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Comment on The Digital Packrat Manifesto | DRM and big tech's war on ownership has led me to make my own media libraries, and you should too

Obelix@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Digital Packratting is the antithesis of this trend. It requires intentional curation, because you’re limited by the amount of free space on your media server and devices—and the amount of space in your home you’re willing to devote to this crazy endeavor. Every collection becomes deeply personal, and that’s beautiful. It reminds me of when I was in college and everyone in my dorm was sharing their iTunes music libraries on the local network. I discovered so many new artists by opening up that ugly app and simply browsing through my neighbors’ collections. I even made some new friends. Mix CDs were exchanged, and browsing through unfamiliar microgenres felt like falling down a rabbit hole into a new world.

I’m really not sure here - that was true back in the days. But today? Just buy a 5TB harddrive for ~130€ and you can save several years of music there. And that part about “devoting space”? A raspberry pi with an external 2,5" hard drive is cheap and does take the space of one book or less than one shoe. Modern tech is amazing.

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Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Safe storage is still expensive just in relative terms.
I bought 4x 16tb drives at 240€ each.
While yes, I could save every album under the sun on there, I still curate what I download/rip because I don’t wanna trash the collection with spam.
Also if you want other stuff like video files it will get tight very fast with space. Especially if you collect stuff that was hard to come by.

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- Obelix@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yeah, high-res video will eat those TB quick. I started to clean up my collection - if something really was not good, I stopped watching or lost interest, it goes into the bin. Collecting is great, but there is no reason to keep some mediocre Netflix shovelware around that was canceled after one season.
  
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- EngineerGaming@feddit.nl ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  My collection just isn’t in very good quality. For example, all the music is mp3, and the movies are 1080p max (my laptop’s creen is only 1080p anyway). I would not fill even one 16 tb disk in a lifetime.
  
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  - Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Already achieved almost 7 tb in movie files (mid/high 1080p and some rare 4k releases)
    
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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’ve been a “digital packrat” for ages and in my experience storing things like video files in external hard-disks has been the superior option since around the time of Bluray and Xvid encoding (so, from around the mid 00s).

Further, whilst most of my collection from back in the days of recordable DVDs is stuck in them until I have the patience to transfer them (which would be many days worth of work), upgrading the harddisk storage over time as you need more storage is a breeze.

Also thanks to me using HDDs for media storage I’ve had easy access to my media collection from the comfort of my living room for almost 2 decades, since I put those disks on a homemade NAS (which for a while was an old Asus EEE PC with Linux) and had a TV Media Player on my living room connected to my TV and to the network so I could just use a remote to access the files via SMB and play them on the TV. (This was well before Android TV, and back then the Media Players were dedicated hardware solutions such as the ASUS O!Play)

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