Quote:
Originally Posted by mcturkey /t/1523316/lets-talk-about-htpc-sto...h-in-todays-digital-world/0_100#post_24507264
They are hardly more expensive. They can be, but not often. In fact, DVDs and music are both almost always less than your $25/BR figure. I'm not one to buy a movie when it first releases. I'll wait for sales, or buy used collections on eBay. I only ever buy games on sale, as my growing Steam collection can attest to. To say that the media must cost $100,000 is disingenuous. More than the total storage, sure, but not that much more.
Good point.
I once bought a DVD lot on ebay. I want to say it was something like 500 DVD's for $79. I remember the cost of each being like a .35 each or something. I don't remember the specifics but at the time it seemed like a really good deal, and I clearly remember the cost being well under $1 per disc.
Trouble is most of the movies are pure crap. Definitely not suggesting someone does this, but also definitely would re-enforce what you are saying.- you can buy media cheap if that's what you want to do. No rule exists you have to pay new release prices. Every home theater enthusiast knows movies get cheaper once they are not new releases. It's not a small difference either. Sometimes it's 50% or 75% of the original cost for good movies.
Assuming you paid $5 average for your 25GB MKV rip that means that each 3TB drive full cost you about $600 in media. (3000GB divided by 25GB per movie is 120 movies times $5 each)
That does not seem too excessive to me. Actually seems kinda cheap from an enthusiast perspective. Point being $100K is way too much I think, but it can still be a good amount of money spent on media. You can get a lot of media for a few thousand dollars invested, and my guess is that with a community like AVS where everyone shares a common interest in audio and video that your average AVSer has spent a couple thousand on media over the years easily. It seems like it's nearly automatic.
With cable costing 80+ per month too.. that's going to add up as well. I've been in my home since 2002 so in the last 12 years I figured I spent $15,000+ to Comcast my local cable provider. That's freakin' nuts to think about. If I spent the same on media to store on my server I'd still have it all. In comparison I have basically not much to show from my Comcast payments. All my recordings of TV are done mostly with free OTA these days anyways, I stopped paying and fooling around with those stupid cable cards recently. I dropped my cable bill down to the very basic only as we found we almost never watched any of it anyways.
Although I do strongly disagree with EricN's valuation to do agree that media can be expensive, or perhaps not necessarily expensive but the amount spent on it can add up cumulatively over time to be a significant amount. I'm not sure many people are very cognoscente of the fact how much they actually spend or how it adds up over the years. It's tough to make the jump from the $5 disc you grab at best buy that caught your eye, or the $10 disc you ordered on Amazon prime to the total value you've spent over a long period of time like a decade or two. It's nickel and dimes over time to some people, but it will eventually add up to be a serious amount if you are consistent about it.
My accumulation of hard drives is basically the same way. I buy one here. Two there. I try to grab them on sale. It adds up, and my storage capacity adds up. But I never went out and bought all at one time 48TB of storage in a single purchase.
I think if that is how people had to do it this hobby would be extinct. No one would go out and buy 20 hard drives at $100 each ($2000) plus spend say another $500-$1000 in PC hardware (or more $ if you are serious) for a media server then go out and in a single purchase buy $600 in media x 18 drives full of it ($10,000) all in one shot. That's like an investment of $25k total. That probably seems pretty crazy to many people.
But $600 a year on media, + the same spent on cable TV/TV shows + a few hundred $ in hard drives is probably a lot more reasonable. Do that for a long time you'll hit $10k, $20k, even more eventually pretty easily. I think people can swallow a couple hundred bucks at a time, but I don't know many that would drop $25K to start from zero and get there instantly.
