I canceled last week. I paid to bundle hulu and Disney so I could lock in the year before the price hike. Hulu would never allow me to log in, I spent 7+ hours with tech support over the last month with them literally having me log in and out over and over without doing anything on their end. Never got logged in.
Several times they tried to sell me that I had to accept the ad tier or the one that included ESPN (which you know full well will get bigger cost spikes) despite promising I wouldn’t have to change plans.
I finally told them to cancel and refund the days. I haven’t pirated in over 4 years, because I finally make enough money and wanted to support content and have easy setup on products as my mom and daughter (outside of household) and my husband and son (in household) depend on me.
I started with a VPN and streaming this week. I will be working on jellyfin in the next week. They could have had my money, but they want to fuck around with my time, money, and content. I’m pissed and done.
I built out the whole stack: clients use jellyfin to watch media and ombi to request it (a friend uses overseerr which seems good too). Internally I’m using sonarr/radarr to manage the library, prowlarr to handle requests, sabnzbd and transmission to download stuff. Altogether this almost completely automates media request and acquisition.
It took a bit of figuring out docker, reverse proxy (using nginx proxy manager), DNS… I got it working though. Someone who has already done networking would find this much simpler but it was new to me.
It’s dangerous because I didn’t know when to stop lol. I started up some game servers for friends, wrote a borg backup script to periodically save all my configs (and game saves) to two cloud storage services, then started spooling up more services…
I’ve been kind of rotating services. I am saving <1gb of configs, game saves, and various other small files. I used Backblaze and AWS cold storage for a bit but that seemed totally overkill, so I started trying out regular consumer stuff and it’s all the same really (for this purpose). OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox… I figured keeping local backups on a different device, and then sending two out to different cloud storage platforms was enough. I backup once a day and keep two weeks worth of backups remote, and one month local. I also manually send a biweekly backup to a friend, and I store his. That’s when I restart the server, do updates, and if I’m unlucky spend a weekend trying to fix whatever broke lol.
Oooh, need to find me a NAS buddy. I’ve been getting into using syncthing lately, I’ve learned that it can encrypt your files before syncing them so that the remote storage never actually knows what’s in them. Still probably need to trust the other end, though.
That sucks. Tech support can be so annoying sometimes. I’m dealing with it too, although in a very different area. I wish they made it at least easy to give them money.
Good luck with Jellyfin and the other things you’ll be doing.
I dropped my sub. Was paying roughly $7.50/mo for 2 years for the legacy bundle and they nearly tripled it to $18.99/mo.
Of all my streaming services, I literally do not watch ESPN, and barely use Hulu and Disney. I could justify $7.50 by stretching the definition of justification, but $18.99 is more than I pay for streaming services I use regularly.
I’m okay with that. The golden streaming age was when there was one platform that had virtually everything available (early Netflix) for a fair price. That was also when many people gave up on piracy, because the availability and convenience was the same, and the price was fair as well.
Ideally this short sighted greed decimates all those streaming services again, collapsing all those spread out shows and movies into a convenient and affordable platform like it used to be.
At least music streaming services have largely avoided this walled garden crap, most of them have the same range and selection of artists and music available as the others because making music exclusive works even less than for shows and movies. Notably this has also helped to avoid undue price spikes because good competition is ensured.
When I built my latest Plex server, I chose to put ECC RAM into it. But it was a pain getting all the hardware, due to the silly rules AMD has for ECC support and iGPU support in its chips.
ECC RAM is only necessary for people doing financial-related work.
If a video has a bitflip that is not corrected in software, ooooo 1 pixel will be a slightly different shade or hue or one subtitle letter will be wrong worst case.
Billing, payment processing, virtual currency storage, a flipped bit could be thousands of dollars, but those systems will have multiple verifiable redundancies in place, unlike the 90s when people like to quote that ECC RAM is essential.
Also 100% uptime servers like enterprise storage servers where customer data integrity is high priority.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Nearly every problem (1 million times more likely) is caused by software instability and bugs, with some being due to hard drive bit rot or hardware failures which ECC won’t fix anyway.
I have yet to see a single shred of evidence that a memory bit flipping has caused any problems past 2008 or so. Maybe another person has found some case where it has, but when I was researching for my own server, I couldn’t find a single one.
Not server-related, but an instance where an inexplicable bit flip caused a stir is Super Mario 64 speedrunning. There is a level that is notoriously slow to navigate and during a playthrough a community member “discovered” a skip that warps you about halfway through the level. There is a video of it happening on live stream, but to this day someone has yet to reproduce the skip. Fiddling around with the game’s memory showed that the behavior happens when a single bit is flipped. All in all, it was likely a one-off error on the hardware that happened at exactly the right time in exactly the right place. The incident is known as the “TTC upwarp” and there is a $1000 bounty to claim if you can provide a working set of instructions to reproduce it on real hardware.
I mean, that was actually pretty cool to read about! Speedrunning community always does the most crazy things as far as hardware memory dumping and analyzing to drop time in a speed run. 😅 that is passion.
It did happen on a device from 1996 though where in the time, programming and error checking was so barebones and efficient that a single bit could really mess a lot of things up.
That’s why I specified a time period 😉. Originally bug were called bugs because literal bugs would get in the holes of punchcards and make programs not run. Not a problem anymore! In the same way, systems have implemented checksums and error checking such that it really isn’t a big deal for the vast majority of applications.
To be completely honest, I kinda did an oopsie because it completely slipped my mind that although it happened in 2020, the technology involved is indeed pre-millenium.
What does that 50TB look like? I’m pushing up against 25 at this point but it’s shamefully all usb hdds plugged into a usb strip in a mini pc, and it’s less than ideal.
I love it. That works fine but if you want a weekend project consider doing something like this:
Buy a Fractal Define 7XL.
Shuck all those HDDs and put them in the case. Buy one more disk, as large or larger than the largest disk.
Buy 8GB RAM, cheap mobo, cheap Pentium gold CPU, and reasonably reliable power supply. Also buy either a SATA or HBA PCI adapter.
Install unRAID and Plex. Use that extra drive for parity. Now your data is protected if a drive fails. They also won’t get so hot, and speed will be much better. You also have lots of capacity for more drives.
Add 4 drives to it of equal size. One drive’s worth of space will be sacrificed for redundancy and they’ll all be combined into a single storage drive.
I have 4x 18TB drives giving me just under 50TB of usable storage. Any single drive can fail with no data loss, and I just replace it and keep going.
I’m using a mini PC for the transcode so the proc in the nas doesn’t matter, it’s just storage. The mini pcs on Amazon are way more powerful than anything you’ll find in a standalone
That’s because more than 75% of the people affected keep paying. The results for Disney are Immediate savings on resources (less people streaming) and they still increase profits.
Your local library has a copy of every kids Disney movie you could possibly want. No need to pay em for access to something your tax dollars pay for. And if you wanna go below board: just rip em and keep em forever.
Back when netflix first started, I subscribed to the 4 dvd plan. I’d rip and burn a copy of every movie that came through the house (if we liked it, that is). I was one of the few friends that had a DVD-R drive, and would make copies on request.
I still have an old case logic disk book completely filled with burnt dvds. I just built my first computer that doesn’t have a removable-disk drive, and with that, I no longer have any way to play dvds/blu-rays. Not one disc player in the whole house.
I built my last computer during the pandemic, and put in a blu-ray writer (obviously DVD and CD backwards compatible) just for legacy purposes. It was actually hard to find a case with a 5.25" front bay. In two years I haven’t used it once.
It’s a shame - digital media DRM is going to escalate quickly once there is no physical media sold, since all our PCs have TPM chips now, so this may not turn out well for us - but I’ve accepted it’s inevitable at this point.
Well no, im assuming most people subscribing to Disney know what they are getting. Mostly old stuff with some new series based on their properties. I liked Loki, bit that isnt the point. My point is you as the consumer have the right to tell Disney to fuck right off and if enough people do it, they will compromise and you still wont be happy because that is what compromise feels like. Personally, I still havent seen all of the Marvel movies yet.
Does the service have non-superhero and non-animated-family-movies content? The name “Disney” puts me off, because I an not into superheroes and I don’t have a family so I don’t really watch animated family musicals.
Yeah, they have a ton of stuff like that. Im not a Disney spokesman even though I sound like one in this thread. I think its a shitty company if im honest. If you are looking for a TV babysitter you could do worse., though
I think I misunderstood your position. Here is mine. Disney wont provide stimulating entertainment for many grown people. ThATS it. Im done talking about it forever.
I’ve been a paid subscriber since day one but canceled yesterday when I got this notice. I’ll just pirate whatever looks good going forward, between the arrs and Plex it’s actually a better experience anyway lol
Add comment