by James Wallace Harris, 1/24/26
I don’t know if you are old enough to remember videotapes, but they were a marvel for the time. Before that, the only way to see a particular movie or TV show was to wait for it to be broadcast. Sometimes, you’d wait years to catch one specific film or rerun of a TV show. After VHS tapes, you could go to the video store and buy or rent whatever you wanted to see.
Eventually, DVDs and Blu-ray discs replaced VHS tapes. Progress was always toward building personal libraries of favorite films and TV shows with higher quality playback resolution.
Then came Netflix DVD rentals. That allowed access to any film or TV show within a day or two. That was so damn convenient that owning DVDs became less popular. After that came Netflix streaming, which made access to favorite shows instant. Who needed to own anything?
Nothing stays the same. If Netflix had never gotten any competitors, I think I would have been content forever. It was like Spotify, one monthly payment for everything.
Now our favorite movies and TV shows are spread over many streaming services, but some shows are nowhere to be streamed. In some cases, I can rent what I want to see individually from Amazon, but with other shows, I have to buy them on DVD or Blu-ray. And for a few shows, they aren’t available for sale or rent.
Over the past thirty years, Susan and I have amassed quite a library of movies and television shows on DVD/BD. But for years, they have been sitting on an out-of-the-way bookshelf. Several years ago, I gave several bags of DVDs to the Friends of the Library when Marie Kondo became popular. However, I kept a couple of hundred that still sparked joy when I held them.
Last fall, I got disgusted with streaming services. We were subscribed to several. They kept raising their prices. And what I wanted to see kept jumping from one service to another. And HBO jettisoned many of its classic shows.
I bought a NAS, set up Jellyfin, and started ripping our library to MP4 and MKV. I’ve been working for weeks, and I’m only halfway through our discs.
It’s a lot of work ripping discs. And it’s frustrating because sometimes neither MakeMKV nor WinX DVD Ripper can read an old disc. I own the complete series of The Twilight Zone on Blu-ray, but MakeMKV couldn’t read one disc, and one episode from another. Nor could either program rip my copy of the theatrical release of Blade Runner from a DVD set that had four different versions of the movie. I also failed to copy one episode of MASH out of 251. That’s annoying.
Setting up Jellyfin on a NAS was not easy. A NAS with RAID drives and two external drives for backups was expensive. It’s quite a commitment to set up your own streaming service on Plex or Jellyfin.
I’m not sure it is worth it. Once the content is ripped, watching movies and TV shows on Jellyfin is much more convenient than watching them on disc. And Susan and I have started using our video library again. That does feel good.
Once ripping is done, Jellyfin is very nice. But to be perfectly honest, watching the same shows on Netflix, HBO, Apple, Hulu, Paramount+, etc. is a bit more convenient, and the picture quality is a touch better. Jellyfin is still plenty good enough.
Personally, I’d be happy to cancel all our streaming services and just watch what we own, but Susan wants to keep all her favorite streaming services. Susan loves watching all her favorite TV shows over and over again while she cross-stitches. There are about a dozen of them spread over five streaming services. I’ve bought the complete series of several of them on DVD and ripped them to my Jellyfin server.
I will subscribe to a streaming service to see a new TV series. For example, I’m subscribing to Paramount+, so my friends and I can watch Landman season 2. Before that, I subscribed to MGM+ so Annie and I could watch Earth Abides. And I resubscribed to Apple+ so Susan and I could watch Pluibus. And before that, I subscribed to Britbox to watch The House of Eliot.
Right now, Susan and I are watching The Fugitive and Mr. Novak at night on Jellyfin. Neither is available to stream. In other words, to watch shows unavailable on regular streaming, we have to buy the discs and use Jellyfin.
I roughly estimate that Jellyfin costs me $25 a month, assuming my NAS setup lasts at least five years, and includes the cost of buying DVDs occasionally. We currently spend $50-60 a month on streaming services.
Unless we cancel half of our subscriptions, Jellyfin isn’t saving us any money. It does make our 30-year investment in DVDs pay dividends again. However, many of the movies and TV shows in our library are available on streaming services. It’s hard to make a case for Jellyfin. Life would be simpler without ripping discs, maintaining a NAS server, backing up, etc. Also, our house would be less cluttered without all these discs.
Going the Plex/Jellyfin route only makes sense if you only watch what you own. And that tends to be old favorites. If you love seeing the latest films and shows, Jellyfin isn’t practical.
Knowing what I know now, I would have given all my old discs to the Friends of the Library and my DVD and Blu-ray players to Goodwill. The Fugitive and Mr. Novak have their nostalgic appeal for 1963, but there are many other worthy new shows to watch in 2026.
JWH
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