Hetzer wrote:
None due to practical, ecological and ethical reasons. I prefer to download media in standard formats so it's local and playable everywhere.
Yay! Me too.
I used to watch Netflix a bit, because it was cheap and Mrs. ToughDiamond was already subscribing to it so I was able piggyback onto her subscription, until they tightened the rules about how many people you could share your account with. It was always annoying at the best of times. They kept auto-playing the "most popular" video as an ad when we were on the home page unless you scrolled down very quickly. I got round it by using an ad blocker, but the streaming tended to glitch (not because of the ad blocker but just because it was a browser or something), so we had to use their stupid "app" instead, and you can't ad-block an app. And I always felt at the mercy of their caprices about what they had available. One minute you're watching a series, then suddenly they remove it. Or you've been watching it in one country and then they won't let you watch it in another. Then there was the creepy feeling that Netflix was stalking us and keeping a data file on what we watched and when we watched it. Anyway we sacked Netflix in the end. One thing I did like about it was the picture quality though.
I also messed with Sky, which I suppose counts as a streaming service. The box had a hard disc recorder, but the recordings were locked into the one disc, and when the box broke down and we sent it for repairs they just trashed it and sent us a new box. Lost a lot of good stuff. I found a method on the Web for transferring the videos off the hard disc recorder onto a proper computer hard drive, but it looked very nerdy and precarious so I didn't bother, I just stopped using it.
I use YouTube but I never go to their website, I use Invidious, and I usually download the videos with YTDLP.exe and watch them offline. Otherwise it's all ads and tracking.
19 Mar 2025, 6:22 am
