The Sorry State of Video
As mentioned in my New Year’s Tech Resolutions, one of them was to work on creating my digital library on my Synology NAS using Plex. Part of this is necessitated by the constant searching for movies (my two-year-old loves to move them around), as well as ensuring a copy should one get destroyed or ruined. Another reason is that streaming video, especially 4K, chews a lot of bandwidth which Comcast/Xfinity has deemed a scarce resource and restricts usage to 1TB or less unless you feed the Pay Phone more quarters.
In beginning my quest to digitize I started by integrating all my digital accounts via Movies
Some of these movies I only own digitally, others are movies where there was a code inside the physical disc to enable a digital copy. Also a few of these movies are 100% 4K that I purchased through various places. Here’s the rub, while you can download movies from the various digital movie stores, you can’t download them in Full 1080p HD let alone 4K. They don’t tell you that up front but after downloading a few known 4K movies and launching them they all were about 4GB and were 720P. Apple, Microsoft, Google (which doesn’t even let you download on a PC) and Vudu. I don’t have a physical disk, I have no other way to get them onto my NAS. Yes I can stream them through the movies anywhere app or any digital store app but again I’d like to let them sit locally on my NAS. My NAS has a better uptime than anything Comcast offers as well as the stream is a much faster connection.
Movies are where we were with MP3’s years ago. I am sure the studios are 100% behind it, and probably enforcing the stores to toe the line or they won’t allow their movies to be sold. Remember when the recording industry enforced all kinds of crap on the various music stores, iTunes included? The pirates all find a way anyway, it just makes it harder for the rest of us. At this
In the mean time I will still buy physical Blu-Ray, especially if the price is the same (or in some cases less), and rip them to my NAS.
