I canceled cable in 2009 and have been collecting media for 10+ years. It's grown into around 60TB and has become effectively my own personal streaming service that I share with my family and a handful of close friends.

Question: What hardware/software solution have you adopted?

> How many times can a person watch Cars?

You don't have kids, do you? ;-)

Truly, two things drive me to care about having this kind of personal media library, which is absolutely not worth it otherwise on a cost basis alone, let alone the time it takes:

1) Works that are only available via piracy, of which there are a handful of entries I'd hate to give up, and

2) Inability to create curated cross-service playlists for my kids, and lock them down to only watching items on those playlists. Only way to get this is by keeping your own digital copies of everything you want on those lists, or by using only physical media, which takes up more space and is prone to being broken or lost (especially when handled by kids)

Parent here as well. I see so often people or unfortunately the grandparents just using youtube for a child song to play. I am very happy with my children playlists and avoiding the kids beeing expose to ads and unlimited consumption/ endless scrolling modes.

I still enjoy a lot of the movies—more especially since I can relive the 'first watch' experience with my kids. It's hard to make sure I don't reveal some of the fun plot twists in older movies but it pays off.

Sadly, since my kids saw Toy Story 2 before Star Wars Episode V, the whole 'I am your father' bit didn't land with the same impact it did on previous generations :(

I swear I've seen every episode of Abbey and Teal at least a hundred times.

(There are 50+ episodes)

Abney?

It's a beautifully put together show, to be fair. Nice and calm! And porridge.

Yes, Abney. Autocorrect etc. It is a gorgeous show as you say. I'd take it over Cars any day..

Reminds me of the show Modern Family. Was something like "we've got finding nemo on endless loop in the den"

Recognise!

I used to use stuff like this when I had a TV. I didn't collect anything, in that I would delete things after I watched them. All of it was for easy sharing/streaming between computers and media devices.

I’ve been ripping Blu-ray and dvd for 15 years or so and have hundreds of movies.

Watching all of LOTR each year without switching discs is nice.

Having kids watch their stuff over and over without ads is nice.

I have a large collection of DVD/bluray/CDs. The real issue is management and storage of the physical medium. I had this ridiculous setup with DVD/CD carousels. Ripped it all and it is now some files on a share on a NAS. Wildly easier to use, also instead of 5 remotes I have 1.

Before I bought the movies I was going to the theater a lot. The cost ratio was clearly in advantage of just buying the movie. With the advent of streaming that cost ratio shifted significantly towards renting/streaming again. However, the fragmentation and region lockouts of which service a show/movie is on that may switch back to discs again. Also some studios are starting to like the idea of re-editing the movies on the fly. You may be better off just buying again. I am already invested in 'buying' but if I were starting today I probably would not bother and just go all in on streaming.

The GP basically is like a lot of people. They watch a movie and they are perfectly good never seeing it again or maybe a few years later. Renting is a perfectly good option for someone like that.