Inspired by a post since deleted, I feel bad for probably coming off judgemental about the poster’s taste in the movie that drove him to consider sailing.
The earliest desired media I can remember that drove me to figure out sailing was DC Talk, a Christian rock band. Pop music was not allowed in my house, so a Christian group was tantalizing and scandalous to a rebellious, young Vanth. Things escalated from there.
Originally, I was too poor to afford software. Then my CD/dvd books were stolen and I couldn’t afford to replace the media I’d been collecting my entire life. I bought an external drive, an s-video to RF modulator, a Bluetooth keyboard and connected my computer to channel 3.
Eventually Pandora and Netflix were released and I stopped pirating. I spent most of a decade buying all of my media. Then I tried to buy a complete set of Good Eats and it wasn’t possible.
There was literally no way to purchase every episode legally. So I took the $500 I was going to spend on that box set and put it towards an ebay’d server and some drives.
By the time the streaming wars started to gain steam, I had everything automated, and was pushing 50TB of storage.
50TB!
I know many people have much more, but wow. 4k I’m guessing? Or full quality 1080 Blu-ray rips?
My TV is… Inadequate. An old 1080p LCD that won’t die. But it’s plenty big, and the backlight is even and the blacks are black enough. It’s plenty clear.
I’ve really enjoyed 4k stuff on my buddies TV. But not enough to justify ditching a perfectly good TV, and the costs associated with a proper HDR OLED, and the increase to my current storage solution (8TB) and the time to find and download everything at Max resolution. I download most my stuff at 720p, I don’t really notice the difference between the two unless I’m pixel peeping.
Plus my family uses my media server remotely, and my upload is only 14mbps, so I’d need to force transcoding, and I’m not sure my server has enough chooch to do 4 concurrent transcoded streams.
I really should just bite the bullet and start with my storage and get higher bitrate stuff now… gah… it’s a slippery slope lol, and so far I’ve been happy with my simple setup…
Sorry for the wall of text, guess I just needed to write this all out 🤷♂️
Everything auto converts to 1080p x265 using tdarr. Ombi is set up so any of my friends with access to the plex server can request whatever they want.