Recent reports have announced that Crunchyroll, the largest anime streaming service, will be replacing Aegisub with Israeli Software, OOONA, to produce subtitles more efficiently. Anime fans across the world are disappointed with this collaboration due to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians (via a report by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry).
Crunchyroll is also ignoring the needs of groups who require Closed Captions to understand the scenes better. They are isolating a large chunk of their audience in favor of AI-based subtitling, which defeats the point of a streaming service. Overall, this hasn’t been a great year for Crunchyroll, and this won’t be the end of it.
I’m doing my part!
My renewal was literally tomorrow too. As these streaming services get worse, I keep on cancelling. Been two years for Prime (literally smashed cancel the day ads were announced) and all i’ve got left at this point is netflix and spotify.
Netflix pricing almost has me there.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-07-31/spotifys-ceo-owns-an-ai-weapons-company-some-musicians-say-its-time-to-leave
I’d cancel it in a heartbeat but my wife would murder me.
Honest question, did you try self-hosted music?
Few weeks ago I thought this was a joke but… there is a TON of stuff out there already.
From the “rough”
to having mobile apps
to minimalist
to federated
to handling discovery
… there is just so much out there!
Edit: since I wrote this message (15min ago) I setup LMS thanks to podman and shared it via
ngrokand my wife can listen to my music on her phone instantly.So… yeah it’s that quick and convenient.
Is it perfect, definitely not, but it’s also very quick to get started and to reconsider.
You could try moving to Tidal or Qobuz, they treat their artists better and there are tools to transfer playlists
Buying music on Bandcamp and similar has been good for me. When I got laid off I kept all the music I owned and didn’t have to pay anymore. All these subscription services suck.
I’m never, ever buying digital licenses to video or audio content. My limit is games because avoiding it is kind of impossible.
Too many platforms close down. I’ve lost licenses from the Impulse acquisition and subsequent shutdown, plus one or two others. Any day these guys can just put up a 30 day notice and rip everything out of your library. Usually this happens after an acquisition… looks like bandcamp was sold in 2023 and the buyers shitcanned half the staff too.
Disks are cheap and piracy works until they enforce digital IDs for all connectivity on the internet. At that point we’d be back to swapping thumb drives.
I only buy drm free music and then back it up somewhere myself. Bandcamp at least is drm free, but who knows if they’ll turn to shit after being bought and sold.
I was recently turned on to Stremio + Torrentio and it’s very good. I’m considering making a Pi5 device dedicated to it.
I have an old Pi floating around that I should probably look at using for stuff like this.
Are they going to be around once Google removes sideloading from unauthorized devs?
Get a divorce
Netflix has been enshityfying and on the capitalist death spiral for YEARS, cancel that shit and spend your money on a VPN and some hard drives…
Netflix makes dope original productions in my experience; I’ve watched many of their shows and enjoyed them.
It’s not wrong to give money to studios that produce good content. What’s important IMO is that the money really goes to the studios, and not to some big banks trying to leech off it.
except they cancel after 2 seasons, because they dont want to pay anymore. Plus i saw the quality in some of the shows in the season, where thier costumes, or props quality is very showing.
I’ve been paying for a VPN for over a decade and I am up to about 20TB of used disks. Make of that what you will.
Your setup isn’t modern enough and you still find convenience in paying for Netflix?
I don’t know what else to make of it…
Not far off. Most of what i’ve setup originates from a plex lifetime sub. Maintenance is completely trivial.
Every time I hear about the next thing I think about modernizing which then requires standing up something new. New shit requires a new virtual host and completely new setups of many things. Then training my wife and others on how to utilize the new tech, and then praying it doesn’t just break tomorrow from The Establishment in some way.
Plex is one of the very few solutions that works with minimal sideloading and fuckery. My instructions for someone to start using it are “download the app, check your email for an account link, and enjoy.” I would not recommend any newcomers to go with Plex though, because it’s definitely not a modern solution.
I’ve tried jellyfin, I put substantial time into trying to get it to work but it had substantial issues with subtitles which are mandatory for us unfortunately. I figure any new solution is going to also have substantial challenges in some way as there is no standardized or simple deployment of absolutely anything.
I use plex also because I have a lifetime sub. Totally agree.
Switch from VMS to docker. Use NAS to keep the media, and store your compose stacks somewhere backed up, then all you need is one host with docker/podman and a repeatable configuration driven deployment. Start adding apps with compose files, no new host setups, no significant resource needs.
Yeah, I have Jellyfin running alongside Plex, (luckily, they happily run side-by-side with the same library), but I consistently find myself using Plex instead. I want to like Jellyfin. I want it to succeed. And Jellyfin is like 80% of the way there… But that remaining 20% is a real sticking point, and I almost always end up falling back to Plex after trying (and getting frustrated with) Jellyfin.
It’s an unpopular opinion on Lemmy because of the FOSS mentality, but Jellyfin simply isn’t mature enough to fully replace Plex in many peoples’ setups. Especially when you consider the whole “getting friends and family to convert” side of things, where Plex handily beats Jellyfin in regards to account and app setup; I can walk my mother-in-law through setting up Plex, but Jellyfin adds a whole new level to the equation when she would need to sideload the app onto her TV.
Agreed wholeheartedly.
I built out bluefin as a panacea to issues I had with subtitles on a set of media on my plex server and it couldn’t even give me subtitles.
I hear a lot of rave reviews for Kodi, but that’s serverless so now I need to open up storage or setup a vpn server and isolate a vlan… and how in the everliving fuck am I going to explain configuring this? Oh, and that needs sideloading too and if I go with a vlan now they need to figure out how to connect their device to a VPN. That’s a nightmare.
Sure, I can setup Kodi at home on my TV device and leave plex as is but i’m no closer to a server based transcoding solution. That sucks.