> So I cancelled my Netflix subscription, and went back to occasionally renting a film on iTunes or Amazon.

I did that too, and then went one step further, because some fifteen years down the line, online video rental still hilariously, bafflingly sucks.

Twelve, thirteen years ago I was still renting physical DVDs. Back then, renting a physical item that was produced halfway around the world, shipped to Germany and distributed by a company with hundreds of physical locations staffed by employees was around two and a half times cheaper than downloading a file via iTunes. Apart from inflation, those prices never came down.

Adding insult to injury, the more expensive download is almost always worse:

On the majority of DVDs I get both the original and the dubbed voice track, plus subtitles in English and German.

That's important to me, because my partner vastly prefers either the dubbed version, or at least the original with German subtitles. When I watch something for myself, I vastly prefer the original - sometimes with English subtitles.

In online video rental (or purchase), I can often only get the dubbed version. If the original is available at all, it is sometimes another item to be bought separately. Either case almost never features both German and English subtitles.

And as the icing on the cake, to this day not all product pages on iTunes even _list_ the featured languages of a download, let alone their subtitle languages.

Combine that with all the other indignities of buffet streaming, such as titles being constantly rotated out or the incessant advertising on Amazon before every episode.

So — I've gone back to buying used DVDs. And since they have their own problems such as unskippables and horrible menus, I'm currently looking into building a NAS and will be ripping them into a personal media collection sometime in the future.

And then I will have come back full circle to 2005.

You can also do exactly this with Blu-rays and get really stunning above-streaming quality, though of course the selection and pricing isn't as desirable as DVDs.

What I'm saying is invest in a USB or internal Blu-ray drive, the extra cost is worth it.

I've noticed that streaming video quality is really bad, actually. Especially when the scene is very dark and grey, like Dark, you can hardly see anything because of the compression. Physical media thankfully does better.

You're right, I probably should.. I'm just a little bit anxious of the extra fiddling required to find decent compression settings for BDs, since I've got no experience there.

Plus, for anything other than new releases you'd get the rental typically for up to a week, whereas now it's 24 hours even for a 30 year old film.

For un-skippable DVD previews try VLC. Or if you must rip them MakeMKV can help.

Thanks for the MakeMKV suggestion, I'll look into it.

VLC isn't an option at the moment, because we've hooked up a 60€ player to her television.

Something with a remote with physical buttons that boots up in two seconds flat, never updates, always works the same and needs zero network connections.

A pretty high bar to beat.

You have described a Raspi media center with a remote and the wifi turned off. It may take a couple seconds longer to boot, but you get back VLC et al in exchange, and there are many good, free options to use it as an interface for your NAS.

What a time to be alive

I have one lying around anyway, so maybe that's another viable path. I'll take a look at how appliance-like I could make such a Raspi, in terms of UX.

The NAS route is a solid one. There are a lot of fantastic tools out there these days for managing media collections.

Exactly this is also my problem. I regularly find illegal downloads of Netflix movies that seem nice but are never shown in my homepage.

I cannot believe I have to manually 'find' those movies.

My default homepage always seems to show the same movies. Many of them I saw already and others that I do not want to waste time watching.

I've found that when I watch a Youtube video, at least half or more of the recommended videos on the right are videos that I've already seen before, often music. Does anyone know if there is way to turn this off so it can recommend me strictly new videos? It's infuriating.

The best guess for why this is that I've seen online is that it's because they're targeting younger age brackets more aggressively and kids love to rewatch the same things over and over.

Many people use Youtube for listening to Music, makes sense to listen to a song more than once :)

+1 on renting films with some level of purpose. A lot of people I know refuse to pay for movie rentals.

I've seen this too many times: endless scrolling to try to find that one decent movie that comes free with the subscription.

But movie studios aren't stupid. They don't just give away their best movies for free. So those who simply aren't willing to pay are left watching Hitman or The Quake (fine Hulu content).

The price of movie rentals might seem high, but life is far too short to waste it watching things you don't even like that much.

Also: iTunes in particular happens to have very decent staff recommendations (i.e., actual human curation). I wouldn't be surprised if movie rental services like iTunes understand that their customers are looking for quality and not quantity, otherwise those customers would be on the streaming services.

My issue with renting has always been the ridiculous upselling for quality. Advertise 4.99 for a movie, but oh, you don't want the "standard definition" that hasn't been standard since 1996? Well then it's 8.99.

Edit: Just gave Play Movies another chance and it looks like perhaps they've finally stopped doing this.

In my experience the iTunes store is such a horrible, slow piece of shit software that I only use it to search and rent films I heard about elsewhere.

Youtube has this same problem very badly. It never suggests me videos that I haven’t already seen.

In the case of Youtube I've basically given up trying to get decent recommendations. At this point I just hope it keeps showing videos of the people I've subscribed to.

I'm in the same boat as you. My question is, does this hyperoptimisation of preferences actually work for anyone other than children? I guess Netflix thinks it does.

When I found myself spending 15+ minutes looking for content and not finding anything, I just cancelled.

I just don't see the value in Netflix anymore. Everyone has wisened up to the fact that creating your own streaming service is extremely important - especially when you consider ROI.

So what differentiates streaming services is the catalog. Netflix now have to compete on the quality of their originals. They have some good shows once in a while but the their lead is not groundbreaking at all anymore.

I have a similar problem with amazon music and spotify: Yes, they are good at picking music I like, but really bad at adding something new. Spotify is better at this, as it does not give you the one "your radio". At amazon music it basically played only those songs I told it about, and a few very very narrow matches, but close to nothing I did not already know.

Nothing I've ever seen did that better than Pandora. Unfortunately I had only sporadic access via VPN because of their inability to secure international licensing, but during those times I discovered more music than ever before or since.

Apple Musics "Create station from track" feature comes very close, though. Back when it appeared I remember reading they had humans tag and classify tracks manually, just like Pandora, which may explain the similar results.

Just fyi, you can reset your watch history and that resets the recommendations as well.

My old boss had multiple profiles sort of curated around topics said that it was a bit of hassle to set up but worked really well for him.

I do something similar, I have my main profile where I watch everything and then a "Random" profile that I regularly clear all viewing history from (if I watch something there instead of switching back to my main profile).

The problem is, as annoying as Netflix's algorithm is on my main profile, the algorithm to shovel shit to users it knows nothing about is even worse.

I honestly don't understand why Netflix had to get rid of the ability to literally just scan the full list of titles, optionally filtered by genre. The home screen is an utter failure, I can never find "My List" or "Continue Watching" because it's a heterogeneous mess and they jump around all the time.