Or better yet, a Raspberry Pi running LibreELEC so that you don’t have to worry about where your software comes from or what it’s doing in the background
i am against paying for DRM streaming services, and i boycott apple products, but i must say this is an impressive hacking effort and a well-executed meme about it. 🥂
The irony of this article being able to quote those comments for us, the humble readers, while the fucking movie studios can’t do the same in a court of law is just… so delicious.
I regret convincing my parents to subscribe to Netflix instead of using Torrent or Emule. Fuck these fucking companies that now cost more than bluerays and broadcast content with crappy quality if you don’t have a platform that knows how much you’re shitting yourself
I find this to be an option with Movies/TV Shows but a struggle with Music. At least once my kids were older and listening to stuff. They were constantly asking for stuff to be downloaded, my mom and wife were asking for stuff, my brother, etc. Had a subsonic server set up and just got tired of actively managing it. Spotify isn’t great but it works and it saves a headache. I just wish there was better options because I don’t like the Spotify app. YouTube Music is even worse, especially since it subscribes to everything on YouTube too so all my subscriptions got jacked up.
Give them a search tool as a web app (for said music server and scraper setup) and allow them to ask it for the music. When they’re over their limit, have it return a temp unspec error. Dust your hands and walk away proud.
I don’t have access to my music torrent site anymore due to the first one shutting down (W.CD) and then going idle on the other one for years. Don’t feel like re-downloading everything either since I lost all my music in a hard drive crash. Could probably recover it from my Cowon X7 but don’t know where the cable is for that anymore.
if you want DRM-free, bandcamp is the best way, but for “exploring” subscribing to spotify is the best way in terms of quantity, and it doesn’t pay much less than other DRMs even if it has a monopoly, and is not from the USA or China
otherwise if you don’t want to pay, youtube + soundcloud with adblock is the best solution. or if you really have a lot of time you can make your own self-hosted pod on funkwhale: docs.funkwhale.audio/administrator/index.html
I have to find the time to do it, I had seen jellyfin as a solution, but I also have to find something that acts as a server, my raspberry pi 3B+ is not powerful enough for 1080p+ streaming
If you parents have a standard TV stick or Apple TV their devices support a variety of codecs.
This means that you can “direct stream” content from Plex / Jellyfin with minimal CPU impact.
At 1080p it should at least support ~4 direct streams when it doesn’t have to “transcode”.
That said, even if it is weak by today’s standards it’s a good platform to learn the setup on. Then you can move to something else more powerful (but still cheap) once you understand it all.
At least that’s how I did it, 3b+ -> Pentium J5040
I’m so glad that I subscribed to netflixs DVD rental service. I would get stuff in the mail, rip the disks with handbrake, and send back. Repeat. Torrents where a no go with a 5gb a month satellite ISP.
You don’t get 4K on Windows or Mac either unless you have a HDCP-compatible display, a supported graphics card, and typically the devices will refuse to initiate a handshake due to the locality check failing, or a difference in HDCP version - Unless you have a “smart” TV you’re watching in 1080p or lower.
Piracy point still stands: why pay for a service that does not guarantee to give you what you are specifically paying for, and actually goes out of their way to block your access?
Netflix may take away their subscription but they can’t take away my Transmission and VLC.
If I could easily do this on my desktop/laptop I legitimately might stop pirating media. I would also stop if the streaming companies just let me watch full quality and didn’t take away what I purchased because the rights holder decided they want you to buy it again on another platform.
I don’t mind much paying for streaming (although that’s increasingly more and more annoying and I still tend to just download whatever I actually care about) but until and unless I can pay to “own” a movie and they just provide me with a DRM free video file of some sort, I will never “purchase” digital content like this.
If you tried this kind of bullshit in just about any other context, even normal people would think you’re crazy.
Normal Person: “hi there, one blender please. I’ll take this one for $25.”
Sales person: “Cool here’s your receipt.”
NP:: “It says here at the bottom of the receipt that you can just come in my house and take this blender back whenever you want or maybe never?”
SP: “yep.”
NP:: “And you don’t tell people that ahead of time?”
SP: “no when you buy it you agree to that by opening the box and it is on the receipt you get after you bought it.”
NP: “you fuckin with me rn?”
SP: “afraid not, and would you look at that corp says I need that blender back, thanks.”
SP: “oh, shoot. I see here you also bought a toaster from EvilCorp sold in one of our EvilMart locations a couple years ago, we’ve decided to license that brand instead to our new partners FukUMart, so we’ll be taking that toaster but if you want you can head to your local FukUMart and buy that toaster again for more than you paid the first time.”
NP: spontaneously combusts
Anyone who has worked in retail will tell you this is absolutely, concretely, and vehemently something corporate would expect their employees to actually say to customers, so don’t go giving them any ideas…
Im kinda mad cuz i removed netflix from my phone plan cuz they kept increasing prices. now Netflix is apparently something i get in my package (its in my base plan somehow and not something i can uncheck anymore. It’s not something i can remove, (something i want because fuck Netflix yarrr) and the base phone plan price keeps ticking up. Fucking phone plan pricing grrr that’s a whole other thing…
“Here is a work around to fix [weird bug in production]:”
“Edit: Disregard the above. It fixes [weird bug in production] but causes [bad thing] to happen.”
“Edit 2: Apparently the first edit is wrong. It doesn’t cause [bad thing] to happen. Bad thing just happened to occur simultaneously the first time I did the workaround.”
“Edit 3: [weird bug in production] has been fixed. This workaround is no longer needed.”
“Edit 4: Turns out [weird bug in production] we fixed is what allowed our systems to communicate with one another. Had to rollback change. Work around is now considered ‘the fix’ going forward.”
“Edit 5: Turns out it DOES cause [bad thing] to happen, but [bad thing happening] is a core component of our system’s design and also PAYROLL NEEDS IT TO FUNCTION?!”
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