Personally I use RAID5, with regular backups for documents and projects. Not too worried if my movies and tv library get lost…that takes up most of the space though.

I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.

Some of mine that suffer from this: Cowboy Bebop anime series, early seasons of Futurama. Many kids shows like Paw Patrol.

Agreed. AppleTV with Infuse blows away everything else I’ve tried.

Haha. What I mean is that some TV series have a different episode order on DVD/bluray than what they were originally broadcast in. “Firefly” is the classic example. The TV networks broadcast them out of order and the DVD order is the “correct” one and the order in which pirate TV packs will use. But by default many tools (which use TMDB.com) have the wrong metadata for the episodes.

For TMDB to end their stupid policy of setting broadcast episode order as the default. Any app that uses them for metadata to match files names ends up with wrong episodes because obviously nobody wants broadcast order.

The worst part is that even buying SG1 on Bluray gives a bad experience, because they fucked up the 5.1 audio.

So what did the pirates do? Combined the Bluray video with the better DVD 5.1 audio! Best of both worlds.

Are you using the Plex app or a third party app such as Infuse? Infuse can handle more codecs and things like image-based subtitles that I don’t think the Plex app can handle, which should reduce transcoding requirements.

It’s a shame that AppleTV doesnt support TrueHD atmos. That seems to be the one feature that the Shield stands apart on, although the new model Firestick now support it, too.

I tried Kodi on Firestick 4K and the whole experience is super clunky compared to the AppleTV.

AppleTV 4K + Infuse app.

Streaming from my local media server.

There are only 10 seasons of The Simpsons and I won’t have it any other way!

Depends what you consider “long term”. My suggestion would be a NAS unit with dual drive redundancy. And additional backup device as well. For consumer level stuff, Synology units with hyper backup are a good solution.

The best way to compare is to re-rip one of your already ripped DVDs. Use MakeMKV and play both back and see if you can tell the difference.

But if we are talking popular movie DVDs, then I’d just grab the Bluray copies from a torrent site. The quality will be far superior.

Oh nice. Didn’t know about this. Seems like an interesting solution!

The film uses an intentionally wide aspect ratio. It also has a lot of added film grain, also intentional. But the grain messes with low bitrate rips. Grab the 20gb+ 4K Web-DL rip to get it in the best possible quality.

I’ll be honest I’m not trying to preserve knowledge I just want high quality stuff for free. Private trackers weed out the low quality files and keep the system healthy by also weeding out people who just leech files without seeding anything back.

If you want to play the files back on your TV…get an Nvidia Shield and run Kodi. Or an AppleTV and run Infuse. Both can connect directly to your network file share and build a nice looking library UI. No need for an intermediate server such as Plex or Jellyfin. But give those a try if you want.

Nvidia Shield or AppleTV4K.

I use an AppleTV4K with the Infuse app to connect to my NAS. Works flawlessly.

Infuse also has support for Plex. I haven’t tried using it with Real Debrid but it does work apparently by adding it as a WebDAV source.

Good point. I’m personally not doing any transcoding so it doesn’t affect me.

Buy a NAS unit such as a Synology DS923+

Add 4 drives to it of equal size. One drive’s worth of space will be sacrificed for redundancy and they’ll all be combined into a single storage drive.

I have 4x 18TB drives giving me just under 50TB of usable storage. Any single drive can fail with no data loss, and I just replace it and keep going.