Tbh I have CDs and Saturn games that are 30 years old and play fine so I’m not too worried about disc rot. But yeah, may back the films up at some point.
my set up is a bit cheaper, I went with a raspberry pi 5 (16gb ram) which was £95 at the time, just checked and it is doubled. However I also have set up jellyfin (and nextcloud, few other things) on my old raspberry pi 4 (4gb) and given it to my parents and it works fine, so is probably cheaper. main cost is the external hard disk drive
it is on all the time, but raspberry pi’s use arm chips like phones so it doesnt use much power, keep meaning to set something up in home assistant to turn off the hard drive when not in use as thing that might use more power, but in the grand scheme of things it is negligible
but yeah you could turn an old laptop in to a home server and just turn it on when you need it, or think you can just install jellyfin as a stand alone app so could probably use your current laptop
Gonna be honest, as much as this stuff interests me and I admire it, I’m gonna stick with just putting the discs in. It’s part of the fun for me. And I get so little time to watch stuff atm 
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Went past this bus stop the other day and can confirm a) there is currently one copy of Hellraiser on VHS in place and b) it is netted down in place…
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I like the idea of that in theory, the ritual, but trouble is I am so badly organised. I want to watch something, go to its case and find a different disc in there, I get that films case and find a third film, if I am lucky this will eventually lead me back to the film I wanted.
if you do go down this path you might like Kodi, its been around for ages, started off as xbox media centre. it has the advantage of being able to play a dvd’s ISO file, so it is similar to putting the dvd in as it preserves the original title menu interface. can install it on android devices, fire sticks etc or a computer and connect to a tv over dlna
Ah, I’m kinda militant about how I care for my music, games, and films. All my DVDs are now in a wallet with only bluray remaining in their original cases. Vinyl and games are kept pristine. So if I find the wrong disc in a case then I can only assume that I’ve been taken over by The Thing.
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my set up is also low budget, bought a Beelink mini PC for about £100, wiped Windows and installed Linux, put a Plex server on it and plugged in an external hard drive. It sits behind the soundbar below my telly and you don’t even see it.
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This is my new to me pile.
I mentioned this in the film challenge thread…
We were staying at a cabin in the middle of nowhere Michigan over the summer and the owners got in touch to say that they were selling the property and we could help ourselves to the dvd collection. I came back with 16 dvds.
A real mixed bag. The Wicker Man is missing from the photo. The Hitchcock 4 disc set is 26 hours long.
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Won big on charity shop DVD roulette today. Came to about a tenner all in all.
Out For Justice is the hardest I’ve laughed in any film.
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Yesterday I bought:
The Surfer - DVD
Monkey Man - DVD
Bugonia - Blu-ray
The Creator - Blu-ray
All for peanuts with the staff discount. I know The Creator is meant to be shit but I like the look of it.
been really getting into buying Blu-rays and 4ks lately as I recently forked out for an actual 4k player. having said that, the finest bit of buying I’ve done in a long time was getting the DVD box sets of the original Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People BBC shows for a combined 40p from the mad 20p shop in Otley the other day
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Lowest resolution I buy is blu ray, but I’m going to test how DVDs get rendered in my player. So, so many bargains on DVD out there.
oh yeah, I like to buy as hi-res as possible too but couldn’t say no to 20p a throw haha!
I find films that were shot on actual film tend to upscale just fine. Anything shot on digital with aggressive post-processing like shitty superhero films tends to look absolutely terrible on DVD. Lots of compression artifacts etc. However, I’ve read some modern DVDs are worse than usual due to lazy mastering.
I recently picked up:
Say Anything (DVD)
Longshot (DVD)
Red Dwarf Series 1 - 8 (DVD)
Snatch (Blu-ray)
Under the Skin (Blu-ray)
All for a pittance
I hope I’m not in the wrong thread for this, but can anyone recommend a good quality region free 4k blu ray player? don’t need anything magical, I don’t have surround sound or an enormous TV, I’m mostly just getting sick of wrestling with my PS4 and would like the option to play stuff from other regions and upgrade to 4K.
Nearly all 4k UHD discs are region free, but if you want region free playback of dvds/blu-ray on it, you may have to hack the player. Sorry
(I get the impression that there’s lots of AV forums online with guides on how to do this. I think it’s just a firmware hack. Like, probably putting something on a USB stick and then doing some jiggery pokery to update the player so it plays every region disc).
tbh, I’d only go 4K if you want to buy 4K discs and have a TV with really good HDR performance. Otherwise, regular blu-ray and its 1080p hd video is more than good enough (imo)
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Recently picked up:
Ratatouille- dvd (quid)
But im a cheerleader - bluray
Jackass forever - bluray
Welcome to the dollhouse - bluray
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Recently picked up:
Network (1976)
Collateral
The Lost Boys
Bound
The Devil’s Rejects
Trainspotting 2
All on DVD for basically no money. Very satisfying building up a streaming library.
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I recently bought this one and does the trick:
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