New Monitor in Life in General

Nerd Alert: This is just about the nerd shit I’m up to currently so skip this one if you don’t care about that stuff haha.

One of the benefits of living in Dallas vs Austin is Microcenter. It is a techie dream store and there are only like 20 of them in the US. Think “Best Buy” for super nerds. Like Best Buy will have a small aisle dedicated to PC stuff, like keyboards and whatnot, yet microcenter literally has a room full of just PC monitors, another room for graphics cards… etc.

Anyway, there is this new PC monitor that came out this summer I’ve had my eye on. I noticed that microcenter has it in stock but it’s so hecking expensive there was no way I could justify spending the money on something I don’t actually need. But I recently signed a very good contract with a company that’s paying very well so I figured it’s a “treat yo self” moment and I checked microcenter and they still had 4 in stock.

So the next day I hop in my car and make the drive. Dallas Fort Worth is a massive area so even though it’s technically nearby, it’s still a 40 minute drive one way with no traffic. That’s important to note, because when I get there, I see the monitor on display, and excitedly tell a salesperson I’m ready to purchase it, and they tell me it’s out of stock. I didn’t believe them at first but, sure enough, I check my phone and they’re out of stock. I could have checked before I left, or I could have ordered the monitor the night before for pickup, but I didn’t realize that a 1500 dollar monitor would just go out of stock that quickly. The next nearest microcenter with the monitor in stock is in Houston and I strongly considered making the drive because no other store sells the monitor right now, the only other way to get one is to purchase it directly from Dell. And when I checked that day, they had 12 in stock. Next day? GONE.

I thought about it, and now it kind of makes sense. A lot of people are starting school right now so it’s probably a popular time to build a new PC. Bummer…

So I went ahead and ordered it from Dell but it takes up to a month to get it shipped since they are back ordered. I’ve been checking twice a day to see if there is an update but no luck yet. I’m so excited....

Well anyway another thing I’ve been up to lately is ripping all of my blurays to my home server. I really like the idea of owning all my favorite TV shows so I can stop getting my heart broken when my shows leave netflix and go to some random streaming service, which has been happening more and more lately. So for prime day Jessica surprised me with a bunch of complete bluray sets, including parks and rec, the office, that 70s show, brooklyn nine nine, and dexter (for her… not my cup of tea personally).

I know I could download these for free technically, but it IS stealing so if the option to purchase the set is out there I’d still prefer to do that and just rip them. Now the path to ripping the files is still not strictly legal, but as long as I’m only using them for personal use and don’t distribute them to others, I feel zero percent bad about it. I just don’t like swapping discs out constantly when binging a TV show.

Anyway all you need is a special bluray drive with the firmware patched to ignore the security baked into the disc. I bought it from a guy I found on a sketchy looking forum. He only took bank transfer and would barely respond to my messages, but wouldn’t you know, he delivered it pretty quickly once I sent the money. After that, there is free software to just yoink the files from the disc into video files that any player can play! The problem is that they are way too big as is… think like 5 gigabytes for a 20 minute episode. So you’re not done once you’ve ripped all the files, then you have to re-encode them to a smaller video file (aka compress them) so they don’t take up a galaxy of space on your storage. I have 20 terabytes of storage on my server, so I could easily just store it all, but modern video codecs are much more efficient than the old codecs bluray uses, so even keeping the quality exactly the same, you can cut the storage in half. But I go a step further and just accept a small reduction in quality and usually can get it down to about 10% of the original size, so the episodes are each about 500 megabytes, which isn’t too bad.

It just takes FOREVER to do all this. Each disc has to be loaded and ripped, which takes about 20 minutes (and a lot of these shows have 30+ discs). And the files aren’t named properly when they are ripped, so you have to go in and check each file to see which episode it is and then label it properly. Then once you’re done ripping the show, which can take a day or two, then you have to load them into the encoder and add each episode to the queue (most shows are well over 150 episodes) and then wait for the encoding to go which takes DAYS. I run it every night full blast on the PC and it can maybe get through 2.5 seasons, and trust me this PC I’m running is BUILT for this. If I was still on my old setup it would probably work at one fifth that speed.

BUT this will all be worth it once I’m done. I’m already binging Parks and Recreation currently and The Office will be next (except I always skip the scotts tots episode....way too much second hand embarrassment for me.) To view the shows you can use Plex which is a free service that organizes your movie and displays them similar to Netflix. All of the info and cover art for the shows is automatically pulled from their servers which is super neat. I’ll include an example of how it looks below. You can get plex on either iphone or android, and it’s also available as an app on all TVs and streaming devices, so very convenient!

TLDR: I ordered a new crazy expensive monitor from Dell and I’ve been refreshing the order status every day even though it will probably take a month for it to arrive. I’m also working on getting all my favorite TV shows on my home server so I can cancel a lot of my streaming services.