Movies – Auxiliary Memory

DVDs vs. Streaming vs. Plex/Jellyfin

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

Watching Old Movies vs. Old Television Shows in Old Age

by James Wallace Harris, 9/20/25

For years, my wife and I have been watching old TV shows at night. We just finished fifteen seasons of ER. It’s our ritual to watch a couple of hours of TV together. However, I asked Susan if we could watch movies for a few months, and she agreed. Susan prefers TV shows.

I’ve always been a big fan of Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I’ve loved old movies since I was a kid, when I would stay up watching movies all night in the summertime. Stations back then would play old movies overnight. That was in the 1960s, and they would show films from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The kind that TCM shows today.

Since I retired, I discovered I can’t watch TV by myself. My mind gets restless. But if I have someone to watch with me, my mind can relax. I can’t explain that. I’ve been craving old movies due to that affliction, so I’m thankful that Susan has agreed to watch old movies with me.

Sadly, watching TCM films hasn’t been as fun as I hoped. Has something happened to me? Last night we watched The Lady Eve (1941) with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda – classic screwball comedy. When I was young, I would have rated this film A+. Now, it was just a C. Susan gave it the same grade. Our friends Mike and Betsy had seen this flick a few days ago, and they were also disappointed. The TCM host gushed about The Lady Eve, and IMDB gives it a 7.7 out of 10 score. That doesn’t sound high, but it is. Anything over a 7 is generally something good.

Mike and Betsy felt the film jumped the shark when the Stanwyck character passes herself off as a different woman to Fonda’s character, and he believed her. That didn’t bother Susan and me.

I enjoyed all the innuendos and double entendres. The movie is a goofy take on sex and love. And I’m a sucker for good character actors, and this film had many of my favorites (Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, and Eric Blore).

I remember being completely enchanted by The Lady Eve thirty years ago, so why did I have to force myself to watch it last night? I think the answer is binge-watching television. We’ve been altered by streaming TV.

We just finished watching 331 episodes of ER. Every episode was more entertaining to me than The Lady Eve, even the ones I found somewhat disappointing. Susan and I generally watched two episodes a night, but sometimes we’d sneak another one or two episodes in during the day. We were addicted. I always craved 8:00 pm because I wanted to see another two episodes.

Old movies, or even new movies, just don’t have the addictive quality of a great television show. That’s why Susan prefers TV. And maybe I do too. I think preference began when we could binge-watch an entire TV show from pilot to finale.

I’ve always thought movies were artistically superior to television shows. And maybe they often are. But I don’t get attached to the characters like I do with Mrs. Maisel, Perry Mason, or Beaver Cleaver.

Great movies often have more to say. Great films used to have better acting and higher-quality production. That’s not always true anymore.

Ace in the Hole (1951) had impressive character development. It had a tight plot. The cinematography was excellent. The ending was very satisfying. And it had a lot of delicious moral ambiguity. It’s an A+ picture. It even makes a good episode of Perry Mason look mediocre. Why then is watching Perry, Della, and Paul more addictive? And why was the newer HBO Perry Mason even more intensely addictive? The answer, I believe, is the newer Perry Mason, which combined a TV characterization with movie-level production values.

What if the characters Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve came back every week? Is that why we loved The Thin Man and Tarzan movies so much? Are movies less satisfying than television because the story ends? And is that why so many films today at the theaters are franchises?

JWH

Young @ Heart – Don’t Wait for the DVD

There are some films that you need to see in theaters, and Young @ Heart is one of them. I’m not the kind of guy who cries, but if I wore mascara my face would have been a mess during this great feel good movie. I’m curious if this show has any impact on those are are currently young of body, but I think any middle-aged person will find this story of the oldest rock-and-roll cover band to be uplifting and inspire great reflection about dealing with getting old themselves.

This is a little story about a chorus of old people who don’t give up no matter what, even when two of their own die in one week, and their little revue gets an emotional jet assisted take-off by being seen on the big screen in the dark theater. I never admired wrinkly-old-people more, because this tribe of oldsters rocked out and kicked my ass when it comes to living and gumption. At Rotten Tomatoes its rated 87%, and I’ve got to figure that other 13% of reviewers are Dead @ Heart.

Sure these old farts would get the boot from Simon and the American Idol tribunal, but songs like Coldplay’s “Fix You” was totally owned by a really fat old guy with an oxygen breather in tow. On the big screen, the lyrics of these songs were totally showcased in a way that made them sound far more meaningful than when sung as anthems to the young. “Road to Nowhere” by the The Talking Heads and “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones took on whole new meanings.

I’m listening to Coldplay sing “Fix You” right now and it just doesn’t have the impact it did in the movie. But I now admire the lyrics all the more. I’m reminded of another movie about music I saw a few weeks ago, Once, and how the songs just don’t translate with the same impact off the screen without being able to see the tortured faces who were singing words that matched their expressions.

I can imagine some viewers thinking that all of this is camp, or stupid oldster tricks, but I found the ancient ones hard core for getting up and doing things I’ve been too scared to do all my life. Janis and I sat up close and I think seeing these little people on the big screen magnified the issues of standing every day with Mr. Death in the room.

I think Young @ Heart had major impact with me because I’ve been around a lot of dying people in recent years, and I can read much more into the scenes than the film maker really worked to show. The more you know about pain, suffering, deteriorating bodies and death, the more real this movie becomes. Unless you have some inkling of what it takes to make such an effort late in life, then you’ll not truly get this film. It might be fun and a lot of laughs but you’ll miss the Sigmund Freud lessons.

It’s one thing to rock in your teens, that’s fucking easy man, it’s a whole other thing to rock out when you’re in your eighties and nineties. I think I’ll go play Mr. Young’s “Hey, Hey, My My (Into the Black).” I’ve got to keep remembering those lessons.

[Here are a handful of YouTube clips to give you an idea, but they don’t work like being at the theater.]