Just pirate it. They can't tell you this but there's a quagmire of rights, licenses, agreements, treaties... and you can untangle this Goridan Knot by just pirating, especially media, for your own use.

There are pixel perfect 4k drm-free rips out there made by people who poured thousands of hours into understanding codecs. They will work on any platform, forever, you can stream them or play offline.

These rips can be freely distributed to friends and family, your kids will be able to play them, they're easy to back up. Physical media are a legacy solution.

And it doesn't stop you from getting a revocable or whatever other license the creators prefer to fund their work.

Another thing that always needs pointing out: that ad-free, copyable, unencumbered, pixel perfect 4K drm-free rip with multiple language audio streams, hand crafted accurate subtitles, chapter tags, and embedded poster art cannot be bought from the movie industry at any price. That's why piracy is a product problem, not a price problem. The industry refuses to produce and offer the superior product, so regardless of the price, piracy is the only way to get it.

I have a TrueNAS server with Jellyfin, but I'd still much rather have a physical blu-ray, especially if it's something with a Criterion release. I think the "inconvenience" of physical media is enjoyable. It makes me commit to actually watch a movie and not just have it on in the background while I look at my phone, much like how a physical record makes me commit to listening to a full album.

believe it or not, but pirated copies can be better a thousandfold than what paying customers get.

whenever I want to play Deathloop, I download it from torrents despite "owning" it on Steam, all because Denuvo really likes my SSD, and whenever I want to go online, then, well, yeah, I have to suffer. still, not regretting the purchase, cuz this money went to Arkane.

Exactly. I pirate eBooks and buy a physical copy when I come around to reading them.

Unrelated to the content: Claude really likes tags

Remember the story of the man who died at Disneyworld, and Disney said his wife couldn't sue them because he agreed to the Disney+ TOS?

I think about that every time I open up Jellyfin

When buying isn't owning...

Yes, of course it's easier to pirate it. The problem is that its unethical (and illegal). That you find it inconvenient to pay for things you want is not a valid justification.

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