Hacker News Reader

Comment by prophesi | Hacker News Reader

While we're thinking of alternatives to Spotify, for years I've been buying albums straight from Bandcamp whenever possible, and HDTracks/etc for artists not on that platform. Then toss up the FLAC/MP3's on my Jellyfin server. I'm pretty sure artists get a lot more of your money that way, and you're not locked into yet another streaming platform that doesn't let you own the actual music files.

View on HN

Apple Music lets you add your own files and will automatically sync them to the cloud so you can access them on your other devices. Then you get the convenience of streaming but you can also maintain a library of music you own (or “have acquired”, let’s say).

You’ll need to convert FLAC to ALAC with e.g. ffmpeg or XLD, and cloud files played on other devices will be converted to AAC, but it works really well overall.

I wish there was a way to buy movies this way. I know there’s a rental service but you have to use their hardware.

Drm free digital video purchase doesn't seem to be a thing, but buying DVDs / blu rays and ripping them to a Plex / jellyfin server has gotten pretty approachable.

It's a real shame, I would be happy to buy DRM-free movies digitally, but afaik there is no marketplace for big name films. The studios certainly don't want it and the streaming services removed large demand for it (at least until quite recently).

Fortunately, the physical market still allows for such things. That's my current path. Ripping Blu-rays isn't trivial, requiring specific drives and often replacing the firmware, but once you get it set up it's quite convenient.

Naturally though, the digital piracy framework is much easier and more common, but I still like actually owning my movies.

It is moral (legality is flawed, copyright is a sham, etc) that if you own a piece of media that you can own it in every digital form based on that media. I.e., buy the disk and pirate it to your Jellyfin to avoid the annoyance of ripping the disk. VPNs are cheap and the *arr software suite is quite capable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com