#but I cannot watch it on the TV with my vpn so I've been putting it off << you're so me coded for this steph😭

[lyknest]

Tag Game!!!!

tagged by: @tortibomb 💖

last song: it is thamepo day and as i said in one of my previous asks, ahista from laila majnu is what makes me think of them 🥹

fave color: purple & yellow

last book: the picture of dorian grey!!

last movie: i saw love in the big city movie!!!!

sweet/spicy/savory: spicy ALL THE WAY

relationship status: this

last thing i googled: lol that "let's get you to bed grandma" meme, i was making fun of my friend

looking forward to: meeting two of my school friends after SIX years to go to a COLDPLAY concert together !!!!!!!

tagging : @i-got-the-feels @thomaskong @rangz-rang (no pressure!!!!)

[callmearcturus]

@vmprsm replied to your post “Raw MKV rip of Mission Impossible: Fallout:...”:

Theoretically, if one wanted their own copies of the MI movies safely on a hard drive....where would one go?

​I mean, there is a site where you can acquire a lot of movies via torrent. I tend to use (rot13) 1337k.gb and I got a heavily discounted Windscribe VPN subscription that I use on almost all of my devices.

But my thing is that... I want commentary reels and special features, and sometimes you'll download a movie but the fucking subtitles are either bad or they become desynced over time and I haaaaate it.

So I've been gathering bits and pieces over the past year to get a Plex system going in my house and it works like a fucking DREAM. But it requires some investment. If you just want to have a few local copies of your favorite movies, this is way overkill. But me, I am canceling all of my family's streaming services and pivoting to our Plex.

So what I have for actually getting the files:

I don't have this model but it's similar to this, a Pioneer External Blu-ray Reader. It sits on a little shelf and is connected to my PC by a USB cable. (I think I got mine for around 68 bucks so you can wait for a sale.)

I use MakeMKV which will rip the big honking raw files from a Blu-ray and leave them as matroshka (.mkv) files.

Because these raw files are ENORMOUS, I compress them in Handbrake. Handbrake is wildly powerful, can convert file formats and make them super small. I have my Handbrake set up special to dump all the non-English language subtitles and audio tracks to save space.

(SUPER BONUS TIP FOR HANDBRAKE: If you have a dedicated GPU, you can give Handbrake permission to use it, and it'll compress shit literally 10x faster, love it.)

At the moment, I am using a Western Digital portable 5TB external harddrive because it was one sale and I couldn't beat the price. Eventually, I want to upgrade to two 10TB HDDs so I can keep a full backup of everything I'm ripping. Because this is a bit of a time and energy commitment and I don't wanna lose all my progress here!

At first I was running Plex off my desktop PC and that worked totally fine, but my family hates having to touch my desktop to wake it up every time, so I very recently grabbed one of these guys:

This is a Beelink Mini PC S12 Pro. It is small enough to fit in my hand but it is a speedy little demon that runs Windows 11. (And eventually I am gonna use it to firewall out ads from our entire home network, I'm pumped for that project but ANYWAY.)

The upside of these mini boys is that instead of being a hefty workhorse like my main computer, this is small and has a low-power draw.

So I moved my Plex Media Server to the mini PC, plugged in my 5TB drive of movies, and now everyone in the house can easily stream anything I have added to the library.

This is what it looks like, if you're curious. Any device in the house that runs Plex and is signed in can select any movie or TV show I have and just watch it like it was Netflix or something.

A month ago, I has like.... 65 movies? Now I'm ripping a few and we're gonna break 100 soon.

"But Arc, where do you get so many blurays!"

My local library.

When I lived in Broward County, FL, I had an extravagantly wonderful library system. Tax dollars at fucking WORK, y'all. Now I live in Georgia and the library system is not nearly as good, but I have still gotten my hands on a frankly ridiculous amount of blurays. Every week I'm picking up 3 to 10 movies or shows, taking them home, making good copies, and returning them.

All of this is an investment and it is work. But as someone who built my computer, built my keyboard, cracked my 3DS and PS Vita-- this is fun to me! This is what I love to do. And through doing it, I've seen more movies in the past year than the last ten years put together.

So yeah, I can't recommend this to everyone, but if you wanna get out of your subscriptions and to just have high quality shit on demand, this is what I'm doing.

Cannot stress this enough tho, if this seems interesting to you: wait for sales. All the components here go on steep sale if you wait patiently. Take your time assembling the parts and keep in mind that shit is modular, you can upgrade parts later.

[tortibomb]

Tag Game

tagged by: @pinkkop 💖

last song: it's ThamePo day so... Trick or Treat - LYKN is currently playing

fave color: black

last book: The 3rd Guardian: Zhen Hun novel. I have a couple other books sitting on my shelf ready to read.

last movie: Moana 2, I took my toddler to the movies. He has been twice and to my suprise he has set through the entire movie. Paradise of Thorns is next but I cannot watch it on the TV with my vpn so I've been putting it off.

sweet/spicy/savory: savory

relationship status: married

last thing i googled: a job search in my area. The burn out is real but my current job offers too many benefits for me to be able to leave.

looking foward to: the weekend and toddler shenanigans

tag your it 🏷️ (no pressure of course): @fredmundo @negrowhat @lyknest @gaylilsherlock @dramalets @cirphu @hotasfahrenheit