent has the most content.

Agreed. Outside of the US a lot of content is just not available at all.

Even in the US.

I haven't looked in a long time, but it has high quality 4k rips with Atmos sound tracks like a Blu-ray would?

there are entire communities dedicated to hd rips. so yes.

keep in mind, they won't be small.

Private trackers have Blu Ray 4K remuxes before the disks hit the shelves.

They have the content... that you can obtain and host (or pay someone to host via a Plex Share). Piracy is back, and getting more convenient by the day.

Netflix has a subset of the content, and the subset differs on where they think you currently live.

There is no way to legally obtain all the content by paying.

> Netflix has a subset of the content, and the subset differs on where they think you currently live

and what deal netflix had with the various content providers that expires, see e.g.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/everything-leaving-netflix

When you strip away all the N-marked pulp, very little remains. Of these, very few titles merit being seen. I'm so weary of these I actually consider going back to buying movies as an alternative to renting (i.e. streaming).

Meaning DVD/blueray?

If I'm going to buy, I might as well have the physical media. It's usually not much (if any) more--and I own the media.

But can you even buy most content anymore? Everything has gone digital to the point where I wouldn’t even know where to get said dvds outside of a few rental stores that somehow still exist in SF. Amazon? Somewhere else?

For recent movies you can often rent from RedBox. To buy DVDs, I usually go to Amazon. Sometimes something will catch my eye in the remainder pile at Walmart. Except for some straight to streaming content maybe, my experience is that most films that aren't really obscure are still available for physical purchase.

Also, I may or may not rip the Blu-Ray media to my external HDD, since

- the BR-enabled player software ("Cyberlink something " Windows-only) is a POS[1],

- playing BR directly on Linux is not a fun experience to get working (fucking DRM)

- not having to search through a cupboard of boxes for the disk I want to watch (convenience)

- not being arbitrarily restricted to 720p or less on streaming platforms ( because I have the audacity run Linux ) even for movies/series I would "buy in HD"

- etc. pp.

[1] From what I remember from using that software years ago: extremely laggy interface, audio volume slider does basically nothing above the "2%" setting where the sound will just be so loud it nearly blows your eardrums (even with Windows audio setting for that program at ~10%), basically no useful keybindings apart from <SPACE>, putting the popout menu on the screen to get more controls almost always locked the program up for >20 seconds, the software had giant ad banners for the other garbage made by that company, etc. pp.

Plex is a media server mainly used for serving downloaded content, so I'll let you make of that what you will. Piracy has not gotten harder in the past 20 years. In many countries it is de facto legal.

At least some 'Netflix originals' are released on Bluray.

You pay $90 a year to a Usenet provider, $15 a year to a Usenet indexer, and get gigabit+ download speeds of any TV show or Movie you want and they automatically get fetched via https://Sonarr.tv or https://Radarr.video

Plus it's all done over TLS and your ISP won't send you notices because you're not uploading/sharing anything.

please note in some cases you need 2 backbones and 2 indexers to find some content

Do you have recommendation for good indexers?

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