Fair enough. My experience has been that the people you describe are most often dogmatically anti-Apple to begin with, and likely won’t care/listen.

I’m a Mac user and agree and know that that’s the case. But you’re taking this too seriously. It a joke that a little bit makes fun of Mac but a lot makes fun of windows.

I also find many of the downloads strive for smaller file size over quality. I want the opposite, as I don’t ever want to have to rip again, and I want them to look perfect.

Then why transcode them? Rip the remux direct from MakeMKV. As long as you’re transcoding them, it’s been my experience that there are much much much more knowledgable people than I when balancing quality/size.

Apparently, it seems my information might be outdated so I apologize. I’ve MakeMKV ripped from disc images before, but was under the mistaken impression that physical BD disks were unable to be easily ripped from.

I’d look at retired business machine, preferably something small like Lenovo or Dell SFF office pc, with 8th gen i3 at minimum. 8th gen is where the integrated gpu shines for this purpose. Install plex or Jellyfin. And if possible, stick to internal drives instead of external; one fewer thing to draw extra power. You could even do a second drive internally for backup.

Standard blu-ray most certainly is not limited to 720p.

I hear you on those concerns. You may find that ripping blu-rays, even if legal, has technical decrypting hurdles too high to clear. Just keep your option open is my suggestion.

Thirdly, the rips you’ll get from the alternative methods will likely be a better quality and/or smaller file size than a personal rip.

One thing you might consider is skipping buying the Blu-ray player and obtaining your movie rips alternatively. Only you know your appetite for risk, but so long as you’re only getting copies of the movies you own, I’d guess the risk is small. Besides, simply ripping your physical discs isn’t strictly legal everywhere, so that itself may have a small risk.

Put the money you save into a better machine.

Honestly, I bet it would be cheaper to replace a few of the 4 TB drives in your current set up with larger drives.

Why 16 drives? Do you already have 16 4tb drives?

Mac users been hating windows before it was cool.

Minecraft server.

I remember learning about Shamir’s secret sharing, and indeed the concept is fascinating. I’m not sure passwords is the best use case of something like that, but I’m not completely against it in theory.

So your solution to password theft is to make sure other people have them?

It was a bit of a shitstorm even in the English world. Plex definitely could’ve written the requirements more clearly.

I’m glad a full open-source stack works for you; I wish I could. There’s a few of my Plex users who just couldn’t make the jump to something like Jellyfin (and I’m unwilling to be their tech support), and honestly for me PlexAmp is so good as to make the problems of Plex overall be worth it.

Take care, friend.

Based on your comments, it sounds like maybe English isn’t your first language (no shade; your English is miles better than my any-other-language). But that, coupled with a Plex announcement that could’ve been written more clearly, it almost most certainly was a misunderstanding.

To be clear, when Plex removed their fully-free model, the only thing required was at least one paid subscription in the chain. Your lifetime paid server qualified, and no one else would’ve needed to pay. They haven’t reverted to this, this was how it was when they removed the fully-free model. I agree, Plex does carry some responsibility in making sure it was crystal clear. I wonder if they would’ve refunded your users that paid unnecessarily if you’d asked?

That Plex has continued to enshittify is without question. I just don’t think their paid model is the most egregious example of it.

Must be a misunderstanding. Paid server; users do not need a subscription.

I love the idea of Jellyfin, but since I host for my extended family, and it has to be wife approved (re: easy) plex is the answer. If you already have a plex pass it’s annoying brainer. If you don’t, weigh the pros and cons because there are cons.

Spool up an instance of Plex, and install PlexAmp. Put a handful of your favorite albums on it, see if you like the features and the interface.

There definitely can be profiles. You can either create fully new users (with their own logins, etc) or home users. Assign them restrictions as necessary. Of course this is all done in the plex web app, but user switching is done easily in PlexAmp.