I will grab the occasional file that really interests me, but lately since I’ve discovered sites like Flixer or streamvaults, I will just stream the shows and movies that I’m curious about but don’t really feel the need to collect.
What about you?
I’ve been wanting to make a collection, but ironically now as storage solutions are becoming more expensive I’m between a rock and a hard place. I could spend the stupid prices for more hard drive space and then grab more. Alternatively I could take some existing smaller hard drives and use them for storage.
If I hadn’t gotten laid off last month I likely would have just expanded while things are still (relatively) affordable. But idk now. I might just stretch things where I can and hope that the bubble pops sooner rather than later
Right now my idea is to store things i find that are more niche or less likely to be shared in the future and i’ll cycle things that are more popular or that will stand the test of time
I would if I could afford the storage. I’d download and archive every YouTube video I watch instead of streaming it. But I hoard and with like 20tb of collective storage, I’m still always moving things around.
I download everything, I just may not ultimately keep it long-term if it turns out to be uninteresting or bad. Streaming and downloading transfer the same amount of bits, one just has higher demands for timeliness.
I hoard media. I’m particular about my releases. I don’t want to stream some shady website that could disappear half way through a show.
I kept waiting to invest in more drives. Now I’m stuck with 4x4TB for the foreseeable future because replacing that raid array is brutal and even then I want to go bigger. Like the other commenter said, I’d like to be able to mirror big data sets.
Curate, is my advice.
I occasionally go through and cull the worst shows and movies. No point keeping mainstream crap that’s readily available on all the streaming sites.
shady website that could disappear half way through a show.
this has occured to me tooo many times too.
yup happening with the one streaming site I use as of tomorrow.
I hoard. Physical media is getting harder to come by, but I’ve ripped all my DVD’s, TV shows, all BDs, all UHD BDs, and 3D. About 2k discs in total. A lot I’ve found used, local video shop closeouts, etc. My dad has about 400-450 retail CDs. I’ve backed up all his stuff too.
I’ve got 8x 16TB drives (RAID5+spare), 10x 8TB drives (RAID5 +spare), and some 2TB SSDs (RAID10) for personal files for my family.
I’ve purchased a new 24x bay Rosewill case for the next expansion 😅. My wife doesn’t like the noise emanating from the basement. ✈️
i don’t really pirate music any more, i get 90% of what i want to listen to from podcasts, internet/community radio and youtube mixes. trying to get in the habit buying stuff i really like from bandcamp to actually support artists.
my mate put me on his family spotify… so use that very rarely, mostly for nostalgia hits.
movies/tv 100% 🏴☠️
Games also 98% mainly old games btw.
If I had the capital, I’d mirror git repos, anna’s archives, libgen, scihub, Wikipedias, torrents, usenet, sketches, websites, portfolios, archive.org, minerva, etc. etc…
It is precisely capitalist oppressions that I haven’t been able to “download everything.” Otherwise I would, and then some.I don’t think capitalist oppression is why hard drives aren’t free
It is why they are preposterously expensive currently.
Along with ram and a whole bunch of other shit.
I don’t stream anything. If I want to watch something, I will download it. The downloads for the shows I watch are all automated so I don’t have to do anything except click play.
When I go on a trip, I just load up my laptop and phone with whatever I want to watch. That way I don’t have to deal with an unreliable or non existent internet connection. Good luck streaming anything over the WiFi in an airplane. There’s barely enough bandwidth for audio unless they have Starlink.
Been free streaming forever. I’m in my 50’s and started with downloads to floppies. For a time over the years we had external drives with favorite TV and movies but we haven’t used them in years. Our kids all free stream too. They’ve never known any other way.
on my server I have the entire library of NES, Master System, Game Gear, GB, GBC, GBA, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, PSX, and PS2 games. Terabytes of games. have I played them all? no way.
I got something similar for movies and series and music. I’ll never see or hear it all, not enough time in a life.
I’d live to make some sort of library out it, something federated that can never die until the last server would go down… That way, everyone can enjoy this
yeah it’s also the same with me for movies, shows, and music. the ROMs take up the most space naturally but I’ll download new releases for movies and shows and most of the time I don’t watch them. for music I’ll find something I like online and then download it off soulseek and I might never hear it again as I have thousands of tracks in my library.
I buy physical discs for the stuff I really care, Steam for digital-only games, streaming and piracy for everything else.
Plus blu-ray has like five times the bitrate of streaming.
Yeah, they are also more durable then ssd/hdd
Disc rot is also a thing.
I find it’s best to accept entropy, that you’re going to die, that everything ends, that you will lose data, that there will be a last time you watch a movie or show, and keep running those ssd/hdds even when they’re in the yellow/red warning zone.
Years back I was sorting through ten years of emails. I got so sick of it, I simply deleted everything. You know what? No drawbacks even ten years later. Such a huge relief.
Reminds me of the artist Michael Landy who chucked everything he owned - pictures, clothes, artwork, his passport - into a shredder. Performance art, reaction against consumerism. He was understandably miserable doing it, but what a relief that must have been. To be free of all the crap. It is true that the things you own often end up owning you.
My grandparents hoarded all their lives, and after they died much of what they owned ended up in a skip, because there wasn’t enough time or interest to sell it. The supposedly priceless porcelain? Chucked. All the records? Sold. Furniture? Goodwill. The huge supply of sunlight soap? Really useful actually.
Disc rot is more probable on DVDs (and I mainly collect blurays).
I understand your point on collections and I’m an entropy guy too but I also appreciate a good collection of art for personal use during my lifetime, without compromises on quality/aviability, and maybe to left to someone in the future who will enjoy it after me. I’m kinda a minimalist for many things but not for art.
I don’t have much time to watch, but when I do I do it on the TV, and streaming on the TV from some random website is extremely difficult to pull off because you only have a shitty browser and the remote control, just to make it full screen is almost impossible without a mouse and keyboard, let alone browsing.
So that is why I use Jellyfin which has a lot of life quality features but needs downloaded files.
To be honest, the difficult part is to find good enough movies and TV series which are worth the very limited time I have to watch them.
