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 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…
Anyone else rip their DVDs, import them into Plex, then share your Plex library with others?
Those are birth defects though. For instance, we still understand humans as being bipedal despite anomalies that prevent a tiny fraction of humans from being bipedal.
`XXY` is a valid combination of sex chromosomes. The person has two `X` chromosomes so is female. The person also has one `Y` chromosome so is male. Which sex is the person? Is it a birth defect?
The US has by far the largest public library system in the world, and it's not close. So by what metric would you consider it underfunded?
Comparing size without considering population will only lead to bad conclusions. Could you imagine someone claiming cancer deaths in Germany aren’t a problem because it doesn’t have near as many deaths as the US, it’s not even close? Sounds silly, right? The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we under…
> Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we underfund our public library system is fairly obvious.
This is only the case if you think the proper level of funding is a function of population size or wealth instead of whatever is required to obtain sufficient results. If you're looking for results, it seems the proper level of funding would actually scale with population density (sparser areas require higher funding per capita to provide the same access).
I think you can make a case for that sort of model, but I don't think it's "fairly obvious".
Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours. I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.
I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies. Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality. If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.
they do a great job at compressing and encoding.
I'll buy the bluray/dvd, then download the torrent for the movie to put into Plex. Like a backup, but MUCH better and easier on the size than I would be able to do myself.
The US has by far the largest public library system in the world, and it's not close. So by what metric would you consider it underfunded?
What measure are you using for "largest"? The US is 3rd in the world by population and 1st by GDP, so in absolute terms it's to be expected that they would be "large" in many categories, simply by having more people and money. (And then there's geographical extent.) The relative (per capita, perhaps) measure is more salient.
Based on books in circulation (overall and per capita). Also for anybody who isn't familiar with interlibrary loans, check it out. In the US you can get access to almost any book around the country sent to your local library. The system is amazing.
The US has by far the largest public library system in the world, and it's not close. So by what metric would you consider it underfunded?
Comparing size without considering population will only lead to bad conclusions. Could you imagine someone claiming cancer deaths in Germany aren’t a problem because it doesn’t have near as many deaths as the US, it’s not even close? Sounds silly, right? The US is reportedly 62nd in the world in libraries per capita. [1] Given the US has more wealth per capita than most of the world as well, I think claiming we under…
Mentioned elsewhere, but books in circulation (overall and per capita). Also, in the US you can get almost any book from elsewhere sent to your local library at no charge.
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 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…
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.
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 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…
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!
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.
Pirate bay is that backup option, at least for me. To use your example of the X-Files, you can currently download a 75 GB torrent with every season + extras and it will only take a few hours. I think people continue seeding torrents for longer than DVDs reliably last.
I've never understood the appeal of downloading pirate movies. Feels dodgy, always a hassle trying to fight your way through all the scams and malware and porn and when you get the movie it's of questionable quality. If I buy a DVD then I get perfect quality in a nice case in a day or two without having to visit the seedy red light district of the Internet only to get dud contraband.
Get a seedbox, set up sonarr [0] and radarr [1]. Use Plex, or even better, Jellyfin [2] for streaming.
Takes about 1.5 hours to set up - you now have a Netflix-like UI with an easy option of requesting TV Shows and Movies from a nice UX.
You can get any media in any quality you want, without ever stepping into any red light district.
It's crazy that you can go to a grocery store as distribution aggregator and buy any type and brand of food in one place. You should have to go to a Kellog's store or a Quaker store depending what you want to eat next week. At least, that's what studios and labels think.
If food was infinitely replicable at basically no cost, you’d only be allowed to eat your cereals at the respective store.
You're implying that piracy was killing media markets until physical copies were replaced with streaming, but hasn't that been debunked?