Just an update on how I PLEX.
It looks like my big DLP TV has finally given up the ghost. My last repair gave it another six months but this looks terminal. A new (relatively inexpensive) LED is due for delivery this week.
A few months ago I stopped Hulu and it was weeks before my wife even noticed. We mostly watch our collection on PLEX. A few weeks ago I let Netflix go too. It just seems that neither of them ever had anything good on anymore, and the few good things they do have are buried under tons of junk films. I got really tired of searching for a half hour and finding nothing. My 'keep watching' lists contain dozens of films I only watched for 10 minutes before I got sick of them. I still have Prime, but it's just as bad and has mostly turned into a shill service for rentals that aren't covered under Prime. Also still have Disney+ but rarely watch it. Well, I did have to turn Hulu on again just to watch college football, but it goes off again at the end of the season.
I'm nearly done ripping all of my DVD/BluRay collection. I'm still finding random disks, and a few weeks ago found a large forgotten box of BluRays. Just about everything is now nicely in sleeves and tucked away in 10 of these
storage boxes (not counting most boxed sets, which still take up several shelves). The last disks I've been ripping have taken longer because I'm now also ripping the disk extra features. Takes awhile to organize those. I dread the thought, but I'll probably go back to the stored disks and start ripping extra's off of those too. TV series take the longest to rip and organize. I'm currently doing my complete box of X-Files and I'm hugely disappointed that many of the disks are completely unreadable or have unreadable episodes. This was a new, original box and most of the disks had never left their sleeves. I recall that DVD's were expected to have a limited shelf life and these are ~20 years old, so either that's it or it was a bad print to start. Looks like I can make up the bad spots from library checkouts (no, I'm not swapping the disks). Can't wait to see how my box of M.A.S.H. disks works out. (Yes, I could download most of the series I have, but most downloads don't have subtitles [that my wife needs], and/or they're not in the formats I want, so I still rip.)
I'm still just using Windows Storage Space for my disk array system, and it's been working fine. It was getting full so a couple of weeks ago I added a new disk. I was braced for trouble and having it off-line for days while it spread the files across the new disk, but no, it was really slick. Click, click, add the disk, and the disk system optimization was done while it stayed available.
And as far a PLEX goes, we use it constantly. At over 3k movies and hundreds of TV series, it's more than we could ever watch, and it always seems to have a movie we want to watch. I'm still organizing the system, placing movies into collections, and getting the TV series named right. The PLEX feature that I really like is the cast list for each movie, that links to all the other movies that that actor appears in (in your collection). I always check them out to see what they've been in, and trying to remember their parts in those movies. And that usually prompts me to watch that movie, and so on, and another day is gone. And it reveals fun facts! That's how I found out that the older waitress in 'Starman' was a hot nurse is 'South Pacific'; and that Bruce (Army of Darkness) Cambell was in 'Fargo' (try and spot his part). Also, it turns out that one of the kids in 'E.T.' was the (extraordinarily well-endowed) stripper in 'Under Siege'.
Bonus movie question: We've recently had a new grandchild, who my son named Robert Westly Crowell. Anyone care to guess the movie reference?
