Right this minute, hard drives are way more expensive due to the flooding and other natural disasters throughout Asia (primarily Thailand). Fortunately, I bought myself eight 3TB drives back when they were $120 a piece! I've got a pair of Synology DS411j NAS in a straight "basic" setup, so I've got 24TB of storage for Blu-ray and HD DVD backups that is network accessible from any computer or DLNA client in my home, or via the internet. Also got four 2TB external USB drives - a pair plugged into each DS411j - for 8 more TB, which I use for DVDs. Total cost for 32TB of NAS was under $2000. Granted, that's a good chunk of change, but to me, it makes a heck of a lot more sense than those clunky multi-disc jukebox changers!
I refuse to pay high prices for movies. I wait until they're on sale or clearance. When pretty much all the video stores closed around here, I had a field day and grabbed a ton of movies! Now my buying has slowed down since any new releases I want have to come down in price.
But once I own the disc, shouldn't I be able to watch it in my own home however I like? I'm not a pirate. I'm not downloading movies. I'm not sharing the movies that I own. I'm buying discs and then putting them on my NAS so that I can more easily enjoy them on any screen in my own house, or so that I can watch them on my laptop or even my iPhone or iPad if I really wanted to. I bought the movie. I want to watch it on any screen that I own. Is that really so horrible and unfair to the Studios? Personally, I think not.
And frankly, watching a movie off of my NAS is easier than watching a physical disc. Having AnyDVD HD means I never have to deal with ridiculous firmware updates just to get a disc to play! But it's also the nice interface and the ability to scroll through ALL of my movies and play them with a click of my remote! Rather than having to take up space in my apartment to have my disc collection on display somewhere, and having to sort through it, pull out a disc, put it in a player, blah, blah, blah. Sure, my solution costs more money and is ultra lazy
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But it looks cool, it's fun to use, it's fun to show off, so why not do it?
It sucks if you're trying to set up a Blu-ray server right now because of the hard drive prices. But they'll come back down next year - barring any further disasters, of course
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