this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
80 points (100.0% liked)
Hacker News
2602 readers
466 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I have zero streaming services, but 1k videos and 15k music tracks. All of them being shared across my local area network. My mum uses it, I use it, and my guests use it - you can literally copy junk from my HDD into your phone if you're visiting me, as the SMB login is anonymous.
Fuck streaming services. I'd be glad to pay for some if I could trust them, but I don't. Suddenly your plan is more expensive because "reasons", or whatever you bought is unavailable because "ackshyually you don't own it lol", so goes on. If buying is not owning then what I'm doing is not theft anyway.
And, sure, my hard disk could go the way of the dodo. There's always this risk. But compared with the certainty of streaming services becoming arseholes? I'm willing to take the risk, thank you very much.
(I'm also considering to buy a blu-ray external reader, to back all this shit up. So far it isn't a concern because I can redownload it; in the future, however, it can be.)
You can hedge the risk of hard drive failure with backups, you can't hedge a digital service company turning off your access to certain media. Storage is getting bigger and cheaper and, especially older, media uses relatively small file sizes.
Exactly. Plus in some situations you can reduce the space requirements quite a bit - as long as you're willing to exchange some quality for that.
And often the quality loss isn't even a huge deal. For example, I always convert my videos to 720p, using H.265 coding; I can see the difference between 720p and 1080p, but it's 1/4 the file size, so IMO worth it.