Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
My wife and I have been slowly over the last few years finding ways to cancel our subscriptions and just own things. If I want to play a vintage game, I buy a physical copy and boot up an emulator. We also set up navidrome and started collecting discs to rip. My wife backed up her spotify playlists before cancelling and we’re trying to find a way to link them to music tracks that we own and make a list of what we’re missing.
Not a terribly challenging task, but I looked around online to see if anyone else was doing it. What I found was dozens of projects going the other way. People saying “I’m looking to ditch my MP3s and move to Spotify.”
It’s certainly less work, but I wonder how all of these people will feel when they’re locked in and their monthly costs for these services increases and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.
Being able to do whatever you want with your physical media is so incredibly freeing. Seems like many born after the 90s don’t seem to quite have a grasp on what that’s like.
I have a digital projector that we take camping. It runs androidOS and you can install apps on it. There is no wifi when camping.
Movies ripped to a thumb drive saves the day.
In 1996, I watched Back to the Future on VHS on a portable CRT TV.
Also the ability to pull a clip from any film you own to create the perfect reaction gif is super nice.
Definitely not alone. For the music I’ve rediscovered record stores. They’re great ways to fill in the gaps of your music library while also discovering new music. I buy CDs and take them home now, happy to keep them on my shelf.
I switched to music streaming (Qobuz) because hi res is too expensive for the amount of music I listen to.
Movies are Garbage quality in streaming though, buying a Blu Ray is so much better and I don’t watch many movies anyways.
This is the way. The new quiet revolution where we dont buy the bullshit anymore.
🫡
You two sound great (would beer)
Pirated enough games in my childhood. It’s the least I could do.
I canceled spoofy earlier this year and have been slowly building my library proper ever since. honestly I’ve always preferred direct downloading my music over streaming because I can access it all offline, I only started using Spotify when my sd card corrupted and I lost all my music on it. tbf it was all pirated cause I was a broke kid but now that I’m buying everything I’m making sure to have backups and physical CDs when I can get them so it never has to be a problem again!
and honestly it’s been SO FUN looking up artists and albums, listening to songs Ive previously ignored or were part of like a collaboration and realizing I really like them. i even got the guts to email one of my favorite artists to inquire about songs he didn’t have on his bandcamp (he sold the rights to em so he can’t sell the songs 😔) and now I look forward to the monthly album I buy to bolster my collection.
My wife loves bandcamp. Especially the sales where they give 100% of the revenue to the artist.
Friday, Oct 3 is one of those sales… tomorrow as of this comment.
Back in 2015 or so, I noticed some of the movies on Netflix that I wanted to rewatch disappeared. I caught on pretty early that this was going to be the case where all the good stuff cycles out, so I took to building a Blu-Ray collection. Now all of my favorites are quick and easy to get to.
At some point I’m planning on digitizing the whole collection because I know discs degrade, but I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want to cook my drive’s laser in the process.
I take a hybrid approach. I’ll buy a movie from my local shop and then go sailing the seas for a digital copy. Much…grayer… but close enough.
You can get bluray drives used for like $30. The real issue is the 4k drives because only certain older models let you rip those. They’re harder to replace.
Ah, I guess I was taking for granted that 4k was one of my requirements. Hadn’t even thought to mention it.
Yeah, I’d say my collection is maybe 5% 4k (over 1000 titles in total). Some discs are reeeeal finnicky. I actually thought my drive was toast at one point, but I was able to take it apart and clean the lens with some IPA to get it working again. Wasn’t looking forward to replacing it.
You can always get a stack of usb dvd drives, and use those.
The challenge is finding a model that lets you rip them. To my awareness, there isn’t any officially supported method to rip BluRays and you have to modify the firmware to let you backup your own media.
deleted by creator
How are you liking navidrome? I’ve been using Jellyfin for everything, using the finamp app for music, and it’s been pretty good. I’ve heard good things about navidrome but I already had Jellyfin set up on my server so I just stuck with it for music too. I don’t have much music on there yet though so I’d consider moving over to navidrome if it was a considerable improvement. I did try to get it set up a few weeks back but couldn’t get it right away and got busy afterwards.
My wife is the music person, so I set it up for her. She seems to like it. I had funkwhale originally, but it doesn’t have nearly the features (though it does support multiple users’ libraries).
The plan is to generate playlists in navidrome and match the filesystems so she can just drag them to her iPod. I haven’t looked into it all too much, but one annoying thing is that some things are kept in the database that I wish were plaintext. Like, I think you can rename files and whatever in the web interface, but it doesn’t modify the original files. I guess that’s okay if you’re nervous about busting your files, but I wish you had a little more control over it.
Yeah, Navidrome does not alter your files by design. I use MP3tag to do all my editing. Operations are a bit slow when the files are on my server, but otherwise I have a decent flow down.
I don’t love Navidrome’s preference for Musicbrainz tags, but I know I can change that.
I agree with everything you’re saying, however it’s a bit much to claim anyone would ever be “locked in” can always just cancel the subscription lol
Go ahead and try to buy a copy of Klaus on DVD.
🏴☠️
If you’ve made a good faith effort to buy something and it’s simply not on the market, the creator isn’t losing anything by you pirating it
Won’t give them the satisfaction. There are plenty of other Christmas movies (we actually have like 4 days worth).
3 more days to cover, then. Hop to it!
If they haven’t already included the Die Hard movies are they even trying?
I can assume what your point is, but can you clarify why? Lol
We’re moving into a space where the only way to access certain types of content that was previously ownable is now through subscription.
There is absolutely no technical reason why Klaus is only available on streaming. It doesn’t require special live-servers to run. There is no staff maintaining it. There are no monthly updates. It’s just 20 gigs of data on someone else’s hard drive that you aren’t allowed to have.
See but it was only released that way, it’s not like it was physical and became digital only (as far as I’m aware) it’s like music or YouTube videos, it is primarily a digital platform and medium.
As someone who’s been digital only with media for nearly a decade and a half, it doesn’t matter to me if I can physically buy it, can I get it digitally somehow? Yes.
But what if you can’t get it? Go try to watch the Willow TV show on Disney+. There is no longer a legal way to watch it. They removed it from the service. You can’t buy it. It’s gone. Disney has also been editing its classic movies like Lilo and Stitch and Splash to remove parts that I guess they found objectionable.
When Robert Redford died, a bunch of streaming services took down his movies and locked them behind a premium paywall. They know you’ll pay more, so they’ll make you pay more. For absolutely zero additional benefit to you or work on their part.
The trend that entertainment and culture are increasingly held hostage behind a paywall and subject to edits is dystopian as hell. What’s to stop Spotify or Netflix from moving all of your favorite media to Spotify Pro or Netflix Premium? What if there’s no other way to acquire that media? How much would you pay per month to experience it again? In what way is this a service that benefits the consumer?
I like my collection of movies, shows, and music, and as long as I’m careful not to lose the files, I can experience them, unchanged, for as long as I like.
And that is happening. Many movies are out of print. DVDs don’t always last forever. There has never been a legal way to obtain a movie in a DRM-free digital format. Ripping backups from discs is the only way to guarantee they are preserved and available forever.
Purely legal means is the issue here, I agree it’s a problem that they’re do things like that, I just feel that if they’re going to take those routes and make it literally impossible for me to own something well… There are rather easy ways around that, and if I can directly support those who made that piece of media, I will!
Well, mp3s are crap. I’m sure if they had built a collection around flacs, they wouldn’t feel this way.