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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I’m one free weekend from canceling it. Gonna go back to a pc under the tv. Just need the afternoon to find the best machine for plex.

The selection of older content on Netflix is really weak on the whole and their original content is getting worse and worse.

There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours in series it really is awful tv and watching the writers struggle to spin tires to drag it to 10 hours is exhausting. Not to mention the executive meddling is extremely apparent in many of their scripts where you can tell whole sections were added at exec request because the story goes off at a tangent and then when it returns the stakes are exactly the same as before the tangent.

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PC under the TV is the answer, at least I think so. I built an ITX HomeTheater/Gaming PC last year (without a GPU initially) and have started to slowly unsubscribe from all the streaming services.

Being able to just grab whatever movies I have in my list of things to watch, and play them, locally, without having to scroll through the apps has been quite the relief. Occasionally I use HBO Max still because it has some decent older movies, but I'm pretty much only using my HTPC now, and with Plex, I can watch my library across the network at home via Apple TVs in the bedroom.

How do you acquire the movies?

This.

The secret ingredient is crime

R-A-R-B-G + V-P-N

Oh, Super Hans.

Many use a few different apps such as radarr, sonarr and all their siblings to grab media into torrent downloaders which is then served via plex i.e.

I'll leave this here, a previous HN post.

https://github.com/Igglybuff/awesome-piracy

Bought my mom an Android TV and installed an apk that combines a movie catalog with torrent search. Can stream or download. Pretty neat stuff, although it's targeted for russian audience (searching russian trackers).

Can't agree more.

The nonsense original content Netflix throw out is awful.

Having to watch 6 to 10 hours of a show riddled with plot holes, long drawn out rubbish narrative, and social justice content just to cloud it further. It's not great.

On top of that they simply switch off all other content if you are using a VPN, even legitimately in your own country, it's rubbish.

PC under the telly is roaring back into fashion.

Who wants to pay umteen subscriptions for bad content anyway?

I have password shared Netflix. In the last 6 months i have opened the app only once to check whether the new Jackass is on it. It wasn't there, but i rewatched Jackass 3D.

Now that they are planning on cracking down on password sharing, good riddance

I have a friend who has a NAS server with plex running 8TB of movies/series/etc... and shares it with multiple other friends (he doesn't tell me how many, but my bet is that it must be at least 50). He has his own OTT, he doesn't charge anything, in case you are wondering...

I'm this friend for my group, except no local hardware - it's a shared server in Canada (a seedbox, for those who want a term to google). I maintain the understanding with friends that it's a rotating library - you request something and it will get added. But it also gets removed when you're done, or when it's been sitting there for a few months unwatched.

I threw down the money for Plex lifetime pass after repeatedly keying in movies and shows on Netflix search, and not finding them. New stuff, classic stuff, it didn't matter. Always just some offbrand substitute junk coming up. Their catalog is very poor now, even compared to just a few years ago.

I'm not playing the game of subscribing to different services just to get particular content, because I don't watch things often enough to justify the effort or cost. Plus this way all my physical media comes into the same library as rips, and PlexAmp is a pretty good music player, too.

Give (Plex alternative) Jellyfin a go as well!

Your third paragraph is hardly unique to Netflix, all scripted serialized dramas seem to suffer this problem these days.

Most? Maybe. Certainly not all.

I've become a little tired of series with continuous plots at this point. It's really hard to create content for so many episodes that isn't repetitive, irrelevant to the main story, or hard to believe because of the piling up of coincidences. Then you often have implausible character changes and other typical series-but-not-movies problems piling up. It's an art form that seems very difficult to get right, and so it usually goes wrong.

BBC gets this right, only as many episodes as necessary.

British TV in general gets it right and always has. 6 episodes per season, 2-4 seasons. Ricky Gervais’ The Office UK is a prime example, 14 episodes. The US version has 188.

Less is more. No filler content. GoT could have stopped 2-3 seasons before it did and I'd been fine. Star Wars not needed episode 1 and onward. The old ones were neat as they were (personally apart from that I only liked the recent movie which took place between 3 and 4, and the first season (!!) of Mando). Its like meeting your heroes: don't! Same with books. I read the The Thrawn Trilogy. It was great. I don't want a comic about it or a movie about it; I leave the memory as is. There's a remake of the brilliant series Utopia (orig. by Ch 4) and I am not looking forward to it either for the same reason. Then again, perhaps all these reboots are not aimed for me but for people who did not see the orig.

Oh, Amazon remade Utopia stateside and it was just rubbish next to the BBC series

> There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours

Jack Reacher. 80 minutes would have been just right.

Get an Nvidia Shield for the Plex client. It can run the server too, but I would use a different computer for that.

Agree the new content has been steadily going downhill as I imagine they are prioritizing profits over art.

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