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Americans quit streaming services as cost of living continues to climb, report finds
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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Yea, fucking AI making it too expensive to be a data hoarder. I have to keep making hard decisions on which media to delete.
I'm kicking myself now for not buying more 20 TB hard drives when they were under $250. It's rough out there for any computer related hobbies right now.
I bought two right before stuff jumped too badly. Looked about a week later thinking buying another one might be an ok idea, rofl no way I can justify it now..
So now I'm debating if I really NEED backups.. certainly not of everything.. I still need a video card, and those never did really come back down..
If you have the processing power to spare (and haven't done it already), you might be able to re-encode your media files to a more space-efficient codec.
I've reduced some of my video files by as much at 75% using Handbrake to convert from AVC to H.264 or H.265. I'm not the most discerning viewer, so I haven't noticed any difference in video quality, but I've definitely noticed the extra space on my drives!
AV1 can double again the savings for the same quality
I've got an ffmpeg script saved on my Mac which re-encodes video to a fraction of its original size without any apparent loss of quality. Shit's basically magic.
I have one for audio as well, but I think it's an Apple-only MP4 codec, that requires you to have to manually build it into ffmpeg on any other platform. But the end result is that my 2 hour radio show AIFFs that start out at 4GB end up being high quality MP4 at around 75mb.
Like I said, magic.
I misread that as ffmpreg…which means I have spent way too much time on AO3 in the past few years.
Do you happen to remember where you got it? I’ve got a Mac and while the idea of going through all the media files on my servers to convert them I twitch a little bit, but would also love to cut down space without giving up some of my files
Pretty sure it's this command;
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 30 -tag:v hvc1 output.mp4
On my M2 Air, conversions are usually pretty quick, depending on the size of the input. After a short while it does throttle because there's no fan, but it counters along nicely.
As for audio; I use XLD, set to encode HE-AAC at 80kbps. It seems really low, but still sounds great.
Not all hero’s wear capes
Which is why it can make sense to pay for pirate shares.
Many are around $5-8/mo, and they're libraries are bigger than my own, with the added bonus of I don't have to do any maintenance.
$60 to $98 per year, is a better deal than paying for these HDD prices. For me at least the trade-offs are worth it.
Private torrent tracker groups are better and free
Not at these storage costs, which was my point.
Dude. Tell me more.
What would you like to know?
How does a fella get piped into those private torrent tracker groups?
You get invited. You gotta know someone with an invite willing to vouch for you. There are strict client and ratio requirements to maintain good standing.
This is the way.
Even better is Usenet 🤫
Except you're still paying for extremely inflated storage costs, on top of your Usenet fee, which is roughly the same cost as a pirate share - depending on what you're paying for i.e. block vs monthly.
True, but I was talking about private indexers, not shares. I guess I'm lucky that I bought a fuck ton of drives before the bullshit.
I have a good bit of storage, around 60tb usuable.
But as those drives die, I will not replace them at these prices.
I have used the free trials of a couple different jellyfin shares to test them out, and was really impressed.
YMMV, but after collecting and serving my own media for around two decades, the hobby part of it isn't as important to me as the the ability to access a large media library for the lowest cost possible.
I have a couple hundred terabytes (half of it being spare), so I'm good for awhile. If I saw excessive failure, I would eventually need to downsize, of course.
Can be... not as reliable or safe
I've had better reliability from Usenet, personally, but YMMV. Safe though? If you use Usenet over SSL, you don't even need to download over VPN, if that's what you mean.
I mean like incomplete uploads and malware
I mean, I haven't had the malware issue and it gets removed from indexers just the same anyway :shrug:
I've had better success than torrenting, 100%. It's faster, too, since it just uses SSL.