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Comment by schmichael | Hacker News Reader

I wish this article had mentioned the greatest thing about DVDs:

You can lend them. Have a friend over and find out they have never seen <insert meaningful show or movie here> before?! No need to quick search and figure out if it's on a streaming service they have, just walk over and snatch it off your shelf and hand it to them.

In the 00s the trade in media lending was so brisk my friends and I would keep spreadsheets and little databases of who-borrowed-what-from-whom. There's even a DVD little lending library in my neighborhood. Not to mention the public library system has tons of physical media to choose from.

I love streaming and rarely turn to physical media these days, but as my kids get older and want to watch the same things over-and-over-and-over... building that DVD collection out again is looking really appealing.

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I lent almost none of my DVDs and VHS tapes(!) back in the day because the fact of the matter is /people never gave them back/. Not even good friends.

It's one of those lessons I learned early in life. If you're going to lend something to someone, do so with the expectation you're never getting it back.

Yup, tools too. I'll come over and help ya, but nobody is going to borrow my tools.

One cannot lend books or DVDs, one can only gift them.

I've checked them out on occasion from libraries – and usually returned them.

As the saying goes (more or less)... "One who lends a book is a fool, but one who gives it back is a greater fool"

So maybe we can also apply it to movies and other works

Wait ? No.

It’s “the one who expect it back is a greater fool”

Or at least that was my take.

I give book back.

Lend implies you expect it back, otherwise it'd be "the one who gives"

I think the implication is that people often do not give back things you lend to them.

This is also true of DRM-free files on thumbdrives. More of my friends have devices with USB ports that can run VLC than optical drives these days (not to mention the whole zone thing, which is quickly a pain when you're a movie nerd)... thankfully generating a DRM-free file from a DVD is trivial.

- signed, someone who also owns lots of CDs and DVDs, mostly old non US-produced things that are close to unfindable on streaming services :)

In my family we swap around portable hard drives loaded up with movies. Mostly orchestrated by my aunt who started the tradition. Before then, it was burned DVDs and before then it was copied VHS tapes. When I was a kid my mother showed me how to circumvent copy protection on VHS by connecting a VCR to a VHS camcorder, although I forget which was doing the playback and which was doing the recording. It was a neat way to circumvent macrovision though.

Kids these days share their collections on Plex

I've been doing this for 5+ years at this point. Your post reminds me that I need to finally, at some point, just build a new home server. This E3-1230v1 on DDR3 is getting a little old.

Anyone else rip their DVDs, import them into Plex, then share your Plex library with others?

On that note, what kind of hardware/connection does that require? I run Plex on a rather old Synology NAS at home, and it's great for streaming at home at original quality even up to 4K but can get a bit sluggish when it tries to scale the video one way or another.

Then I go out of my home and it's unwatchable when streaming even original quality, which is odd because I have 20Mbit up with fiber to the premise at home and probably getting 60Mbit+ where I'm trying to watch from.

That's mostly 1080p I've been trying to watch, so 10Mbit should be sufficient. I don't know why the hardware would become a problem only when I leave home.

I have a vague memory that if your device can't get a direct route to your Plex server (e.g. because of NAT) then it gets relayed via Plex's own cloud servers with significant bandwidth throttling.

This article seems to have some more details and mentions that free tier users get throttled to 1Mbps. https://support.plex.tv/articles/216766168-accessing-a-serve...

It'll be the transcoding that is the issue. Whether that is because you don't have a direct path, bandwidth issues, or because of codec issues.

Not all devices support all codecs. Any disagreement means that Plex is now going to try transcoding, even if the hardware capability isn't there (and most NASs don't have the grunt to do it).

You have options.

Spend more disk space: You can tell Plex to transcode copies into lower bitrate versions it makes them available via the UI (although this isn't always obvious how, and varies on platform). Note that on a NAS this might take a day to transcode a movie. During which your ability to use the NAS for anything else is greatly reduced.

Spend more effort: Re-rip or re-encode everything into a known supported format. You will need to maintain this. Tools like Tdarr may help here.

More compute power (and some effort):

If your content is in 1080p and you want to view it in 1080p or lower then reasonably-modern Intel CPUs with support for QuickSync are pretty good at handling transcoding for 1080p. Plex Media server has an option to enable hardware-accellerated transcoding if you pay for Plex.

An older Intel NUC or Small-form-factor PC can usually do this job fine. They can also be fairly power efficient.

If you want to start throwing in 4k content, then you are going to need a GPU and the cost and complexity goes up.

I use my old GTX1060 for transcoding and it does a decent job. Upload speed could be another factor, as well as pointed out elsewhere making sure there is direct internet access to the Plex server so it doesn't use a middle server via Plex themselves.

I had a friend who had DSL cause it was all they had available, and with 1.5Mbps up I could decently stream a lot of things at 720p which TBH was fine and I did not notice, plus a lot of the source material was older shows like Stargate SG-1 so resolution wasn't that high anyway.

Blurays instead of DVD’s and I don’t share them with anyone.

So maybe sorta yes. I would be a lot easier with DVD’s though. I don’t want to be uploading 40+GB files constantly.

Which, of course, includes gifting them. CDs, DVDs, and Video Games used to make really good gifts for certain people, but gifting digital copies of these is becoming harder and harder to do. At least books still exist in physical form, I guess.

One added bonus of having a limited selection to pick from was the quicker decision making time.

With thousands of options via streaming services some of us become paralysed by choice!

I keep a list of media that I have heard enough good things about in my notes app to prevent this.

great idea!

I think I'll make a reminder list so I can just get siri to add them as I hear about them.

I have a terrible memory but a large ego that doesn't let me admit it so I often forget about recommendations.

Honestly, this is why broadcast tv still has some appeal to me. Give me a handful (which it still is, really, in the UK) of TV shows to choose from, and I'll probably find something to enjoy. Meanwhile, I can browse 'My List' on Netflix for ages, trying to find something among all these unwatched shows I've set aside, and nothing really appeals.

Absolutely. Another less thought of aspect is simply power consumption and hence ecology. Running so many remote servers for movings and shows one already have at home is absurd I find.

I need some automated streaming-service ripper that will burn DVDs whenever I pop in a blank disk. And maybe generate nice sticker label PDFs from some intermediate scene with the title.

Consider instead: a Plex library backed by a “disk drive” that’s actually a DVD/Blu-Ray jukebox. You can fish the disks out if you really want, but most of the time they’re just “online” as part of your library. Buy a new one? Feed it to the jukebox. Ideally, rip one “into the library” and the jukebox will consume a blank disk to burn it, then file it.

(AFAIK, this last bit is how Amazon Glacier works—just with some online disk drives in between to buffer content up into Blu-Ray-sized chunks.)

I'd be real surprised if it was anything beyond tape drives, plus a local cache. Check out the storage capacity on the latest LTO tapes, and the tape storage capacities of the large room-size tape robots.

'Ex libris'! I just picked up a stack of my grandfathers' (he had the same name).

For sure! Assuming anyone still has a method of playing them that is

In this day and age and that day and age, I’ve had friends offer me ripped DVDs or nowadays a single thumb drive with their entire former DVD collection and then some.

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