Content you purchased shouldn’t disappear
December 15, 2024 1:34 PM Subscribe
You have a massive collection of e-books, music, video games, software, and movies that you bought as a digital download, and you probably think you own them, like you own a physical book or a DVD. Think again. from Do I really own the digital media I bought?
A "Digital Rights Byte" from the EFF
Others include: Why is it so expensive to repair my devices?; Can the government read my text messages?; Is my phone listening to me? and Why is printer ink so expensive?
A "Digital Rights Byte" from the EFF
Others include: Why is it so expensive to repair my devices?; Can the government read my text messages?; Is my phone listening to me? and Why is printer ink so expensive?
This is good info. I'm that friend/family member who likes to tell people whenever the topic comes up that they're only "renting" any digital content they thought they bought (and yes, I fully recognize how insufferable that is). My wife has a much more healthy approach. She's not one for re-reading books, so she treats book "purchases" as an entertainment fee, much like buying a ticket to a movie. She'll keep them as long as she has space on her device, but doesn't much care if they disappear. For anything she thinks she'll want to re-read, she'll buy a hard-copy. For music, however, which she'll listen to multiple times and wants to own, she'll only purchase from venues that let her download the MP3s.
Neither of us "buys" TV/movies, mostly for this reason, though occasionally we will formally rent from one of the streaming services.
posted by Pedantzilla at 2:16 PM on December 15 [5 favorites]
Neither of us "buys" TV/movies, mostly for this reason, though occasionally we will formally rent from one of the streaming services.
posted by Pedantzilla at 2:16 PM on December 15 [5 favorites]
*climbs atop soapbox, clears throat*
The All Digital Everything Future harms so many public library users specifically. A LOT of the people who visit my rural Oregon library system use our DVD catalog as if it was [Popular Streaming Service]. They have either spotty internet or none at all, so grabbing a stack of movies and TV seasons sets them up for the weekend.
I hate how many times I've had to tell a patron "sorry, I can't even interlibrary loan this for you because it does not exist on DVD." (I have SO MANY Indigenous patrons who would love it if our library was able to loan out Hulu's Reservation Dogs, for instance.)
Netflix, Amazon, Disney... all the streaming services with exclusive content that they refuse to put on physical media because it's much more profitable to them to parcel content out to you a month at a time in a format you can't share with anyone else.
A pox on all their houses!
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 2:28 PM on December 15 [82 favorites]
The All Digital Everything Future harms so many public library users specifically. A LOT of the people who visit my rural Oregon library system use our DVD catalog as if it was [Popular Streaming Service]. They have either spotty internet or none at all, so grabbing a stack of movies and TV seasons sets them up for the weekend.
I hate how many times I've had to tell a patron "sorry, I can't even interlibrary loan this for you because it does not exist on DVD." (I have SO MANY Indigenous patrons who would love it if our library was able to loan out Hulu's Reservation Dogs, for instance.)
Netflix, Amazon, Disney... all the streaming services with exclusive content that they refuse to put on physical media because it's much more profitable to them to parcel content out to you a month at a time in a format you can't share with anyone else.
A pox on all their houses!
posted by The demon that lives in the air at 2:28 PM on December 15 [82 favorites]
Our phones are definitely listening to us. I've had experiences where I'll be talking to my girlfriend about some weird, super specific little thing - like maybe we were joking about a manatee Christmas ornament - and then she'll sit down to read stuff on her phone and show me that she just got an ad for a manatee Christmas ornament. If that happened once or twice I could write it off as a freaky coincidence, but that shit happens a lot. You've probably got stories like that too. I read these articles saying it's an urban legend, and... no. The tech exists to listen to us, feed us targeted ads, keep tabs on dissidents, etc. Of course the fuckers will use it.
/tinfoil hat rant.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:33 PM on December 15 [16 favorites]
/tinfoil hat rant.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:33 PM on December 15 [16 favorites]
You have a massive collection of e-books, music, video games, software, and movies that you bought as a digital download downloaded from somewhere, and you probably think you own them, like you own a physical book or a DVD.
and you'd be absolutely correct.
posted by alchemist at 2:37 PM on December 15 [17 favorites]
and you'd be absolutely correct.
posted by alchemist at 2:37 PM on December 15 [17 favorites]
even physical copies of software may have the same licenses that restrict such ownership. hoarding media does not solve this "problem"
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:44 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:44 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
Just the one swan, actually: This is why I buy my music through Bandcamp.
Nth-ing Bandcamp. I'm usually an advocate also of Qobuz.com but I discovered that a few of my purchases from their download store are no longer available to re-download.
Physical media is so much easier to track when you use your post-sale rights. Data is harder to track, but the EFF would be entirely against a cryptographic enclave (with full DRM and network-attested integrity) and ledger where you have the data until you sell onwards, and then the digital locks stop you from accessing that specific copy once the rights have sold onward. Copyright infringement (not piracy) is looming in the background of this note and the fix, as said by gaben of Steam, is convenience not bigger locks.
posted by k3ninho at 2:48 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
Nth-ing Bandcamp. I'm usually an advocate also of Qobuz.com but I discovered that a few of my purchases from their download store are no longer available to re-download.
Physical media is so much easier to track when you use your post-sale rights. Data is harder to track, but the EFF would be entirely against a cryptographic enclave (with full DRM and network-attested integrity) and ledger where you have the data until you sell onwards, and then the digital locks stop you from accessing that specific copy once the rights have sold onward. Copyright infringement (not piracy) is looming in the background of this note and the fix, as said by gaben of Steam, is convenience not bigger locks.
posted by k3ninho at 2:48 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
Here's the latest scam that Audible is pulling: the books you buy there are supposed to be "yours forever." But I started noticing that some books I know I'd listened to previously weren't in my app. However, I listen to books on Libby and Libro as well and can never remember where I did so. My brain starts thinking, "Oh, that musta been Libby," and then I consider purchasing from Audible.
But... then I log into Audible.com and click My Library and search for it there. And, it is there on the computer. When I reopen the app to confirm, it's still only offering me the ability to Purchase.
So, I contact Audible support and they confirm I did buy it, so they refund me the credit so I can buy it again. When I ask why, they tell me the publisher must have reupped the files due to complaints about a glitch or a mistake in the table of contents or something and therefore my app isn't recognizing it as the same file I already paid for. "Then why does my computer recognize it?" I ask, and am told that's a very good question but am given no answer.
The whole thing is ridiculous, right? But wait! I have not yet gotten to the ridiculous part, dear reader.
I guess a lot of people were having this problem and Audible was tired of giving them the credit back, so what they've now done is made it so that you cannot contact customer support unless you have an active membership! And by active, I mean active. Even if you have credits to spend (which you've paid for), but you've paused your membership to catch up on your listening, you cannot contact support!
So, just unpause and then contact them, right? Yup... but guess what? You cannot repause your membership after contacting support because you can only pause your membership once every six months so then you're stuck needing to spend credits that aren't going to roll over before you can repause.
If you recontact support and scream at them because of this, they will repause for you, but only after denying a few times that they're capable of that. Absolute horseshit.
I've been a member there since before Amazon bought them and have over 1100 books through them but now I just use Libro or Libby. I have one credit that will never expire (given to me for a book I'd previously purchased that disappeared), which I will never use, just so I'm able to unpause and contact customer service about other titles of mine they may disappear.
Amazon is evil.
posted by dobbs at 2:49 PM on December 15 [35 favorites]
But... then I log into Audible.com and click My Library and search for it there. And, it is there on the computer. When I reopen the app to confirm, it's still only offering me the ability to Purchase.
So, I contact Audible support and they confirm I did buy it, so they refund me the credit so I can buy it again. When I ask why, they tell me the publisher must have reupped the files due to complaints about a glitch or a mistake in the table of contents or something and therefore my app isn't recognizing it as the same file I already paid for. "Then why does my computer recognize it?" I ask, and am told that's a very good question but am given no answer.
The whole thing is ridiculous, right? But wait! I have not yet gotten to the ridiculous part, dear reader.
I guess a lot of people were having this problem and Audible was tired of giving them the credit back, so what they've now done is made it so that you cannot contact customer support unless you have an active membership! And by active, I mean active. Even if you have credits to spend (which you've paid for), but you've paused your membership to catch up on your listening, you cannot contact support!
So, just unpause and then contact them, right? Yup... but guess what? You cannot repause your membership after contacting support because you can only pause your membership once every six months so then you're stuck needing to spend credits that aren't going to roll over before you can repause.
If you recontact support and scream at them because of this, they will repause for you, but only after denying a few times that they're capable of that. Absolute horseshit.
I've been a member there since before Amazon bought them and have over 1100 books through them but now I just use Libro or Libby. I have one credit that will never expire (given to me for a book I'd previously purchased that disappeared), which I will never use, just so I'm able to unpause and contact customer service about other titles of mine they may disappear.
Amazon is evil.
posted by dobbs at 2:49 PM on December 15 [35 favorites]
Do I really own the digital media I bought?
I own all mine. And my copies of all the digital media other people were kind enough to share with me. They're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything. There isn't a single DRM-encumbered one in the bunch because fuck that noise.
That said, it's quite sad that in 2024 that probably involves rolling your own.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 PM on December 15 [14 favorites]
I own all mine. And my copies of all the digital media other people were kind enough to share with me. They're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything. There isn't a single DRM-encumbered one in the bunch because fuck that noise.
If the company you bought it from shuts down, changes its terms, or just flat out loses the rights to what you’ve “bought,” that content can be clawed back from your devices.Solution there is to use devices that suck less.
That said, it's quite sad that in 2024 that probably involves rolling your own.
posted by flabdablet at 2:58 PM on December 15 [14 favorites]
I resigned myself to this a long while ago, partly because I don't even own all the thousands of physical books I owned, not any more. Nor do I own the physical CDs, tapes, or albums I had once. My life has been a succession of purges, and while I am a voracious reader and still buy books (bought four at the bookstore just today), I only save a few and treat the rest as fodder for the Little Free Library or the nice people who come pick up my thrift donations.
I'm not saying this is virtuous or anything. It's just that I figured out bit by bit that I can't carry it all with me, even assuming the world wasn't run by evil corporate monsters, and that detaching myself from most of my music, books, and movies cushions the anxiety of possible loss.
I think the final blow was when my husband the computer consultant was moving my files from an old computer to a new one and forgot to bring over all my PhD dissertation fieldwork and analysis files before he wiped the old computer. I cried for three days, even though I had defended long before, and then I decided I wasn't going to let it matter.
posted by Peach at 3:17 PM on December 15 [17 favorites]
I'm not saying this is virtuous or anything. It's just that I figured out bit by bit that I can't carry it all with me, even assuming the world wasn't run by evil corporate monsters, and that detaching myself from most of my music, books, and movies cushions the anxiety of possible loss.
I think the final blow was when my husband the computer consultant was moving my files from an old computer to a new one and forgot to bring over all my PhD dissertation fieldwork and analysis files before he wiped the old computer. I cried for three days, even though I had defended long before, and then I decided I wasn't going to let it matter.
posted by Peach at 3:17 PM on December 15 [17 favorites]
I go back and forth on this. I tend to think it might be better to dump streaming services and just buy stuff. I did that for a while and have a big back catalog--with major holes that I'm now unwilling to pay to fill. The streaming services make it too easy.
I feel like one of the things I owe my children is to crack all the digital media I've bought over the years.
While it's true that I have a massive trove of VERY SPECIFIC PDFs, they may be more interested in the other stuff that'll go into and out of streaming catalogs but will be very cheap to store as that gets easier and easier.
I know how to do this with Kindle books, though I've never really bothered. I'm less certain that this is possible with movies, or music that I've now handed over to Apple perhaps one too many times.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:19 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
I feel like one of the things I owe my children is to crack all the digital media I've bought over the years.
While it's true that I have a massive trove of VERY SPECIFIC PDFs, they may be more interested in the other stuff that'll go into and out of streaming catalogs but will be very cheap to store as that gets easier and easier.
I know how to do this with Kindle books, though I've never really bothered. I'm less certain that this is possible with movies, or music that I've now handed over to Apple perhaps one too many times.
posted by anotherpanacea at 3:19 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Unlicensed media is better than licensed media. Scene MKV files will be replayable on open source systems forever.
posted by Nelson at 3:27 PM on December 15 [10 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 3:27 PM on December 15 [10 favorites]
hey're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything
The last time this came up here (can't find a link now) it finally got me started on going back to physical media and setting up kodi on an rpi5. Amazon Prime Video shoving ads into everything recently felt more like vindication than yet another turn of the screw.
DVDs and BDs can live on a spindle and not take up much space. Makemkv and Libredrive firmware on an appropriate BD disk drive gets you everything from DVDs up through 4k UHD blu rays. And done. You now have your own netflix.
One of the upsides to this is that when Christmas rolls around some of the typical Christmas movies (like Die Hard) will not be available on most streaming services (but *of course* will be available for a digital rental). Now you don't have to worry about individual titles disappearing and reappearing when you want to watch something.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:27 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]
The last time this came up here (can't find a link now) it finally got me started on going back to physical media and setting up kodi on an rpi5. Amazon Prime Video shoving ads into everything recently felt more like vindication than yet another turn of the screw.
DVDs and BDs can live on a spindle and not take up much space. Makemkv and Libredrive firmware on an appropriate BD disk drive gets you everything from DVDs up through 4k UHD blu rays. And done. You now have your own netflix.
One of the upsides to this is that when Christmas rolls around some of the typical Christmas movies (like Die Hard) will not be available on most streaming services (but *of course* will be available for a digital rental). Now you don't have to worry about individual titles disappearing and reappearing when you want to watch something.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:27 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]
hey're all sitting on my home media server in unencrypted standard media formats that genuinely play on anything
While I concur that this is an excellent way to keep your media (I raise you 'op shop hard copy' in addition to personal servers, because I have had one too many hard drive crashes in my life to risk digital only), it's also a massive, massive amount of skill and experience to achieve. My siblings do not have the same skill set and rely on digital for a lot of their media. The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up, and they too deserve to hang onto their media.
posted by Jilder at 3:42 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]
While I concur that this is an excellent way to keep your media (I raise you 'op shop hard copy' in addition to personal servers, because I have had one too many hard drive crashes in my life to risk digital only), it's also a massive, massive amount of skill and experience to achieve. My siblings do not have the same skill set and rely on digital for a lot of their media. The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up, and they too deserve to hang onto their media.
posted by Jilder at 3:42 PM on December 15 [7 favorites]
When I was a kid, I knew a couple of families who had multiple types of computers for multiple purposes, and it seemed inevitable that’s something I would have as an adult. As a teenager, I happily ripped CDs and waited 30 minutes for an mp3 to download over a dialup connection on a noisy phone line.
Now, I have an aging laptop, phone, Kindle, and Xbox One, and the idea of devoting the time and space to setting up a home media server and loading content onto it feels deeply depressing, especially when I think about backups and other periodic maintenance and equipment failures. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had a spouse and kids, but for me on my own, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
posted by smelendez at 3:45 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
Now, I have an aging laptop, phone, Kindle, and Xbox One, and the idea of devoting the time and space to setting up a home media server and loading content onto it feels deeply depressing, especially when I think about backups and other periodic maintenance and equipment failures. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had a spouse and kids, but for me on my own, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
posted by smelendez at 3:45 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up
Friend of mine had her mind absolutely blown when I showed up at her place with a 64GB USB stick full of mp3s and gave her a copy.
Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
posted by flabdablet at 3:49 PM on December 15 [13 favorites]
Friend of mine had her mind absolutely blown when I showed up at her place with a 64GB USB stick full of mp3s and gave her a copy.
Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
posted by flabdablet at 3:49 PM on December 15 [13 favorites]
If you do want to set up a home media system, a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough. It can download and serve video, music, even transcode 1080p in realtime (and maybe 4k). The software part still requires some hackery, it's definitely an enthusiast project.
posted by Nelson at 3:49 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 3:49 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
I've started buying DVDs and blue rays of my really beloved niche films for this very reason
posted by treepour at 3:52 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
posted by treepour at 3:52 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
flabdablet: "Music? Without an Internet connection?"
We also used to buy (buy!) songs in sets of 10 or so, rather than a la carte. We called these sets "albums." Sometimes albums had a unifying theme running through them, and the songs were ordered intentionally to create a certain artistic effect. An elegant delivery mechanism from a more civilized time.
posted by adamrice at 4:04 PM on December 15 [27 favorites]
We also used to buy (buy!) songs in sets of 10 or so, rather than a la carte. We called these sets "albums." Sometimes albums had a unifying theme running through them, and the songs were ordered intentionally to create a certain artistic effect. An elegant delivery mechanism from a more civilized time.
posted by adamrice at 4:04 PM on December 15 [27 favorites]
The only problem with Bandcamp is that I can't get all the music I want from there. So I buy from Apple, which has no DRM on their music, and download and store it outside of Apple Music.
As for ebooks...let's just say I no longer worry about losing the ability to read any of them whenever I want. I still have paper copies of the truly life-changing ones.
posted by lhauser at 4:13 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
As for ebooks...let's just say I no longer worry about losing the ability to read any of them whenever I want. I still have paper copies of the truly life-changing ones.
posted by lhauser at 4:13 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough
CoreELEC on any of the tiny single board computers it supports works great too. I run it on an Odroid N2 (since superseded by the N2+). Half the price of the Beelink and eats about 5 watts running flat out, less than 1W idling.
My CoreELEC board doesn't have storage attached, though - that's on another N2+ out in the back shed with a bunch of USB3 hard drives hanging off it to make up a RAID5 array. They eat a bit more power but still rather less than a typical Intel based mini PC. But if your media collection is modest enough to fit on say a 10TB USB3 backup drive, that can just be plugged straight into the N2+ running CoreELEC.
posted by flabdablet at 4:14 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
CoreELEC on any of the tiny single board computers it supports works great too. I run it on an Odroid N2 (since superseded by the N2+). Half the price of the Beelink and eats about 5 watts running flat out, less than 1W idling.
My CoreELEC board doesn't have storage attached, though - that's on another N2+ out in the back shed with a bunch of USB3 hard drives hanging off it to make up a RAID5 array. They eat a bit more power but still rather less than a typical Intel based mini PC. But if your media collection is modest enough to fit on say a 10TB USB3 backup drive, that can just be plugged straight into the N2+ running CoreELEC.
posted by flabdablet at 4:14 PM on December 15 [6 favorites]
Just the one swan, actually
Whoa. I'm forty more!
posted by 41swans at 4:30 PM on December 15 [10 favorites]
Whoa. I'm forty more!
posted by 41swans at 4:30 PM on December 15 [10 favorites]
a $170 N100 mini-PC like the Beelink is plenty powerful enough
Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server. My wife is pissed off at Bezos and wants to get off Prime, and more generally is interested in reducing our reliance on streaming services. I have a perhaps-naive fantasy of driving my TV with a NUC-like box with a (probably external) optical drive for ripping media and a nice big drive for file storage. But... I'm busy with work and family, so I imagine it's going to be hard for me to find time to go off beaten paths.
While (as a programmer) I have used a computer or two in my day, I'm really not familiar with the real-world state of the relevant hardware, software, or whatever DRMy obstacles media companies have put in the way of my actually-and-unironically-completely-legal fantasy.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 4:43 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server. My wife is pissed off at Bezos and wants to get off Prime, and more generally is interested in reducing our reliance on streaming services. I have a perhaps-naive fantasy of driving my TV with a NUC-like box with a (probably external) optical drive for ripping media and a nice big drive for file storage. But... I'm busy with work and family, so I imagine it's going to be hard for me to find time to go off beaten paths.
While (as a programmer) I have used a computer or two in my day, I'm really not familiar with the real-world state of the relevant hardware, software, or whatever DRMy obstacles media companies have put in the way of my actually-and-unironically-completely-legal fantasy.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 4:43 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server.
First thing: it's almost always WAAAAY!! easier to just download from usenet or torrents than it is to actually rip your own disc.
You'll want to separate the renderer you hook to the tv or receiver from the server -- windows boxes anyway have problems with hdr, especially with hdr in content.
Something like a googletv, onn 4k, or shield will do a good job rendering. TVs that run google-os can do fine with some methods, not in others.
The server can be something as simple as a very basic NAS that just lets other things grab files, or it can be a decommissioned enterprise rackmount server with three disk shelves hooked up to it with a petabyte or more.
Option 1: Put Kodi on the renderer and put the files on the server, and it can be a very simple server. Kodi runs entirely on the renderer. Like, it's not a client/server thing, there is no server. There are just files someplace that Kodi can see. You tell it movies are here, songs are here, etc, and it indexes them in a... better than half-assed but not fully-assed way. You'll need to go in and manually identify some files, but only once. If you're in the apple world, you can apparently do something similar with "infuse" on the appletv.
Option 2: Jellyfin. Or plex, but from the outside plex seems to be about halfway down the path to enshittification. Jellyfin is very much client/server. One advantage of jellyfin with multiple users and devices is that you only need to set it up once (unlike kodi, which you'd need to set up individually on every device), because the clients just ask for info from the server. Another is that, with a not-comically-underpowered server, you can transcode on the fly so your wifi and phone aren't both buckling under the load of a ninety-gigabyte 4k/hdr/dolby vision mkv. Advantage 3 is that you're much more likely to be able to get away with installing the jellyfin client directly on a (googly) tv.
The downside of jellyfin is that it requires a stronger server. This doesn't mean *STRONK!*, but it does mean that you probably won't be able to run it on a cheap commodity NAS from synology or qnap -- and if you can run jellyfin server on it, and well, you're almost certainly overpaying for the hardware. Basically anything intel 8th gen or newer, including wee little bois like the n100, is fine. You mostly need an integrated gpu with the transcoding functions. A simple way to do this is to just buy a decommissioned pc with an appropriate cpu and throw a big hard drive in there. Just leaving windows on it is fine to start with.
The bug might get you, though. We went from a little 2-bay synology nas to 16tb usable in a windows storage-spaces array to 48tb-usable in an unraid array in a ginormous fractaldesign box that should be good up to 16 or so hard drives.
If you want to roll your own server, the two most prominent options are truenas and unraid. Unraid is NOT FREE and is more or less purpose built for a media server. It's a weird thing. On the one hand, the OS boots from a USB drive and you have to login as root. WTF? What the weirdness buys you is: (1) an array of drives where you can just add another drive. Machine is full? Add a drive. Which drive? Whatever's the best price per terabyte at goharddrive or serverpartdeals that week. You'll have a little futzing if the new drive is bigger than your existing drives, but mostly you just put in the drive and that's it. Another advantage is that while it does have parity (or double parity) protection, it's not raid (hence the name). It's just a bunch of files on a bunch of disks that unraid displays to you as a coherent thing. This is good for power consumption -- it means that when someone cues up duneparttwo.mkv on their phone, only the one drive that holds the file spins up. Its interface for setting up and running the docker containers that will actually Do The Stuff, or full virtual machines, is staggeringly easy to use and the parts that are remotely confusing have helpful videos and text tutorials. Finally, if you do have catastrophically bad luck and lose more data drives than you have parity protection, you'll only lose the data on the drives that went bad.
truenas is free and is basically enterprise software. It runs off the zfs file system, which has a huge amount of protection, and continually queries itself to find potential errors in its stored files. But for me anyway, I don't need this. If all the drives in my server zeroed out tomorrow, I'd mostly just be faced with a moderately-unpleasant month redownloading the files. Truenas downside one, which they're supposedly working on, is that it's more expensive to add drives to the system. You can't just expand an existing zfs-raid array -- you need to add several drives in a new pool. So instead of getting one of whatever's cheap that week, it would make more sense to get 3 or 5 of them. Downside two is that it is absolutely raid, so every file is smeared across all of your drives. This means that anytime you access a file, all the hard drives have to spin up. It also means that if you do lose more data drives than you have parity protection, you've lost everything. Reputed downside 3 is that being basically enterprise software it has a reputation for being harder for newbies.
The way I see it, truenas is for your family photos and other precious data, and unraid works well for stuff that you'd just need to download again.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:48 PM on December 15 [15 favorites]
First thing: it's almost always WAAAAY!! easier to just download from usenet or torrents than it is to actually rip your own disc.
You'll want to separate the renderer you hook to the tv or receiver from the server -- windows boxes anyway have problems with hdr, especially with hdr in content.
Something like a googletv, onn 4k, or shield will do a good job rendering. TVs that run google-os can do fine with some methods, not in others.
The server can be something as simple as a very basic NAS that just lets other things grab files, or it can be a decommissioned enterprise rackmount server with three disk shelves hooked up to it with a petabyte or more.
Option 1: Put Kodi on the renderer and put the files on the server, and it can be a very simple server. Kodi runs entirely on the renderer. Like, it's not a client/server thing, there is no server. There are just files someplace that Kodi can see. You tell it movies are here, songs are here, etc, and it indexes them in a... better than half-assed but not fully-assed way. You'll need to go in and manually identify some files, but only once. If you're in the apple world, you can apparently do something similar with "infuse" on the appletv.
Option 2: Jellyfin. Or plex, but from the outside plex seems to be about halfway down the path to enshittification. Jellyfin is very much client/server. One advantage of jellyfin with multiple users and devices is that you only need to set it up once (unlike kodi, which you'd need to set up individually on every device), because the clients just ask for info from the server. Another is that, with a not-comically-underpowered server, you can transcode on the fly so your wifi and phone aren't both buckling under the load of a ninety-gigabyte 4k/hdr/dolby vision mkv. Advantage 3 is that you're much more likely to be able to get away with installing the jellyfin client directly on a (googly) tv.
The downside of jellyfin is that it requires a stronger server. This doesn't mean *STRONK!*, but it does mean that you probably won't be able to run it on a cheap commodity NAS from synology or qnap -- and if you can run jellyfin server on it, and well, you're almost certainly overpaying for the hardware. Basically anything intel 8th gen or newer, including wee little bois like the n100, is fine. You mostly need an integrated gpu with the transcoding functions. A simple way to do this is to just buy a decommissioned pc with an appropriate cpu and throw a big hard drive in there. Just leaving windows on it is fine to start with.
The bug might get you, though. We went from a little 2-bay synology nas to 16tb usable in a windows storage-spaces array to 48tb-usable in an unraid array in a ginormous fractaldesign box that should be good up to 16 or so hard drives.
If you want to roll your own server, the two most prominent options are truenas and unraid. Unraid is NOT FREE and is more or less purpose built for a media server. It's a weird thing. On the one hand, the OS boots from a USB drive and you have to login as root. WTF? What the weirdness buys you is: (1) an array of drives where you can just add another drive. Machine is full? Add a drive. Which drive? Whatever's the best price per terabyte at goharddrive or serverpartdeals that week. You'll have a little futzing if the new drive is bigger than your existing drives, but mostly you just put in the drive and that's it. Another advantage is that while it does have parity (or double parity) protection, it's not raid (hence the name). It's just a bunch of files on a bunch of disks that unraid displays to you as a coherent thing. This is good for power consumption -- it means that when someone cues up duneparttwo.mkv on their phone, only the one drive that holds the file spins up. Its interface for setting up and running the docker containers that will actually Do The Stuff, or full virtual machines, is staggeringly easy to use and the parts that are remotely confusing have helpful videos and text tutorials. Finally, if you do have catastrophically bad luck and lose more data drives than you have parity protection, you'll only lose the data on the drives that went bad.
truenas is free and is basically enterprise software. It runs off the zfs file system, which has a huge amount of protection, and continually queries itself to find potential errors in its stored files. But for me anyway, I don't need this. If all the drives in my server zeroed out tomorrow, I'd mostly just be faced with a moderately-unpleasant month redownloading the files. Truenas downside one, which they're supposedly working on, is that it's more expensive to add drives to the system. You can't just expand an existing zfs-raid array -- you need to add several drives in a new pool. So instead of getting one of whatever's cheap that week, it would make more sense to get 3 or 5 of them. Downside two is that it is absolutely raid, so every file is smeared across all of your drives. This means that anytime you access a file, all the hard drives have to spin up. It also means that if you do lose more data drives than you have parity protection, you've lost everything. Reputed downside 3 is that being basically enterprise software it has a reputation for being harder for newbies.
The way I see it, truenas is for your family photos and other precious data, and unraid works well for stuff that you'd just need to download again.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:48 PM on December 15 [15 favorites]
Yeah, I've bought most of my recent music off of iTunes, and have it downloaded to my PC. (Most of my music is on CDs and ripped to my computer.) I have roughly 90 gigs of music on my phone, so I can go anywhere with most of my music available, regardless of signal.
For games, GoG offers DRM free installers. They go out of business, as long as you still have the installer, you're good to go. Same with itch.io. Back when they did their sales to support Texas Trans youth and Ukraine I bought a ludicrous amount of gaming stuff. I've played a lot of it, but nowhere near all.
Theoretically, when Steam goes out of business, they'll disable their DRM (at least they said they would). That doesn't mean that other DRM won't still be active, or that the game will transfer to a new PC. My 20 year old install of Unreal Tournament still works, after migrating through 4-5 different computers. UT2004 does registry stuff, so you need to either reinstall it, or much with the registry to get the game to run. (And UT's now free at the internet archive.)
posted by Spike Glee at 5:48 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
For games, GoG offers DRM free installers. They go out of business, as long as you still have the installer, you're good to go. Same with itch.io. Back when they did their sales to support Texas Trans youth and Ukraine I bought a ludicrous amount of gaming stuff. I've played a lot of it, but nowhere near all.
Theoretically, when Steam goes out of business, they'll disable their DRM (at least they said they would). That doesn't mean that other DRM won't still be active, or that the game will transfer to a new PC. My 20 year old install of Unreal Tournament still works, after migrating through 4-5 different computers. UT2004 does registry stuff, so you need to either reinstall it, or much with the registry to get the game to run. (And UT's now free at the internet archive.)
posted by Spike Glee at 5:48 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server.
Step 1: Figure out where you're going to store the media. The Synology DS 224+ is an excellent choice, and fill it with the appropriate disks.
Step 2: Remove the DRM from your purchased content:
a) eBooks: Calibre and noDRM Tools. This seems to be a reasonable guide. It's a running battle between Amazon and DeDRM over their KFX format, but you can buy an older Kindle for less than $20 that'll let you keep using the older formats. Or buy your books from someone like Kobo or Google who use the Adobe DRM, which is easier to break.
b) Audiobooks:
Audible: OpenAudible will download and strip DRM
Kobo: Kobo Book Downloader
c) Other media: Arr, Matey
Obviously, this may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction.
OK, now you have your media on your file server, how do you play it back? Plex will serve up your movies, music (via Plexamp), and Audiobooks. The Plex package for Synology does a poor job of tracking the very latest releases, but you can upgrade by hand or live with it.
posted by Runes at 5:56 PM on December 15 [18 favorites]
Step 1: Figure out where you're going to store the media. The Synology DS 224+ is an excellent choice, and fill it with the appropriate disks.
Step 2: Remove the DRM from your purchased content:
a) eBooks: Calibre and noDRM Tools. This seems to be a reasonable guide. It's a running battle between Amazon and DeDRM over their KFX format, but you can buy an older Kindle for less than $20 that'll let you keep using the older formats. Or buy your books from someone like Kobo or Google who use the Adobe DRM, which is easier to break.
b) Audiobooks:
Audible: OpenAudible will download and strip DRM
Kobo: Kobo Book Downloader
c) Other media: Arr, Matey
Obviously, this may or may not be legal in your jurisdiction.
OK, now you have your media on your file server, how do you play it back? Plex will serve up your movies, music (via Plexamp), and Audiobooks. The Plex package for Synology does a poor job of tracking the very latest releases, but you can upgrade by hand or live with it.
posted by Runes at 5:56 PM on December 15 [18 favorites]
I have thought about that over the years and I have never come to a satisfactory conclusion. I’m aware that I don’t own the media, and it could be taken away from me at any moment. However, I have to balance that against the fact that I have no descendants, so it is not going to matter much when I die. I don’t have a strong attachment to any of the books in my collection. This same condition attaches to all the music in my collection and the movies.
When my mother died, she left behind around 2000 books that we had to figure out what to do with. If it hadn’t been for the local prison, we would’ve wound up, tossing most of them in the dump because they weren’t in good enough shape to be sold, and were not valuable enough to even to cover the cost of the gas necessary to transport them to a book seller.
Ownership of your media might be important to some people, but it’s not an ideal solution for everybody. Some consideration needs to be given to that.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:02 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
When my mother died, she left behind around 2000 books that we had to figure out what to do with. If it hadn’t been for the local prison, we would’ve wound up, tossing most of them in the dump because they weren’t in good enough shape to be sold, and were not valuable enough to even to cover the cost of the gas necessary to transport them to a book seller.
Ownership of your media might be important to some people, but it’s not an ideal solution for everybody. Some consideration needs to be given to that.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:02 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]
Ooh it would be excellent if this thread ended up giving a little head start on figuring out a home media server.
Vaya con Dios, my friend.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 6:26 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Vaya con Dios, my friend.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 6:26 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
I've spent way too much of my life trying to maintain downloaded media in formats that I can actually own. I don't do that any more though, since I realised nobody gives a flying fuck about all that sound and vision except me and I'll be either dead or dead from the neck up with dementia in a decade or two. Any books and music that are really important to me I have in CDs or hard copy as well, but the only use for them is for me while I'm around because any that are still working when I flee this dump will no doubt go straight in the bin.
But, yea, I'm also 'that friend/family member who likes to tell people whenever the topic comes up that they're only "renting" any digital content they thought they bought (and yes, I fully recognize how insufferable that is)'. See, I can be an annoying pedant and practical at the same time! I do think it's important that people understand they're being lied to when they 'buy' media.
posted by dg at 8:06 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
But, yea, I'm also 'that friend/family member who likes to tell people whenever the topic comes up that they're only "renting" any digital content they thought they bought (and yes, I fully recognize how insufferable that is)'. See, I can be an annoying pedant and practical at the same time! I do think it's important that people understand they're being lied to when they 'buy' media.
posted by dg at 8:06 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
I’ve got a raspberry pi3 with a ssd usb drive running MiniDLNA that works great.
posted by dr_dank at 8:15 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 8:15 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Amazon is evil yes, but you can buy no-DRM mp3s there, which I do quite a bit.
Since we're all getting nerdy about our storage solutions, I'll just say that my fileserver is always a triple-drive affair of two RAID 1 drives and a backup. I don't like RAID 5 because a giant raid array is a difficult thing to backup and I like to have both backups and RAID to protect against different failure modes.
posted by Sauce Trough at 8:30 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]
Since we're all getting nerdy about our storage solutions, I'll just say that my fileserver is always a triple-drive affair of two RAID 1 drives and a backup. I don't like RAID 5 because a giant raid array is a difficult thing to backup and I like to have both backups and RAID to protect against different failure modes.
posted by Sauce Trough at 8:30 PM on December 15 [3 favorites]
🪘
posted by HearHere at 8:45 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
posted by HearHere at 8:45 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]
If it can be copied, then (almost) anything digital is available online, for free, forever. It's sort of reminiscent of Chan culture which emphasizes the collective over the individual - you don't own your digital media, but neither do the corporations - we, the collective internet, own it now that it's released into the wild.
Older stuff that was originally released years ago in 1080p is now available in 4K and hey we now have 4K TVs so... what was the point of even saving those original files again?
posted by xdvesper at 10:44 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
Older stuff that was originally released years ago in 1080p is now available in 4K and hey we now have 4K TVs so... what was the point of even saving those original files again?
posted by xdvesper at 10:44 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]
I am feeling very smug about this right now because I don't really rent digital media. (When I moved country I ripped all my DVDs, kept the discs in storage, and brought the drive with me, so I am now one of the annoying people who can show up with a terabyte of movies.) I also keep my kobo firmly detached from the internet and put epubs on it the old fashioned way - through a cable - and keep mp3s of a core 200 MB or so of music and audiobooks (anything else, I'm happy enough to listen to on Spotify). The first person who ever decided to flirt with me did so by giving me nearly 5 GB of ebooks from his stash, I happily reciprocated with my stash, and I only realized years later that his intentions were more than just friendly sharing of DRM-free files.
In general if I know I will want to see it again ever, I will put a DRM-free copy somewhere the internet can't find it and yoink it. I don't worry too much about backups - I'll keep one, and then if it's gone, it's gone, and if I can get it again from where I got it before, so much the better, and if I can't, well, I'm not worse off than people who don't keep digital files at all.
posted by ngaiotonga at 1:33 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
In general if I know I will want to see it again ever, I will put a DRM-free copy somewhere the internet can't find it and yoink it. I don't worry too much about backups - I'll keep one, and then if it's gone, it's gone, and if I can get it again from where I got it before, so much the better, and if I can't, well, I'm not worse off than people who don't keep digital files at all.
posted by ngaiotonga at 1:33 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
Shout out to Shepherd for creating and maintaining our Plex server which has all our media--movies, TV, music, I think some audiobooks?--on it. It has been a gamechanger but I am fully aware I married the kind of dude who can do this stuff and enjoys doing this stuff.
posted by Kitteh at 5:08 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
posted by Kitteh at 5:08 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
The Yoof also often do not know what that even is, let alone how to set it up
Friend of mine had her mind absolutely blown when I showed up at her place with a 64GB USB stick full of mp3s and gave her a copy.
Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
posted by flabdablet
I'm still rocking my 2008 iPod on the train and have people occasionally say, oh I miss those but how do you connect to the ITunes store? Folks, I have never connected to the iTunes store or bought a single file from them.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:48 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
Friend of mine had her mind absolutely blown when I showed up at her place with a 64GB USB stick full of mp3s and gave her a copy.
Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
posted by flabdablet
I'm still rocking my 2008 iPod on the train and have people occasionally say, oh I miss those but how do you connect to the ITunes store? Folks, I have never connected to the iTunes store or bought a single file from them.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:48 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
Not that I really want to defend Apple, but the music that you buy through them doesn't have DRM, which means that you can download it and keep it without fear of your access being revoked for some reason in the future. You can back it up, listen to it on other devices, and so on. It's one of the main things that recommended them back when buying music digitally was taking off.
But now, for music at least, it seems that the main model is more or less just perpetual streaming. Spotify's library is legitimately impressive - to the point that it feels comprehensive even though it's not. People can usually find what they want unless they have esoteric tastes, maybe discover once in a while that a track in one of their playlists is grayed out. It's a bit different than streaming video where the selection is obviously much more limited and changeable.
I use streaming to discover new music but try to put aside a little money each month to buy music that I end up liking a lot.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:20 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
But now, for music at least, it seems that the main model is more or less just perpetual streaming. Spotify's library is legitimately impressive - to the point that it feels comprehensive even though it's not. People can usually find what they want unless they have esoteric tastes, maybe discover once in a while that a track in one of their playlists is grayed out. It's a bit different than streaming video where the selection is obviously much more limited and changeable.
I use streaming to discover new music but try to put aside a little money each month to buy music that I end up liking a lot.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:20 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
We are at the point in the physical media life cycle with movies where we were a few years ago on music. Streaming has mostly won, but the push from collectors for something they can own and hold in their hands, that outperforms the technical limitations of streaming is picking up steam.
With music, it was vinyl, with records going from a dated footnote to a thriving niche market for serious aficionados.
Now we're seeing that with movies. This may sound wild, with LG announcing they won't be making Blu-Ray players anymore, with Best Buy and some other big box stores dropping physical discs. But we are also in the era of the boutique Blu-Ray label.
We are in an era where yes, you can buy a digital copy of The Wicker Man. But you can also order a gorgeous, elaborate 4K box set of it from Studio Canal. When you play it on your TV, the blacks do not pool into pixelated bands. The contrast is jarringly sharp. The colors are endless and vibrant. The songs seem to be sung from right next to you. Three different cuts of the film are restored and included: the UK theatrical cut, the director's cut, and the "final" cut. There are endless extras, interviews, docs, commentaries included.
But the real magic of the boutique Blu-Ray goes beyond well-known movies. The folks at Vinegar Syndrome lovingly restore films like Christmas Evil, Putney Swope, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, or even out there cult items like Rabid Grannies. The folks at Second Run package lesser-known international gems from Czechia or Hong Kong with the same care you'd expect for Oscar winners.
One of my favorite labels of late is Deaf Crocodile. Fanciful name, but serious people. They find fantastic forgotten films and restore and reintroduce them: old Russian epics, German animation, Iranian drama. I just finished watching The Outcasts a 1982 Irish-made folk horror/fantasy/drama from the writer of Blood on Satan's Claw. It has never existed on disc, barely peeked its head up on VHS, was shown on TV only a few times, and only played in theaters for a week. It certainly hasn't ever streamed in any legitimate way.
But here it is, loving restored from the original camera negative to HD, with commentary, interview with the director, interview with the composer, four short films by the director (including some with cameos by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlton Heston), and the director's half hour tribute to William Blake. It's packaged in a rigidly-made cardboard box covered in lovely art, and packaged with a full-color book that pairs extensive production photos with lengthy essays by Irish filmmaker Paul Duane and American film critic Walter Chaw.
I don't like our odds of coming to a treaty with the digital overlords. They're always primarily going to sell into their own walled gardens. And they're going to yank our shit away as rights move around or companies fold... or as it suits them.
But just as vinyl is thriving now and represents a way to have permanent excellent versions of the music you love, we are also seeing films increasingly given loving care and amazing presentations on disc.
It's just not going to be available at Best Buy. It's going to be niche.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:43 AM on December 16 [7 favorites]
With music, it was vinyl, with records going from a dated footnote to a thriving niche market for serious aficionados.
Now we're seeing that with movies. This may sound wild, with LG announcing they won't be making Blu-Ray players anymore, with Best Buy and some other big box stores dropping physical discs. But we are also in the era of the boutique Blu-Ray label.
We are in an era where yes, you can buy a digital copy of The Wicker Man. But you can also order a gorgeous, elaborate 4K box set of it from Studio Canal. When you play it on your TV, the blacks do not pool into pixelated bands. The contrast is jarringly sharp. The colors are endless and vibrant. The songs seem to be sung from right next to you. Three different cuts of the film are restored and included: the UK theatrical cut, the director's cut, and the "final" cut. There are endless extras, interviews, docs, commentaries included.
But the real magic of the boutique Blu-Ray goes beyond well-known movies. The folks at Vinegar Syndrome lovingly restore films like Christmas Evil, Putney Swope, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, or even out there cult items like Rabid Grannies. The folks at Second Run package lesser-known international gems from Czechia or Hong Kong with the same care you'd expect for Oscar winners.
One of my favorite labels of late is Deaf Crocodile. Fanciful name, but serious people. They find fantastic forgotten films and restore and reintroduce them: old Russian epics, German animation, Iranian drama. I just finished watching The Outcasts a 1982 Irish-made folk horror/fantasy/drama from the writer of Blood on Satan's Claw. It has never existed on disc, barely peeked its head up on VHS, was shown on TV only a few times, and only played in theaters for a week. It certainly hasn't ever streamed in any legitimate way.
But here it is, loving restored from the original camera negative to HD, with commentary, interview with the director, interview with the composer, four short films by the director (including some with cameos by the likes of Sammy Davis Jr. and Charlton Heston), and the director's half hour tribute to William Blake. It's packaged in a rigidly-made cardboard box covered in lovely art, and packaged with a full-color book that pairs extensive production photos with lengthy essays by Irish filmmaker Paul Duane and American film critic Walter Chaw.
I don't like our odds of coming to a treaty with the digital overlords. They're always primarily going to sell into their own walled gardens. And they're going to yank our shit away as rights move around or companies fold... or as it suits them.
But just as vinyl is thriving now and represents a way to have permanent excellent versions of the music you love, we are also seeing films increasingly given loving care and amazing presentations on disc.
It's just not going to be available at Best Buy. It's going to be niche.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:43 AM on December 16 [7 favorites]
You can download MP3s purchased from Amazon without DRM, still. And there are ways to back up their ebooks and audiobooks as well. I pay for all my music, books, and audio books these days. But having paid for them, I do feel like I am entitled to copies of my own.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:51 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:51 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
I'm also getting a Blu Ray writer and a bunch of M discs, so that the copies I've made for myself hopefully won't fall victim to bit rot.
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:56 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
posted by OnceUponATime at 7:56 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
I forgot to mention this earlier, but Blizzard's delisting one of the old Warcraft games. GoG has a notice up that once it's gone from the store, it's gone for good, even if you bought it from them. But, if you download the installer now, it'll keep working until the underlying OS changes enough that it'll no longer run.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:05 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by Spike Glee at 8:05 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
This is why I buy my music through Bandcamp.
Unfortunately, this is no guarantee either - I've had albums I've purchased disappear from my bandcamp collection when the artist no longer sells on bandcamp. For example, this Tennis album, where the download link is gone and it's no longer in my collection. You have to download your stuff or you risk losing it, even from Bandcamp.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:13 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
Unfortunately, this is no guarantee either - I've had albums I've purchased disappear from my bandcamp collection when the artist no longer sells on bandcamp. For example, this Tennis album, where the download link is gone and it's no longer in my collection. You have to download your stuff or you risk losing it, even from Bandcamp.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:13 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
Music? Without an Internet connection? HOW IS THIS DARK MAJICKS EVEN POSSIBLE
By checking CDs out from the library, and ripping them. What makes this Dark Magic?
posted by Rash at 8:17 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
By checking CDs out from the library, and ripping them. What makes this Dark Magic?
posted by Rash at 8:17 AM on December 16 [1 favorite]
And that made me check to see whether other albums I purchased are gone and yes, three different albums I paid for on Bandcamp are now gone to me forever.
It makes me think of that "you wouldn't steal a car" campaign they had to try to dissuade pirating media. Okay, but seemingly y'all would come into my house and take my DVDs, records/cds and books. Sounds fine!
posted by urbanlenny at 8:19 AM on December 16 [6 favorites]
It makes me think of that "you wouldn't steal a car" campaign they had to try to dissuade pirating media. Okay, but seemingly y'all would come into my house and take my DVDs, records/cds and books. Sounds fine!
posted by urbanlenny at 8:19 AM on December 16 [6 favorites]
The only problem with Bandcamp is that I can't get all the music I want from there. So I buy from Apple, which has no DRM on their music, and download and store it outside of Apple Music.
this resembles me. I'm also set up so that I can easily record any sound that plays on either of my laptops in real time, and in good (ie: not absolutely superb) quality. So I'm covered for stuff that I can't find available for download.
I guess, for me, it's just a given: you can't trust any sort of profit driven enterprise with stuff you love. And I love music.
Worth noting -- I don't trust "the cloud" with anything for the same reason as stated above. You can't trust it. Which doesn't mean I don't use the cloud, but anything that genuinely matters to me --I also back up "down here", and in duplicate.
And none of what I'm doing here is that hard at all. I've certainly never been accused of being tech-savvy by anyone who knew what they were talking about. It does take a little time every now and then but I find it. Because (for the third time): you can't trust any sort of profit driven enterprise with stuff you love.
posted by philip-random at 9:40 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
this resembles me. I'm also set up so that I can easily record any sound that plays on either of my laptops in real time, and in good (ie: not absolutely superb) quality. So I'm covered for stuff that I can't find available for download.
I guess, for me, it's just a given: you can't trust any sort of profit driven enterprise with stuff you love. And I love music.
Worth noting -- I don't trust "the cloud" with anything for the same reason as stated above. You can't trust it. Which doesn't mean I don't use the cloud, but anything that genuinely matters to me --I also back up "down here", and in duplicate.
And none of what I'm doing here is that hard at all. I've certainly never been accused of being tech-savvy by anyone who knew what they were talking about. It does take a little time every now and then but I find it. Because (for the third time): you can't trust any sort of profit driven enterprise with stuff you love.
posted by philip-random at 9:40 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
Metafilter - Dagnabit, I am now inundated with ads for manatee Christmas ornaments!
(I have also seen the "phone is listening" phenomenon in real time with a group of friends)
posted by Chuffy at 9:56 AM on December 16
(I have also seen the "phone is listening" phenomenon in real time with a group of friends)
posted by Chuffy at 9:56 AM on December 16
I buy. Then I pirate it so I have a copy forever that can't be vanished by Amazon or whoever.
posted by sotonohito at 10:01 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
posted by sotonohito at 10:01 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
I went to rewatch my DVDs of Dark Angel, only to find they have all spoiled in the last 20 years, and are unplayable 🙃
posted by funkaspuck at 10:14 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
posted by funkaspuck at 10:14 AM on December 16 [4 favorites]
By checking CDs out from the library, and ripping them. What makes this Dark Magic?
My local library doesn't have CDs anymore, so that strategy is now kaput, but they do still have a solid DVD collection. Whatever, I buy songs from amazon for a $1.25, download it and have it for a long time and use it how I want.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:15 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
My local library doesn't have CDs anymore, so that strategy is now kaput, but they do still have a solid DVD collection. Whatever, I buy songs from amazon for a $1.25, download it and have it for a long time and use it how I want.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:15 AM on December 16 [2 favorites]
I had uploaded about 200 cds onto MusicMatch in the 90s, then over the years purchased their music online, so I didn’t have cds. When MM disappeared, or was purchased, whatever, I downloaded all of the music before the deadline, and lo and behold they only provided the least popular tracks from each cd from both my original uploads as well as the albums I had purchased. I never again purchased online music and have ordered cds instead. I’m glad I saved all of my old cds or I’d be SOL on those. I lost a lot of money with my online purchases.
posted by waving at 11:16 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
posted by waving at 11:16 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
I went to rewatch my DVDs [...] only to find they have all spoiled in the last 20 years, and are unplayable
Just to spell it out rather than hiding it behind the link I dropped above, the whole point of "M-discs" is that they are optical discs which won't degrade like DVDs or ordinary Blu Rays (though they can still be read and written by the same devices which read and write DVDs and Blu Rays.)
posted by OnceUponATime at 11:39 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
Just to spell it out rather than hiding it behind the link I dropped above, the whole point of "M-discs" is that they are optical discs which won't degrade like DVDs or ordinary Blu Rays (though they can still be read and written by the same devices which read and write DVDs and Blu Rays.)
Unlike traditional optical media, which utilize dyes that can break down over time, data stored on an M DISC is engraved on a patented inorganic write layer – it will not fade or deteriorate. This unique engraving process renders these archival grade discs practically impervious to environmental exposure, including light, temperature and humidity.I haven't tried it yet. I'm a little worried about the write process erroring out on a big (100 Gb) expensive (about $15 each) disc, and wasting that disc. But I think it's worth a try. Because hard drives die, cloud storage companies go out of business, and DVDs and tapes degrade.
ISO/IEC 16963 standard longevity tests have proven the durability of M DISC technology, and it withstood rigorous testing by the US Department of Defense. Based on ISO/IEC 16963 testing, M DISC media has a projected lifetime of several hundred years.
posted by OnceUponATime at 11:39 AM on December 16 [3 favorites]
Yes, this has turned into the stereotypical metafilter storage thread - “I store my data on a hard disk!” “Well I store my data in a disused mine in sealed casks!” “I’ve biengineered the data into the local fireflies and their twinkling is actually an encoded version of the first season of Andromeda, with Kevin Sorbo!”
posted by The River Ivel at 1:51 PM on December 16 [9 favorites]
posted by The River Ivel at 1:51 PM on December 16 [9 favorites]
dobbs (and others): It doesn't fix the problem of Amazon being evil, but the lovely little utility Libation (FOSS, available free for all platforms) will connect to your Audible account and allow you to download unencrypted copies of your audiobooks as .m4b audiobook files. Certainly it isn't as convenient as listening via Audible -- you'll have to get an audiobook player for your phone, etc. -- but i highly recommend it as a tool in the toolbox for making sure you can in fact keep the media you bought.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:01 PM on December 16 [2 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:01 PM on December 16 [2 favorites]
stereotypical metafilter storage thread
I mean, if you want to own the media you buy, you actually can, right now, thanks to quasi-legal de-DRM tools which people have helpfully linked (they're legal as long as you're only using them on stuff you've paid for, for the purposes of making back ups for your own use, AFAIK. But of course they can also be used in illegal ways.)
So anyway, you CAN own your media, but you have to store it yourself. Relying on other people to store it for you is convenient, but by definition limits your control over it and potentially limits your ability to access it in the future. So data storage is kind of at the heart of this discussion of "ownership" of data. I find discussions of how people manage that helpful. If you don't, it's okay to just scroll past.
Getting copyright laws or industry practices changed would be great, and would certainly make this kind of media ownership more accessible for people who don't feel comfortable downloading third party apps and burning blu-ray disks. But those changes will be slow to happen, if ever. And honestly, most people who use streaming services are happy with them, and don't mind that they don't really own the stuff they are paying for. This is kind of a nerdy concern to have in the first place -- you have to really love books or music or movies to even care at all about this ownership issue. So I don't think nerdy solutions are out of place.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:23 PM on December 16 [3 favorites]
I mean, if you want to own the media you buy, you actually can, right now, thanks to quasi-legal de-DRM tools which people have helpfully linked (they're legal as long as you're only using them on stuff you've paid for, for the purposes of making back ups for your own use, AFAIK. But of course they can also be used in illegal ways.)
So anyway, you CAN own your media, but you have to store it yourself. Relying on other people to store it for you is convenient, but by definition limits your control over it and potentially limits your ability to access it in the future. So data storage is kind of at the heart of this discussion of "ownership" of data. I find discussions of how people manage that helpful. If you don't, it's okay to just scroll past.
Getting copyright laws or industry practices changed would be great, and would certainly make this kind of media ownership more accessible for people who don't feel comfortable downloading third party apps and burning blu-ray disks. But those changes will be slow to happen, if ever. And honestly, most people who use streaming services are happy with them, and don't mind that they don't really own the stuff they are paying for. This is kind of a nerdy concern to have in the first place -- you have to really love books or music or movies to even care at all about this ownership issue. So I don't think nerdy solutions are out of place.
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:23 PM on December 16 [3 favorites]
I think Amazon has figured out how to set things up so that the folks who support de-DRM can no longer make it work, at least for Kindle purchases. (I've been using Calibre and apprenticeharper's dedrm plugin.)
Honestly, all I want is to be able to keep a readable copy of stuff I paid for.
posted by sneebler at 4:24 PM on December 16
Honestly, all I want is to be able to keep a readable copy of stuff I paid for.
posted by sneebler at 4:24 PM on December 16
I think Amazon has figured out how to set things up so that the folks who support de-DRM can no longer make it work, at least for Kindle purchases. (I've been using Calibre and apprenticeharper's dedrm plugin.)
You still can, but you have to grab a specific version of the Kindle for PC/Mac software and lock it down so it won't auto-update.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:44 PM on December 16
You still can, but you have to grab a specific version of the Kindle for PC/Mac software and lock it down so it won't auto-update.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:44 PM on December 16
Or have an older kindle registered to your account. Then you can use the "download and transfer over usb" function to download an azw that's easy for dedrm to jailbreak. My old 4/5 generation kindle from 2012 works for this.
But for popular things easier to pull from usenet/torrents.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:01 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
But for popular things easier to pull from usenet/torrents.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:01 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
Or have an older kindle registered to your account. Then you can use the "download and transfer over usb" function to download an azw that's easy for dedrm to jailbreak. My old 4/5 generation kindle from 2012 works for this.
This works for most books (i have a Kindle 2 that i literally haven't turned on in a decade that i use for this), but it won't work with some of the newer books which are only shipped in the KFX format. For those, you do need Kindle for PC/Mac.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:04 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
This works for most books (i have a Kindle 2 that i literally haven't turned on in a decade that i use for this), but it won't work with some of the newer books which are only shipped in the KFX format. For those, you do need Kindle for PC/Mac.
posted by adrienneleigh at 5:04 PM on December 16 [1 favorite]
I have 600+ titles on Kindle. (Yes, I have a reading problem) I usually read these through an ancient iPad. However, I have Kindle on my PC and I download each and every title. Are these safe from Amazon's predations or do I need to take further steps?
posted by Ber at 5:21 PM on December 16
posted by Ber at 5:21 PM on December 16
Not quite the same issue but I just spent 45 minutes trying once again to watch Netflix in a second house. That's supposed to work. But it fails because of their garbage detection of "household" which seems to boil down to SSID for wifi. My device is wired ethernet and Netflix can't figure out how to accept that device should be allowed.
My solution is to watch unlicensed copies of Netflix streams via Plex instead. Same bits but no DRM garbage preventing me from using the service I am paying for.
posted by Nelson at 5:42 PM on December 16 [2 favorites]
My solution is to watch unlicensed copies of Netflix streams via Plex instead. Same bits but no DRM garbage preventing me from using the service I am paying for.
posted by Nelson at 5:42 PM on December 16 [2 favorites]
I have 600+ titles on Kindle. (Yes, I have a reading problem) I usually read these through an ancient iPad. However, I have Kindle on my PC and I download each and every title. Are these safe from Amazon's predations or do I need to take further steps?
Ber: if you are only downloading them into the Kindle app on your PC, those books are still encrypted and Amazon can still pull your access to them at any time. What you need to do in order to be safe from that is to strip the DRM from them, which is fairly easy to do via Calibre and the DeDRM plugin, both of which are freeware. If you want to MeMail me i can give you a quick rundown of that process.
(An alternative is to simply download unencrypted versions from a pirate site, for archival purposes only. This may or may not be technically legal in your jurisdiction (it depends where you are), but since you've already bought them it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone would ever get on your ass about it regardless. You can also MeMail me about this; i know which sites are safe and which are scammy.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 6:35 PM on December 16 [4 favorites]
Ber: if you are only downloading them into the Kindle app on your PC, those books are still encrypted and Amazon can still pull your access to them at any time. What you need to do in order to be safe from that is to strip the DRM from them, which is fairly easy to do via Calibre and the DeDRM plugin, both of which are freeware. If you want to MeMail me i can give you a quick rundown of that process.
(An alternative is to simply download unencrypted versions from a pirate site, for archival purposes only. This may or may not be technically legal in your jurisdiction (it depends where you are), but since you've already bought them it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone would ever get on your ass about it regardless. You can also MeMail me about this; i know which sites are safe and which are scammy.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 6:35 PM on December 16 [4 favorites]
There’s so much media in all forms that I don’t really get why people are super pressed. Though it is a bummer when some older games are unable to be archived, but we’ve lost a lot of writing throughout history and onward we go.
But yeah, yanking stuff that was purchased due to rights or an error, or the servers dying and it being gone is a classic capitalism gotcha. Like all the educational kids robots that are dead now that the company went bankrupt.
I am definitely advocating we all memorize one novel and gather to retell them.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:05 PM on December 16
But yeah, yanking stuff that was purchased due to rights or an error, or the servers dying and it being gone is a classic capitalism gotcha. Like all the educational kids robots that are dead now that the company went bankrupt.
I am definitely advocating we all memorize one novel and gather to retell them.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 8:05 PM on December 16
it won't work with some of the newer books which are only shipped in the KFX format.
Huh. Fuckwits.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:25 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]
Huh. Fuckwits.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:25 AM on December 17 [1 favorite]
It's really hard to beat paper for stable storage, absent fires or floods (that would also take out digital storage). But it is bulky. Maybe the ultimate form of archiving would be some sort of Bag of Holding pocket dimension situation, to a vast warehouse of climate controlled bookshelves. So if all the digital copies were corrupted or lost, you had an ultimate backup.
All kidding aside, given the potential of AI slop to contaminate data, I'm less confident than ever in the ability of digital storage to save copies of things these days.
posted by emjaybee at 7:55 AM on December 17
All kidding aside, given the potential of AI slop to contaminate data, I'm less confident than ever in the ability of digital storage to save copies of things these days.
posted by emjaybee at 7:55 AM on December 17
"Everything not saved will be lost."
posted by AlSweigart at 8:47 AM on December 17 [3 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 8:47 AM on December 17 [3 favorites]
I've got at least five external hard drives (I lose track). I've been fanatical about saving videos since the 00s when I noticed that things come and go on YT. Plus we were about to move, there was no cable or Internet in our apartment, so I got into the habit of downloading things at work and taking them home so my wife could have some entertainment besides our collection of VHS tapes.
I have a lot of TV series and movies backed up on a couple of the hard drives, that is dwarfed by terabytes of music files: purchased, pirated, or traded. The place I worked at for ten years was basically a giant music exchange and no one made a deal about taking CDs out of office supplies for burning. That stuff is all still stored, along with countless live shows and HD versions of favored artists.
We had wildfires almost take out our small town this fall. Among the pets, medications, and change of clothing that I scooped into the SUV, were three hard drives and a laptop. My wife said, "what about all our photos." "I got 'em."
I don't trust the Cloud and streamers keep content. I notice that Netflix is going to drop The Magicians, I wonder where my Brakebills fix is going to come from. We've gotten out of the habit of buying DVDs and I'm thinking we really shouldn't. There's a few hundred DVDs in the house, a few thousand CDs and LPs. Screw it, I'm 67. My nephew can toss it out when we die. Although my niece's boyfriend will probably take all the vinyl.
Now I just have to find a fix for the ebooks.
posted by Ber at 9:45 AM on December 17 [2 favorites]
I have a lot of TV series and movies backed up on a couple of the hard drives, that is dwarfed by terabytes of music files: purchased, pirated, or traded. The place I worked at for ten years was basically a giant music exchange and no one made a deal about taking CDs out of office supplies for burning. That stuff is all still stored, along with countless live shows and HD versions of favored artists.
We had wildfires almost take out our small town this fall. Among the pets, medications, and change of clothing that I scooped into the SUV, were three hard drives and a laptop. My wife said, "what about all our photos." "I got 'em."
I don't trust the Cloud and streamers keep content. I notice that Netflix is going to drop The Magicians, I wonder where my Brakebills fix is going to come from. We've gotten out of the habit of buying DVDs and I'm thinking we really shouldn't. There's a few hundred DVDs in the house, a few thousand CDs and LPs. Screw it, I'm 67. My nephew can toss it out when we die. Although my niece's boyfriend will probably take all the vinyl.
Now I just have to find a fix for the ebooks.
posted by Ber at 9:45 AM on December 17 [2 favorites]
There's a few hundred DVDs in the house, a few thousand CDs and LPs. Screw it, I'm 67. My nephew can toss it out when we die. Although my niece's boyfriend will probably take all the vinyl.
The Boomer Avalanche of Stuff article returns!
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:07 PM on December 17 [2 favorites]
The Boomer Avalanche of Stuff article returns!
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 7:07 PM on December 17 [2 favorites]
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