#vmprsm

Theoretically, if one wanted their own copies of the MI movies safely on a hard drive....where would one go?

​I mean, there is a site where you can acquire a lot of movies via torrent. I tend to use (rot13) 1337k.gb and I got a heavily discounted Windscribe VPN subscription that I use on almost all of my devices.

But my thing is that... I want commentary reels and special features, and sometimes you'll download a movie but the fucking subtitles are either bad or they become desynced over time and I haaaaate it.

So I've been gathering bits and pieces over the past year to get a Plex system going in my house and it works like a fucking DREAM. But it requires some investment. If you just want to have a few local copies of your favorite movies, this is way overkill. But me, I am canceling all of my family's streaming services and pivoting to our Plex.

So what I have for actually getting the files:

I don't have this model but it's similar to this, a Pioneer External Blu-ray Reader. It sits on a little shelf and is connected to my PC by a USB cable. (I think I got mine for around 68 bucks so you can wait for a sale.)

I use MakeMKV which will rip the big honking raw files from a Blu-ray and leave them as matroshka (.mkv) files.

Because these raw files are ENORMOUS, I compress them in Handbrake. Handbrake is wildly powerful, can convert file formats and make them super small. I have my Handbrake set up special to dump all the non-English language subtitles and audio tracks to save space.

(SUPER BONUS TIP FOR HANDBRAKE: If you have a dedicated GPU, you can give Handbrake permission to use it, and it'll compress shit literally 10x faster, love it.)

At the moment, I am using a Western Digital portable 5TB external harddrive because it was one sale and I couldn't beat the price. Eventually, I want to upgrade to two 10TB HDDs so I can keep a full backup of everything I'm ripping. Because this is a bit of a time and energy commitment and I don't wanna lose all my progress here!

At first I was running Plex off my desktop PC and that worked totally fine, but my family hates having to touch my desktop to wake it up every time, so I very recently grabbed one of these guys:

This is a Beelink Mini PC S12 Pro. It is small enough to fit in my hand but it is a speedy little demon that runs Windows 11. (And eventually I am gonna use it to firewall out ads from our entire home network, I'm pumped for that project but ANYWAY.)

The upside of these mini boys is that instead of being a hefty workhorse like my main computer, this is small and has a low-power draw.

So I moved my Plex Media Server to the mini PC, plugged in my 5TB drive of movies, and now everyone in the house can easily stream anything I have added to the library.

This is what it looks like, if you're curious. Any device in the house that runs Plex and is signed in can select any movie or TV show I have and just watch it like it was Netflix or something.

A month ago, I has like.... 65 movies? Now I'm ripping a few and we're gonna break 100 soon.

"But Arc, where do you get so many blurays!"

My local library.

When I lived in Broward County, FL, I had an extravagantly wonderful library system. Tax dollars at fucking WORK, y'all. Now I live in Georgia and the library system is not nearly as good, but I have still gotten my hands on a frankly ridiculous amount of blurays. Every week I'm picking up 3 to 10 movies or shows, taking them home, making good copies, and returning them.

All of this is an investment and it is work. But as someone who built my computer, built my keyboard, cracked my 3DS and PS Vita-- this is fun to me! This is what I love to do. And through doing it, I've seen more movies in the past year than the last ten years put together.

So yeah, I can't recommend this to everyone, but if you wanna get out of your subscriptions and to just have high quality shit on demand, this is what I'm doing.

Enjoy! And thanks for writing amazing stuff!

Ahhh, thank you so much!!! ♥

Oh my gosh, this is absolutely a Mafia Boss!Eclipse song, just the violence and control and manipulation ohhh! *chef's kiss* There's a certain delight in playing with his victim (the vigilante) and it shows in this beat!

Thought you had control I'll strip you 'til you're bones Scraping your knees 'til you beg for more Cover you in scars Just to leave a mark Get you addicted Then tear you apart

What are your thoughts on this? Any tips? Ghost Protocol is tonight's adventure.

I.... actually think if you HAVE to watch MI2 that might be a perfect order to tackle the movies in. You get to meet Ethan as a traumatized flinty mean twink and see why he's so hard.

You jump to Ghost Protocol and basically meet the second incarnation of Ethan, who is older and wearier and fallible and his superpower is just that he keeps going against the odds.

Then MI2, which. Okay. If you MUST.

Then you have Rogue Nation, which is a perfect inversion of MI2 in some ways. It's got a staggeringly good script, it has beautiful locations and cinematography, and Ethan gets two love interests, one of which is Ilsa, who is the A Plot of that movie in many ways.

Jumping back to MI3 is going to be hard because the crash in the technical quality of the cinematography and the script after RN are stark.

But it gives you Julia, gives you a chance to meet Ethan right before his turn into a better man, a more human person... right before Fallout, which is start to finish about how becoming a more human person has fucked Ethan over.

oh no i am HELLA pleased and hope you don't fall down the same "ethan are you in the most toxic threesome ever" rabbithole that i now LIVE in. god that movie. jfc.

Omg not to butt in but I need more of this conversation please show your work lmao

GOOD