Hacker News Reader

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