*What rights do you have to the digital movies, TV shows and music you buy online? That question was on the minds of Telstra TV Box Office customers this month after the company announced it would shut down the service in June. Customers were told that unless they moved over to another service, Fetch, they would no longer be able to access the films and TV shows they had bought. *
I went the route of a physical collection, but man do they make it difficult unless you get a commercial player that is likely to have ads and doesn’t integrate well into a home theater setup.
I’ve taken to doing everything I can to play things through my computer, but they do everything in their power to make them unplayable. This includes things like adding hundreds of bogus playlists so you don’t know which one to play, adding extra layers of encryption that cause image corruption a few chapters into the movies, and more.
If they just allowed you to easily watch and rip the movies that I pay actual money for, I think a lot more people would be open to a physical collections of their favorites. As it stands, I can’t really recommend it.
MakeMKV and Handbrake are godsends.
MakeMKV hasn’t failed to rip a DVD to MKV for me yet. I have hundreds of videos from DVDs.
Most I convert to MP4 using Handbrake to save space and for compatibility.
As for playing, look into running something like a NUC (small PC about 2x the size of Apple TV), with Kodi on it. It can play your entire library either stored on it or on a NAS or practically from any storage on your network, and connect to your TV via HDMI. It’s effectively a local streaming box.