Burning my DVDs to Plex, or, I should have been doing this the whole time.
My family loved movies growing up, we went to the theater all the time and, critically, had a massive VHS collection of everybody's favorites. As time went on this switched to DVDs, and then it was replaced by ... nothing?? I probably made one DVD purchase in 10 years -- the first two seasons of Supernatural have the original soundtrack striped out of the streaming versions due to issues with the rights -- and other than that it was Netflix, HBO/HBO Max/Max/I think it's called HBO again?, and the other streaming services.
There was a big controversy last year that inspired me, and everybody else, to cancel Disney+ and as I was looking into doing that I realized telling my daughter we couldn't watch any Disney movies anymore was ... daunting.
So, anyway, I realized I had to get off the sauce. What follows is perhaps not 100% legal but it's fully ethical in my opinion.
I have a Playstation 5 to play DVDs, and I've found by visiting used bookstores you can get a ton of DVDs for just $1 apiece. One problem is ultimately I don't have space in my house to maintain a whole closet of DVDs like I had when I was a kid. Instead I've been burning the DVDs to an external hard drive and putting the DVDs in my basement.
I have access to my external hard drive from every device on my network, but running a Plex server makes it all work rather like one of the streaming services. This is very nice because, as it turns out, DVDs actually used to be really annoying. I forgot this! They start with unskippable ads, it's hard to move around the video without going into the weird chapter menus, everybody felt obligated to add their own custom animations to the menus that take aaaaages.
So this is my current set up. I love it, it works great, the work or exporting the DVDs and organizing the data is kind of relaxing to do.
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